Lux Issue 11/12 features interviews and essays on the fight against fascism around the globe. Read more from Kenya, India, the Philippines, the U.K., and the U.S.
It was a summer afternoon in June 2024, dusty and hot. A crowd had gathered at a stadium in Kabul, but there was no game to be played on the field that day. Instead, the Taliban had organized a public flogging of over 60 people convicted of a variety of crimes. Fourteen of the accused were women, found guilty of offenses such as adultery and fornication. The women, draped in the characteristic burkas demanded by the Taliban, were brought before the all-male crowd to be lashed.
The spectacle was an example of the depraved and unremitting misogyny of the Taliban, a throwback to scenes from when the group first seized power in 1996, before the U.S. invasion in November 2001. The first reports of the Taliban having stoned a woman to death emerged in 1997, when a woman was killed for trying to flee the country with a man who was not her husband. For the Taliban, the stonings and floggings — which drew condemnation from Afghans and international observers alike — were part of the brand they were building, an image of deliberate antiquity. The medieval motifs harkened back to an imagined past untouched by the taint of modernity and colonial enslavement.
Women were central to the Taliban’s aesthetics of power, and they still are. When the Taliban rolled back into Kabul in 2021, they immediately banished women from public spaces and limited women’s mobility. Aisha, the press officer for the Purple Saturdays Movement, a popular protest movement that seeks to draw attention to the bans that the Taliban have placed on girls’ education, provided me with a litany of challenges women now face in their day-to-day lives. They must be accompanied in public by a male relative, or mahram, which severely restricts their daily activities. Since December 2022, education beyond sixth grade, or age 12, has been prohibited, and most schools and universities for women have shut down. Women’s employment beyond the home requires so many bureaucratic hurdles that it has become almost unheard of. Sexual assault in women’s prisons is rampant. With these moves, the Taliban are thumbing their nose at the idea that they care at all about their reputation on the world stage. For a populace that has suffered Russian and U.S. invasions and decades of near-constant conflict, the rejection of the outside imposition of human rights ideals has its appeal.
In the face of this dispiriting situation, the most tempting option appears to be to look away, and indeed, that is what most have chosen to do. There are other feminist battles to fight, after all. The American women who were so eager to save Afghan women in 2001 are now losing the basic ability to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term. There may not be public floggings in the United States, but on YouTube, you can watch the proceedings of a medical licensing board hearing in Indiana where a female physician, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, risks losing her license if she does not disclose whether she has a tattoo of a coat hanger or give up the name of a physician in Ohio who referred a 10-year-old rape victim for an abortion. (The board allowed Dr. Bernard to keep her medical license but issued an official censure and fined her $3,000.)
Women were central to the Taliban’s aesthetics of power, and they still are.
The expanded perimeter of women’s suffering could be the basis of an expanded solidarity and sisterhood, but that is not the case. For decades, too many transnational feminists have outsourced solidarity, subcontracting their conscience to NGOs and the mechanisms of international law and diplomacy. Feminist ethics has become depoliticized, technocratic, and actually ineffective. The institutionalization of feminist solidarity has led to a corrosive political apathy that is central to the backsliding of cultural and social norms into misogyny.
International NGOs have been banned in Afghanistan, but the major watchdogs like the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are still documenting atrocities. And yet, the mechanism of “naming and shaming” has been effectively and utterly turned on its head: To the Taliban and other misogynist actors like them, the ignominy adds to their notoriety. It lends them a perverse form of anti-woman street cred that adds to rather than detracts from their political authenticity as anti-globalists. Appeals to international law fall into the same trap: It’s hard to see how bringing a case on behalf of Afghan women before the International Court of Justice (as a group of legal scholars argued for in a recent article published on HRW’s website) would isolate the Taliban any further than they already are.
Recent experience in Afghanistan underscores that international institutions and their legal instruments have been ineffectual (to put it mildly) in coming to the aid of Afghan women. At the same time, the continued existence of these instruments suggests some vestigial legitimacy, so victims and advocates continue to turn to them despite their ineffectiveness. Transnational justice is suspended in limbo.
It’s also hard to forget that the Americans used the subjugation of women as a pretext for war in 2001, with the support of liberal human rights defenders, some of whom are now sounding the alarm about renewed Taliban atrocities. In 2012, after more than a decade of war, Amnesty International ran ads pleading, “NATO: keep the progress going!” over a photo of Afghan women in burkas. The return of the Taliban cannot be used to elide the fact that the top-down, bomb-strapped feminism that was “exported” to Afghanistan was unsuited and unhelpful to Afghan women, and it delegitimized feminism in Afghanistan and the region.
Hypocrisy on women’s issues continues to abound within international institutions. When the United Nations agreed to the Taliban demand to exclude women and women’s issues from a diplomatic meeting in Qatar, there was much outcry at the decision, with Heather Barr, associate director of HRW’s Women’s Rights Division, saying: “What is happening in Afghanistan is the most serious women’s rights crisis in the world, and the idea that the U.N. would convene a meeting like this and not discuss women’s rights and not have Afghan women in the room is beyond belief.”
It should not be beyond belief. In March 2024, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women unanimously appointed Saudi Arabia as its chair. Saudi Arabia imposes the same guardianship system on Saudi women that the Taliban has imposed on Afghan women.
It’s also hard not to fault those who imagined that the top-down, aid-funded women’s “autonomy” of the two decades of occupation would last. Even when the U.S.-NATO occupation of Afghanistan was in full swing, money allocated for Afghan women rarely got to them. One of the much-touted programs that the Americans created for Afghan women under the auspices of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was called “Promote.” Budgeted at $280 million, it was supposed to provide 75,000 Afghan women with jobs, training, and internships. When the program was audited by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, it was almost impossible to tell where the money had actually gone.
Women’s movements have to look elsewhere to push for justice and equity. With Afghanistan, a new transnational feminist approach is required. For American women, it starts with looking in the mirror. They must acknowledge that a war supported by most Americans — and many American feminists in particular — imposes duties of care. They must also acknowledge the similarities they have with women whose situation has always been presented as the polar opposite of their own.
A war supported by most Americans — and many American feminists in particular — imposes duties of care
Making real connections with Afghan feminists is difficult; as Aisha told me, maintaining anonymity is crucial for activists on the ground. And counterterrorism strictures can make it hard to send money to Afghanistan. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Afghan diasporas can be strong and viable networks with which to create pipelines of assistance to Afghan women who are still in Afghanistan, to help direct funding to underground schools and covert health initiatives, for example. Urgent efforts are required to help get women out of the country, especially those who worked with foreign NGOs as program officers, translators, and administrators out of the country. Afghan women arrive as refugees and asylum seekers in Western countries every day, often languishing in detention or in camps. They need immediate assistance and sponsorship to help them put down roots in their new countries. Even those who have been able to get legal status abroad struggle to obtain jobs and learn how to survive in their new environments.
The existing system of advocacy may be broken, but it may have its limited uses. A judgment at the International Court of Justice might mean nothing to the Taliban, but could it be used by asylum seekers to bolster their cases? Only if we push to repair and reopen Western asylum systems. Universities and colleges can be lobbied to create special programs for Afghan women that would simplify the visa and admission processes and provide free tuition and other financial support to them. This work is currently being done on a very narrow scale, as in the case of 19 female Afghan medical students who recently arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland, to finish their medical studies after they were banned from doing so by the Taliban. In the words of one student thanking the woman who had lobbied the Scottish and U.K. governments to make the program happen, she had “saved our lives in every sense of the word.”
Aisha emphasizes support for refugees, donating to groups on the ground, and the need to “build partnerships with Afghan women-led organizations and listen to their needs and priorities.” She wrote me, on behalf of the Purple Saturdays Movement, that in their view, Western women’s “advocacy can and should be a powerful force in influencing their governments to take a firm stance against any form of interaction or recognition of the Taliban regime.” She also wrote that international organizations and individuals have “a moral obligation to support Afghan women who are fighting for their survival and basic human rights.”
Yet I could find little evidence of such efforts underway amid Western feminist networks — to say nothing of major feminist institutions.
This moment in the history of feminist solidarity is particularly riven and vexing. We are stuck with broken institutions built for another world. We have never been more aware of the common causes of our subjugation and yet we are still at a loss to aid each other in our common suffering. But perhaps even small gestures of remembrance and outreach are valuable salves against the wounds we collectively bear.
In the decades ahead, women all around the world are likely to face challenges from misogynist and authoritarian forces that seek to curb their freedom and mobility. The revival of a feminist conscience — and hence, a feminist politics — requires that we think of these problems through an intersectional lens. This means understanding the linkages between the Taliban’s insistence on male guardians if a woman is to travel out of her city and the bureaucratic Western regulations that limit visas to Afghan women who have adequate sponsors. Flogging women in a public stadium for a crime like fornication shares its logic with Republican attempts to ban birth control in the U.S. Feminism requires an elastic empathy and more political risk-taking than what we have become used to. Without the radicalization of the feminist conscience, apathy and subjugation will reign. Afghan women are living under that brutal reality already, but it can happen anywhere.
Rafia Zakaria is the author of Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption (Norton 2021). She is a fellow at the African American Policy Forum.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.