Four years after seizing control in 2021, the Taliban regime is not consolidating control, it is unraveling from within. Far from the “peace and stability” they promised, Afghanistan today is a pressure cooker of human rights abuses, economic despair, and simmering popular resistance. Recent reports from Human Rights Watch, the UN, and a bombshell BBC investigation paint a damning picture, a regime so paranoid and brittle that it responds to discontent not with reform, but with ever-harsher crackdowns. The result is exactly what the Taliban’s own leader feared, internal rot that is eroding their legitimacy and fueling the very opposition they claim to have defeated.

The cruel and misogynistic nature of the regime is no clearer than in its relentless efforts to subjugate women and girls through what the UN and other international experts have rightly termed gender apartheid. From 2021, the Taliban prohibited girls from attending secondary and higher education facilities, stopped women from engaging in most professions, required them to remain in their homes without being accompanied by men, and implemented an oppressive dress code regime meted out through public lashings and detentions. In the year 2025 alone, UN experts highlighted an uptick in these repressive measures, including sexual assault in detention centers and crackdowns on women who wear their hijabs incorrectly. The........

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