The Taliban regime has implemented a systematic policy of gender apartheid, banning girls from secondary and higher education (the only country in the world to do so), severely restricting women’s work, movement, and public participation, and replacing the Ministry of Women’s Affairs with the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

This repression extends to daily life through over 100 edicts enforcing dress codes, male guardianship, arbitrary arrests, ill-treatment, and corporal punishment, while dismantling safe houses, female judges, and independent women’s organizations, leading to collapsing health services and rising poverty.

The author argues that the international community must link diplomatic recognition, economic engagement, and aid to verifiable benchmarks (reopening schools for girls, restoring women’s rights to work and participate, ending arbitrary detention), while directing support to independent Afghan women-led initiatives rather than normalizing the regime.

Today, Afghanistan is witnessing a well-calculated effort to exclude women from society, almost five years since the Taliban regained power. There are no sidelights here, and it is not something that can be attributed to a brief time of cultural adaption. It’s a structured system of gender oppression, supported by a series of laws, observation, threats, arrest and imprisonment. Afghan women, whose right to education in schools and offices was already limited, have been excluded from political discussions and most public institutions, and pushed out of classrooms. The Taliban have not only deprived women of opportunities, they have tried to remove the women from the role of an independent citizen.

This policy has been most clearly demonstrated in the assault on education. Girls and women are still banned in formal education in Afghanistan, the only country where women are barred from secondary and higher education. Another set of girls........

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