This article is based on a speech made at the second International socialist feminist conference of ISA, October 23.
The hasty withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan this summer, as Kabul fell into the hands of the Taliban, represents the most humiliating debacle for US imperialism since the fall of Saigon in 1975.
In Vietnam, the US military was defeated by a force that — notwithstanding the Stalinist and nationalist nature of its leadership — derived its support from the revolutionary aspirations of millions of oppressed and poor, which included the striving for sexual equality and land redistribution. In contrast, the Taliban, despite self-styling themselves as liberators, are an outright counter-revolutionary force, an ultra-patriarchal and Islamic fundamentalist group that will bring untold misery for the Afghan people, and for women and oppressed minorities most especially.
During their first period of rule between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban unleashed an unprecedented level of persecution on women and LGBTQ people, imposing a system of rigid gender apartheid, based on their primitive interpretation of the Shari’a law. Under their brutal rule, bulldozers or tanks were used to topple walls onto men accused of being gay, socializing between sexes outside the family was banned, alleged adulterers were stoned to death. Female education and work were forbidden. Women were banned from going out unless accompanied by a male chaperone and veiled from head to toe, risking being beaten up if any part of their body could be seen.
It is, therefore, a resounding indictment of the 20 years-long military occupation that after trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands killed and displaced, the Taliban flag is once again flying over Afghanistan. It also amounts to the biggest rollback for women’s and LGBTQ rights in the country in two decades.
Within days of the Taliban takeover in mid-August, female broadcast journalists were taken off the airwaves, the price of burkas skyrocketed as compulsory dress codes were restored, women and girls started disappearing from public life, girls were locked out of education and women forced out of work, sometimes being brought back home at gunpoint.
In early September, the Ministry of women’s affairs was replaced by a “Ministry for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice” — a recycling of the notorious religious police that used to publicly shame and punish people for violating the Taliban moral code during their first ‘Islamic Emirate’.
Afghan women are reportedly already subjected to more domestic violence. This is not all that surprising, considering they are being imprisoned at home at the mercy of their husbands, and most have lost the financial resources to escape abusive situations. To add insult to injury, the approximately thirty women shelters that existed in the country have been forced to close down by the Taliban. Women who were in these shelters have been sent home back to their abusers or to prison. For what they were worth, the organizations that could have helped survivors of violence are no longer functioning, and the very few and very inadequate institutions and laws which once provided some form of protection have virtually disappeared.
Ideologically, the reemergence of the Taliban also provides a certain encouragement to all abusers in the country, who feel that “the gloves are off”. As a spokesperson for Human Right Watch aptly commented: “The Taliban is giving license to every misogynist who was feeling grumpy about their daughters who were going to school, or their wives who insisted on working or were insufficiently obedient”.
There are widespread reports of the Taliban entering homes searching for potential “brides” (i.e. sexual slaves) for their fighters — since promising “wives” had been a strategy used by the Taliban leadership to lure men into joining their ranks. Targeted killings and disappearances of women and other activists have also taken place. LGBTQ people are now forced into hiding, constantly fearing for their lives, as they are being hunted down by the Taliban.
Abysmal humanitarian catastrophe in the making
This is without talking about the policy of ethnic cleansing underway, especially the persecutions directed at the minority Hazara community, which is lately facing a large wave of forced evictions, with entire families thrown out of their homes and lands on the eve of a freezing winter.
Afghanistan is on the brink of a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe. United Nations agencies are warning that over nine out of 10 Afghan families are not getting sufficient food to eat and that at least 1 million children could face acute malnutrition and death by starvation by the end of the year. On top of Covid-19, there is a rising danger of other viral diseases like measles and polio spreading further among the population.
In a country highly dependent on agriculture and livestock for survival, drops in rainfalls and the worst drought in decades have destroyed much of the fields’ harvest, and are threatening the livelihoods of millions. Meanwhile imported food prices are exploding, and most foreign aid and development funds have been cut off. Since half of aid workers in the country are Afghan women, most of them are not allowed to work at the moment. For similar reasons, according to the Red Cross, around 2,000 hospitals, clinics and other health facilities, including those dedicated to treating Covid-19 patients, have been forced to shut down across the country.
As always, women and children, along with other marginalised and oppressed sections of the population, are bearing the brunt of this calamitous situation. For example, more and more parents struggling to feed their families are selling their daughters for marriage, and at even younger ages and at cheaper prices than usual.
Racist fearmongering about Afghan refugees
Since the end of May 2021, almost a quarter of a million Afghans have been displaced, of which about 80% are women and children. The sweeping victory of the Taliban has pushed these numbers off the wall. Millions of people around the world were able to witness the heart-breaking images of desperate Afghans trying to escape the Taliban regime, running after airplanes or passing their children to soldiers over barbed wires to get them out at all costs. Yet the main response from western governments and from all the surrounding regional powers vis-a-vis these people’s plight has been to ramp up their battery of measures to prevent refugees crossing their borders.
Trampling on the toes of the racist far-right in the run-up to next year’s presidential elections, French President Macron declared that “France should have a robust plan to protect itself from a wave of migrants from Afghanistan”. The Turkish government started building a concrete wall along the Iranian border to block Afghan refugees crossing through, while the ex-Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz explicitly ruled out taking in “one single Afghan refugee”. The countries sharing a land border with Afghanistan (Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) have all closed their doors to Afghan refugees as well.
This type of reaction — including from governments whose responsibility in the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is staggeringly obvious — stands in striking contrast with the instinctive, if mostly passive, sympathy that has been animating many ordinary working class and young people internationally with the victims of the new Taliban regime. But the cynicism of these politicians does not stop there.
Since August, we have seen the deployment of de facto economic sanctions on Afghanistan by Biden’s administration, pulling the plug on billions of dollars in funding to vital services — including the payment of the wages of tens of thousands of civil servants, many of whom have not received a paycheck in months. As is always the case with this type of sanctions, they hurt the poor and the oppressed more than they do the reactionary rulers they pretend to target. This collective punishment on an entire country is doing nothing but driving the mass of the population further into economic distress.
Such policies bring to light the sickening hypocrisy of the claims made all through the years by Western imperialist countries about their concerns for human and women rights in Afghanistan.
The use of womens’ oppression to justify imperialist bloodshed
When the Bush administration went on to invade the country after 9/11, the apologists for this imperialist intervention cynically weaponised the all-too-real oppression of women under the Taliban’s first period of rule as a major selling point for this war. The latter was portrayed as “a fight for the rights and dignity of women”, to use the expression of ‘first Lady’ Laura Bush at the time. The voices of Afghan women opposing the invasion were muffled by the drums of war.
Such a patronizing and orientalist trope was not new, as it had been used by imperialist and colonial powers before, most famously in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. The claim that the invasion and occupation was helping liberate Afghan women remained a pretty constant feature of the imperialist propaganda all through the last two decades.
In August 2009, for example, the cover of the Time magazine featured the photo of a young Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban with the title, “What Happens When We Leave Afghanistan.” The narrative of a civilising mission brought through western bombs was echoed by a number of liberal feminists and NGO’s. Thus in 2012, the US branch of Amnesty International ran ads featuring images of Afghan women in burqas along with the caption: “Human Rights for Women and girls in Afghanistan. NATO: Keep the Progress Going!”
In a perverse logic, the rising of the Taliban regime 2.0, and the major throwback it objectively represents for women, is now seized by a range of mainstream western media and commentators to reassert the idea that the US & NATO war in Afghanistan had been a positive step forward for Afghan women. But is that really so?
First of all, it is useful to bear in mind that the Taliban are one of the Frankenstein monsters of imperialist meddling in Afghanistan in the first place. In the 1980s, various Islamic fundamentalist armed factions were armed, trained, financed, organised by a range of powers — most of all the United States, Saudi Arabia and, not least, then US ally Pakistan — as a battering ram against Stalinist Russia’s occupation of the country. It is in this context that the Taliban first came about.
But their demise in 2001, far from giving rise to an era of peace and democracy, only gave rise to the conditions that facilitated the Taliban’s return, re-empowered as they were by the infamous consequences unleashed on the people of Afghanistan by 20 years of war and destruction, and by the terrible legacy of a thoroughly corrupt pro-US puppet regime. It should also be clear that while the rule of the Taliban is now back in Afghanistan’s metropolitan areas, it has been a brutal reality for many women in areas under insurgent Taliban control for years.
But the horrors visited upon women over the last two decades of war and occupation cannot be simply reduced to the Taliban’s record. The US and allied forces themselves have enabled countless instances of violence and atrocities against women — for example, by propping up, arming and giving prominent governing positions to violent fundamentalist warlords used as a counterweight to the Taliban — warlords whose policies towards women were only marginally less reactionary, if at all, from those of the Taliban themselves.
To this must be added the millions of working-class and poor Afghan women who have been displaced, impoverished, starved, maimed, and killed in the war; those who have been raped by Western troops; those who have experienced sexual violence as so-called “terror suspects”; those caught in a growing sex industry servicing the occupying armies; and more generally, the swelling number of women pushed into prostitution as a result of the war and of the widespread poverty that has come with it.
Besides, despite some limited legal and constitutional changes, on the ground gender-based violence had remained extremely pervasive, from honour killings to forced marriages. According to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, nearly 15% of honour killings and sexual assaults carried out against women in the last two years were by the Afghan police itself — a figure highlighting the deeply ingrained misogyny that was prevailing within the Afghan state forces even before the Taliban took control. Violently-enforced patriarchal religious practices and tribal courts proceedings have continued to be a regular occurrence, especially in the rural areas.
In some cases, new gender-discriminating laws have also been pushed for by the supposedly pro-women rights, US backed governments. This was the case when in 2009, the then President Hamid Karzai approved the ‘Shia Personal Status Law’ — an ultra-reactionary law imposed on women of the minority Shia community which forced women to ask the permission of their husband for the right to work, and allowed a man the right to refuse to give food to his wife if she refuses his sexual demands. In 2011, the Afghan government drafted a law that would have subjected women entering shelters for victims of abuse to virginity tests, and would have allowed them to be turned over to their families at their relatives’ request. It was forced to backtrack after the outrage this provoked. Again in 2018, Afghanistan passed into law a new criminal code in which the original chapter of the code penalising violence against women was removed, so as to not upset feudal warlords and other reactionary segments of the Afghan ruling elite.
It is true that more women did enter the workforce after the first Taliban regime was overthrown in 2001. But the majority were facing very precarious conditions and extremely low pay. While literacy and education rates did improve among women and girls in certain areas of Afghanistan, by 2018 an estimated two thirds of Afghan girls were still not attending schools and 70% of Afghan women were illiterate.
In short, the 20 years-long parenthesis between the two Taliban regimes, far from being some blossoming age for women’s rights in Afghanistan, was a period during which the country ranked as one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. Afghanistan actually beats a number of such gruesome records: it is one of the few countries on earth with much higher suicide rates among women than men, with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world,…and the list goes on.
Under the previous Ashraf Ghani government, sexual relations between people of the same gender were also illegal and punishable by up to two years in jail; it was thus not anything close to a LGBTQ-friendly government either.
Imperialist hypocrisy
Typically, bourgeois feminists have often laser-focused their views on the limited number of women who “made it to the top” whether in the Afghan government, businesses, state institutions — before those same institutions fell to the Taliban — as a steady measure of progress towards gender equality. This was to the extent that some ended up applauding the scenes of women politicians taking part in the peace negotiations with the Taliban last year in Doha, as if this was a sign of feminist achievement!
But for the vast majority of working class, rural and poor women across the country, the reality all through those two decades has been one of continued exploitation, oppression, extreme poverty and violence.
This reality is now undoubtedly taking a very dramatic turn for the worse. However, socialists need to make clear that our solidarity with the women and girls of Afghanistan has nothing to do with the very selective indignation of those pro-war, pro-imperialist politicians who are shedding crocodile tears for Afghan women now, but for whom the lives of these same women did not matter an iota when they were slaughtered by US bombs or battered and raped by US-sponsored militia commanders.
An archetype of such politicians is Texas Republican Senator Michael McCaul, who stated that what he is “really worried about the most are the women left behind and what’s going to happen to them” — while he himself is a rabid opponent of abortion rights in his own country. This fake outrage on behalf of Afghan women and girls today is an echo of the pretexts given for invading Afghanistan in 2001. This invasion has done nothing but to bring the Taliban back to power, threatening Afghan women, along with other sexually oppressed groups, with a new range of extreme attacks on even the very limited freedoms they could experience before.
Changes
The collapse of the first Taliban rule brought the inevitable collapse of their most extremely subjugating, arch-reactionary laws and practices (no work, no school, no medical care from male doctors, forced burqa wearing, stonings in Kabul stadium etc). But since this came about not through the Afghan masses’ own struggle but on the account of an imperialist war, it also brought for women twenty years of renewed ordeal.
The further few — precarious and uneven — rights and freedoms women had gained in the past two decades did not come about thanks to the benevolence of the NATO forces and their local allies, but thanks to the tireless mobilization and struggles of Afghan women and feminists. In the face of the worst manifestations of patriarchal violence, repression and war, women did not sit by and watch; they organized themselves and fought back. This reality sits uncomfortably with both the school of “imperialist feminism” who think women’s liberation has to be exported through neo-colonial occupation, and with the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalist groups who portray the struggle for women’s rights as a western conspiracy against local culture and traditions.
Undoubtedly, Afghan women’s outlook has gone through important transformations in the last twenty years, a factor that will impact on their relations with the new Taliban regime. A number of objective and material changes would have influenced consciousness. Among those is the fact that the country has become significantly more urbanised. Kabul 2021 is not the same city as Kabul 1996. The capital has almost tripled in size, growing from less than 2 million inhabitants to a far more cosmopolitan city of close to 5 million residents. At the time the Stalinist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took power in 1978, 85% of Afghans lived in the countryside; in 2001 when Western imperialism invaded, it was 77%; it is now 71%.
But even in rural areas, women’s expectations have changed. A July 2021 study from the ’Afghanistan Analysts Network’, based on interviews with rural Afghan women from a large spectrum of provinces and ethnic background, highlights how much they are striving for more rights, including the right to education and employment, to choose whom they marry, to move around more freely and participate more in public life. As the report indicated, “these conversations clearly challenge the idea that women in rural areas are satisfied by what is often portrayed as ‘normal’ by the Taliban or other Afghan conservatives. Almost every woman we spoke to, regardless of the political stance and level of conservatism that could be gleaned from the answers, expressed a longing for greater freedom of movement, education for their children (and sometimes themselves) and a greater role in their families and wider social circles.”
While still low and now threatened with drastic curtailment, the proportion of wage female workers had increased quite steadily in the last decade, allowing more women to taste at least a measure of autonomy that can be conducive to political engagement and collective struggle. The fact this is now taken away from them does not mean the consciousness shaped through this process will disappear overnight.
Also, Afghanistan has one of the highest proportions of young people in the world. Close to half of the population is now under 15 years old. A new generation of Afghan women — and men — have been born and raised after 2001. Less affected by the traditionalist and conservative views of their parents, they have no living memory of the first Taliban dictatorship, and are hence likely to resist more forcefully against a return to the institutionalised misogyny and gender segregation of that regime. Internet access in Afghanistan has also much improved since the first Taliban regime. It should not be exaggerated — because it is still overall very limited, with huge gender obstacles and interrupted by frequent electricity blackouts — but the new urban youth are comparatively more connected to the outside world.
At the same time, among the older generations, many remember the Taliban’s rule all too well. In the mid-1990s, the Taliban were a relatively new phenomenon: they had promised to bring “order” and an end to violence after years of war, insecurity and destruction, and many Afghans did not resist them as a result. This time it is likely to be different, as people know what the Taliban are about and have less illusions of what their reign of terror will entail. The bitter experience of years of foreign military occupation and its ignominious result has also exposed the role of imperialism for what it is, which means more chances for the grassroots opposition to the Taliban regime not to look that way for support.
But perhaps one of the most significant differences as compared to the period between 1996 and 2001 is the stage of women’s, feminist and LGBTQ+ struggles globally. No country has shown to be totally impermeable to the worldwide trends of radicalised feminist consciousness, manifested in the countless movements that have emerged against gender-based oppression and violence around the world over the last decade or so — including in neighbouring Pakistan and in Central Asian countries, as was shown, for instance, by this year’s historic mobilisation for the March 8 protest in Kazakhstan.
The global struggle for women’s liberation has high potential significance for Afghanistan, presenting both more open possibilities for building international solidarity with what is happening there, and possibilities for international struggles to affect the mood of resistance on the ground. And this point does not only relate to the struggle against gender oppression per se. Over the last ten years, the world has been shaken by mass revolutionary uprisings, youth rebellions and working class struggles the likes of which were not on display at the time of the first Taliban ‘Emirate’ — including, not the least, mass struggles by the weighty and neighbouring Iranian working class, and in many countries of the Middle East.
Moderate Taliban?
Despite all their backward ignorance, the Taliban leaders seem acutely aware of the fact that they are holding power in a changed global environment. The way some of them have tried — within obvious limits — to distance themselves from the brutal record of their 1990’s regime and to polish their public communication to the outside world concerning their approach towards women (by arguing, for example, that “women’s rights will be respected within the framework of Islamic law”) is an indication of this.
Some sections of the international ruling classes tend to sugarcoat the Taliban based on such postures. The head of the EU delegation to Afghanistan stressed that “there was no need for alarmism”, implying that no comparison was possible between the old and the new Taliban. The line of argument that the latter are not as bad as before fits with the EU’s intention to reopen its diplomatic representation in Kabul and to deepen its engagement with the Taliban. It also serves to make the western imperialist powers’ own record in the country look better, and help justify a harsh anti-Afghan refugee policy at home.
But the Taliban have not become any less reactionary than they were in the 1990’s, and few on the ground believe this to be the case. Rather, what this reflects is a calculated pragmatism from its central leadership, who wants to showcase a different facade that can assist the group in garnering international support, money and diplomatic recognition, and wants to proceed incrementally in a situation where their regime is not fully consolidated.
This approach is not to the taste of all Taliban either. Since they seized power in August, these statements have been contradicted by numerous actions on the ground as well as by other, far less crafted statements by local Taliban representatives. This also attests to genuine differences and divisions within the group itself. As a matter of fact, a multitude of rifts are emerging among the Taliban already. There are tensions between Taliban groups from different regions, between those who want to go for the ‘full package’ and the more pragmatic wing within the leadership, between different Taliban units in the same cities over the spoils of their victory, and not the least, there is a distrust of Taliban chiefs among many rank-and-file fighters.
It is also important to keep in mind that the Taliban conquered the main cities of Afghanistan without much of an actual fight. The utterly rotten and corrupt ex-occupation regime was only standing thanks to the bayonets of US imperialism. The speed of the latter’s collapse, once these bayonets were pulled out, surprised even the Taliban themselves. Their own social strength and military prowess on the battlefield were hence not the primary factors in their swift victory.
This is of course not to say that they have no popular support — one does not sustain a guerilla war for 20 years in a country like Afghanistan without points of support within the population. But it is one thing to grab power from a completely discredited regime that had no real social base of its own and was “defended” by an army filled up with ghost soldiers; it is another thing entirely to manage, feed and stabilise a country of 40 million people, especially with winter coming on, a major humanitarian crisis looming, and the freezing of the cash that was keeping the country under financial perfusion for many years.
First signs of resistance
It is very remarkable that the Taliban’s rule has already triggered resistance, spearheaded by women and youth, on a level that was not there back in 1996. The very next morning after the Taliban entered the capital Kabul, a group of young women painted graffiti on the walls with the slogan: “Down with the Taliban”. The day after, four brave young women in their mid-20s, assembled outside of the Presidential Palace, flashed placards in the face of the Taliban chanting: “We exist. We are half Afghanistan. Don’t conceal us. Don’t harm us. Support us”.
In the following weeks of September, sizable street protests erupted across many Afghan cities, led by women but also involving a noticeable layer of men. Some of these protests attracted several hundred people, who braved the threats to their lives and the vicious repression carried out by the Taliban militiamen (which included shooting dead several female protestors in Herat and other places, beating up and lashing women with electric cables, and torturing journalists covering the demonstrations).
These protests seem to have dwindled in recent weeks, but they have not stopped. In October, a small women’s protest opposing the Taliban broke out in Kabul demanding “work, bread, and education”. Last Sunday, November 14th, dozens of Afghan women took to the streets of Kabul again, demanding their right to learn and to seek employment.
Such encouraging developments would have been unthinkable during the first Taliban rule. This should of course not lead to a romanticisation of a situation that is, by all accounts, extremely dire. The harsh repression, the economic despair, women’s isolation in their homes and the lack of strong left and working class organisations in the country are all tremendous obstacles for struggles to break out on a larger scale at this point.
However, it is clear enough that the Taliban will be unable to respond to the deep-seated problems facing the Afghan population. With an economy in ruins, they will find it challenging to administer the Afghan cities and hold onto power for a sustained period of time by the sole rule of fear, and by keeping half of the population recluse. These factors point to a regime that will not be stable and will not easily consolidate a strong social base, particularly in the urban and non-Pashtun areas. This may well provoke serious backlashes, inner tensions within its ranks breaking out, as well as potentially, eruptions of popular anger down the line. Many Afghan women and girls have acquired a higher sense of self-determination and a resolve to not let their meagre gains be snatched away again; they are thus likely to play a prominent role in this process.
At the same time, in the absence of a class-based, unifying and progressive political alternative, the future backlash and opposition against the Taliban can also take some reactionary expressions, for example regional and tribal warlords picking up arms to defend their fiefdoms. Even more brutal and more violently misogynistic fundamentalist armed groups, such as ISIS-K, can also take advantage of the ensuing chaos and mass poverty to spread their activities, as they are doing already.
Socialists, workers, trade unionists and left-wing feminists the world over must support all efforts of Afghan women, LGBTQ, young people, workers and poor farmers to fight back and organise against the oppressive Taliban regime. This struggle will need to adopt an independent stand from the local feudal and pro-capitalist forces, and all those opportunist elements which have collaborated with, or might want to collaborate with, imperialism against the Taliban in the future. This includes the leftovers of the Northern Alliance like the “National Resistance Front” of Ahmad Massoud in the Panjshir Valley, which is again lobbying Washington for support.
Socialists need to oppose all forms of imperialist intervention — economic sanctions, drone attacks, foreign support for regional warlords — and whichever side it comes from. Indeed, in response to the US withdrawal, other world and regional powers (primarily China, but also Russia, Turkey and Pakistan) are looking for ways to benefit from the US retreat and seeking influence in Afghanistan and central Asia. These capitalist powers all exploit workers and oppress women and LGBTQ+ people in their own countries, and are ready to turn a blind eye to the crimes of the Taliban for the sake of getting a stronger foothold in Afghanistan. They consequently offer no viable alternative to the Afghan working class, women and poor. No wonder, in these conditions, that the “international community” has been openly targeted by Afghan women protesters for their silence on what is befalling them.
The best and only reliable ally of the Afghan masses in their fight for a better future is the international working class. The battle against Islamic fundamentalism, imperialist meddling and for true women’s emancipation in Afghanistan has to be connected to a worldwide and systemic struggle against capitalism itself, and for a program of democratic, voluntary, international and feminist socialism as the only way out of the barbarism and violence the Afghan people have been confronted with for decades on end.
In a country where the working class is weak and poorly organised, with millions relying on subsistence agriculture and external aid, international solidarity will be hugely important in the fight against the Taliban’s extreme forms of gender oppression, and for the revolutionary transformation of society eventually needed to end this oppression on a permanent and structural basis.
