Taliban ban on women education: Despite condemnation from across world, why its leverage is clearly limited

In August this year, foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balki told The Indian Express that despite the “cultural constraints, budgetary constraints, lack of resources, lack of infrastructure, lack of teachers, books”, the government was “working extremely hard to try to address this problem”. “Our policy”, Balki said, “is education for all Afghan citizens irrespective of gender”.

He accused the international community of “weaponising” women’s education against the regime in order not to return Afghanistan’s financial assets banked in the US. He also said girls had access to secondary education in more than a dozen out of the country’s 34 provinces.

Until December 20, women could attend colleges and universities, which the Taliban had gender-segregated with gendered changes to the time table as well. After last year’s ban on secondary schooling, younger girls whose families could afford it, attended “courses” in fee-charging private schools. Madrassas also held “Islami” classes for girls. A network of underground “secret” schools sprang up so that girls would at least not forget what they had learnt in school until then.

Even though primary and elementary schools remained open, the ban on secondary education had a chilling effect on them — and the ban was effectively total. Hopes went up temporarily earlier this month when the Taliban allowed girl students to write high school exams (though their schools had been closed for a year).

Since Wednesday though, the denial of education to women is complete. Women teachers have been banned from working. Along with the medical profession and police, teaching was one of the few remaining avenues for working women. In most government offices, women employees had already been asked to take a pay cut and show up once a week to mark attendance. The invisibilisation of women by the Taliban is now gathering pace. On November 9 this year, women were banned from visiting most public parks, hamams, and gymnasiums.

The Taliban have also resumed the practice of public punishment, their calling card in the late 1990s. The first public execution took place on December 7 in the southwestern province of Farah — an alleged murderer was shot dead by the father of his victim. There have been several public floggings since then.

The world is outraged…

The world has responded as one to the Taliban ban on girls’ education. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan, the three countries that recognised the 1996-2001 Taliban regime (they have not done so this time) have condemned the ban. Turkey, Qatar, and Indonesia have also questioned the ban. Some countries have said it is against Islam to deny women education.

In her capacity as chair of the G7 foreign ministers that issued a joint statement against the Taliban decision, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock warned the Taliban’s “gender persecution may amount to a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute, to which Afghanistan is a State Party”.

India has said it is “concerned” and reiterated its commitment to an “inclusive and representative government that respects the rights of all Afghans and ensures the equal rights of women and girls to participate in all aspects of Afghan society, including access to higher education”.

But the Taliban appear unfazed, indicating the limits to the leverage the international community has with them, and what it can do to make them respect the human right of women to education.

Some 15 countries, including India, China, Russia, Pakistan, the US (through Qatar), and Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbours have been engaging with the Taliban through differing levels of diplomatic presence in Kabul. But no country has granted recognition to the Taliban, making that conditional on the Kabul regime meeting preconditions that include giving girls and women equal access to education, and forming an inclusive and representative government.

…Taliban are brazen

The Taliban are desperate for international recognition, but they have shown that they won’t fulfill the conditions for it, and instead hope to benefit from geopolitical rivalries and the race among regional powers for influence in Afghanistan.

In the Security Council exactly a year ago, Russia and China successfully pushed for an exemption in the UN sanctions regime to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Afghanistan. At a Security Council briefing on Wednesday, hours before the Taliban announced their blanket ban on girls’ education, the UN Special Representative in Afghanistan Roza Otunbayeva said: “We do not see eye to eye with the Taliban on a number of issues, but the focus is, and should be, on maintaining dialogue in the hope of a better future for Afghanistan, where everyone — women, men, girls and boys — can live a life with dignity and equality”. Otunbayeva later described the ban as “devastating”.

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said 20 million Afghans faced acute hunger, and millions more were directly and critically dependent on international aid. Cutting aid to Afghanistan was not an option, he said.

Given the nature of the choice — between starving Afghans and punishing the Taliban — the limitations to what the international community can do to ensure that Afghan women do not sink into a black hole are painfully evident.

India’s shackles on itself

New Delhi reopened its Kabul mission in June with a “technical team”. Concerns over security are the main driver of India’s engagement with the Taliban. Other than ISIS and al-Qaeda, Pakistani-origin terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are reportedly present in Afghanistan.

At the December 20 Security Council briefing on Afghanistan, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ruchira Kamboj pointed to the presence of 60 UN-sanctioned individuals in the Taliban “cabinet” and senior positions in the regime. India is the chair of the Taliban sanctions committee, and Kamboj also pointed to continuing close links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

New Delhi seems to hope that its presence in Kabul will somehow ensure that Afghan soil is not used against India. With relations between the regime and its benefactors in Rawalpindi not so warm at the moment, New Delhi believes it has an opportunity to retrieve some lost influence in Afghanistan.

Somewhat contradictorily though, India has stopped playing to its biggest strength and the wellspring of its influence in Afghanistan: the friendship of the Afghan people.

While the stated objective of the reopening of the diplomatic mission in Kabul was “the continuation of our engagement with the Afghan people”, the mission does no public outreach. In the past, education and refuge from the conflict were solid connectors — but over the last year, New Delhi has not responded to desperate pleas from Afghans for visas. Some 3,000 Afghans who were studying in India in 2021 and had gone home in the months before the Taliban takeover found their visas cancelled.

Among the visa seekers are hundreds of women with no education or career prospects in their own country, more so after the latest anti-women move. New Delhi’s only engagement so far with the Afghan people has been the evacuation of the Afghan Sikh community, who were being repeatedly targeted by the ISIS.