The situation in Afghanistan is complex – we must always be aware of that

I have qualms about the way the (still uncertain) plight of women and girls after the accelerated exit of US forces is being used as an emotive pitch to cast aspersions on the withdrawal, writes Mary Dejevsky

Focusing on the plight of Afghan women risks obscuring other iniquities (Getty)

As the Taliban swept back to power in Afghanistan, one theme stood out in the western response. What will become of the women and girls, all their achievements, all the dreams they were encouraged to dream? Except that it has rarely been posed as a question. More often it has come in overlapping chains of angry, sometimes tearful, assertions.

Girls’ aspirations had been shattered. They had been betrayed by the west, by the US, by Joe Biden. It was back to medieval confinement. Armed fighters would go door to door, snatching 12-year-olds and/or widows to be raped and/or married under duress. Women who worked would be dismissed and forced to stay at home. Women MPs, lawyers, doctors, teachers, judges – they would all be summarily dispensed with, schools for girls would be shut. Campaigners would be silenced in whatever brutal way could be found. All the progress made over the past 20 years would be lost. If anyone merited an early place on an evacuation plane, the message went, women and girls should be first.

At a briefing by the Nato secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg – a female questioner – wept as she asked how the alliance intended to support Afghan women. In the UK, a petition has been launched, demanding that the UK “step into the breach” to save Afghan women. “This is a real-life Handmaid’s Tale that the west has co-authored,” says the subtitle; “We are about to see a whole generation of Afghan women forced into modern slavery.”  

Social media is awash with inspirational pictures – of the Afghan national women’s cricket team promised a life as professionals; of the first all-female orchestra: “Look at these young female faces... and tremble at the fate now awaiting them,” says the accompanying text. And here we have the first female mayor of Kabul, aged 27, saying: “I’m waiting for the Taliban ... to come and kill me”. As the target of several assassination attempts, Zarifa Ghafari knows whereof she speaks.

At which point, let me put something clearly on the record. I yield to no one in my respect for the women who have stood up to be counted in Afghanistan: the advocates for women’s rights and girls’ education; the women with the courage to stand for election to a parliament that may now be doomed; the women who gained professional qualifications and contributed to the society they lived in; the journalists who campaigned for a better country and better lives; and the mothers who ensured that their daughters went to school. I have no illusions about the difficulties, and far worse, they may face, if they remain in a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Already, there have been reports of women in provincial cities being sent home from work at gunpoint (Kandahar) or told to go home and send male relatives to take their place (Herat). These so far isolated examples may or may not be the shape of things to come. But who would trust any assurances from the Taliban that they have changed since the 1990s?

And yet... I have qualms about the way the (still uncertain) plight of women and girls after the accelerated exit of US forces is being painted, and about how worst-case scenarios are being used as an emotive pitch; not just by women’s rights activists, but by western politicians of all stripes, to cast aspersions on the withdrawal.  

That they raise this theme, it seems to me, is not only because it is a genuine concern, but because it is seen as a right-on way to appeal to a western audience; an effective way of raising funds, of lobbying for a higher aid budget, of opening the way to more visas, even of blackening the reputation of anyone who might favour the “Biden” withdrawal.

Fail to mention the plight of girls in sufficiently apocalyptic terms, and – especially as a woman – you may be seen as not just letting the side down, but consigning your Afghan sisters to an early and horrible death.

Focusing so narrowly on the plight of Afghan women also risks obscuring other iniquities, under the ousted regime, as well as its Taliban successor. How much has been heard, for instance, of the corruption that so undermined US and UK efforts to build a credible Afghan army and political system? Of the massive embezzlement of aid money, or the likely retrenchment of sharia law, with such practices as amputation and stoning? It also creates the impression that, in its treatment of women, Afghanistan is unique, which, of course, it is not. You don’t have to go far from Kabul to find countries where the position of women as it could be under the Taliban is not significantly better and could be even worse.

For myself, I am wary of overzealous preaching about women’s rights, or anyone’s rights, in countries that are very unlike ours. By all means campaign to send girls to school and university, for women to take a full part in society and national life. But the impetus has to come from the women in these countries. They have to be ones to campaign for their rights and be prepared to defend them, because the obstacles they face don’t derive exclusively from their position as women, but from the social and cultural structure as a whole. Men have to change as well as women.  

Almost 20 years ago, as US-backed forces closed in on Kabul to end the last spell of Taliban rule, the then US and UK “first ladies”, Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, took up the cause of Afghan women. A dominant theme at the time was the iniquity of the all-covering burqa, as a symbol of women’s subjugation and powerlessness. The central call was to ban the burqa.  

I had difficulties with this then, and I have difficulties with similar calls now, even as the position of women in Afghanistan may be going into reverse. Casting off the burqa or the veil does not by itself liberate women – in conservative parts of the country, it could threaten their lives. In an article at the time, I wrote: “Burqa-burning will not automatically generate rights for women where they do not exist. Women can be as powerless uncovered as they were covered, and in societies of overt male dominance, more vulnerable.” Those facts have not changed and neither has my view.

Yes, there are more educated and working women in Afghanistan now, and more girls going to school. But the bulk of the country remains patriarchal and conservative – witness the speed of the Taliban advance for evidence of how shallow were the roots of the western-sponsored modernisation. Think, too, how the appeals from the US and the UK over the past week may have been perceived by men and boys in Afghanistan, who could feel confirmed in a view of the US and its allies as a subversive force out to destroy the basics of their society.

The truth is that no amount of sermonising from outside is going to change the treatment of women in Afghanistan. Harsh Taliban rule might, in theory, qualify every Afghan woman for an exit visa – 19 million women – which of course is absurd. But if the positive changes that have happened are to endure and to spread, they need to come from inside the country and from Afghans themselves.