In the five years since the Taliban seized power in Kabul on August 15, 2021, Afghan women have become the most persistent source of resistance to the group’s efforts to transform Afghanistan. The exclusion of women and girls from public space is at the center of the Taliban’s extremist state-building project—a project that has also included dismantling institutions, subordinating the judiciary to religious authority, eliminating political opposition and civic activity, silencing independent media, and diverting male and young female students from schools with broad-based formal curricula to madrasahs that instill the Taliban’s ideology.

Many Afghan women are refusing to accept this radical transformation of Afghanistan’s social and political order. Some are protesting in the streets despite the extraordinary threats they face. Others are organizing underground schools to fill gaps in education and collaborating closely with Afghans in exile to prepare legal action against the Taliban’s abuses. Against the odds, Afghan women have built a tenacious resistance movement, inside and outside the country, that is working to alleviate conditions and provide opportunities, however limited, for women and girls.

Yet most foreign governments, including those who have publicly condemned the Taliban’s swift and sweeping repression of women since 2021, have done little to support Afghan women’s efforts. Indeed, many are expanding their diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, which may further embolden the group to tighten its repression and advance its extreme policies. The Taliban’s odious treatment of women should in itself be sufficient to compel foreign countries to reconsider their approach. But the strides the Afghan women’s movement has made offers them another reason to resist normalization and instead to invest directly in Afghan people. Afghan women are the most organized constituency resisting the Taliban’s hardline agenda—and they are preserving the human capital, institutions, and political networks with which a stable and pluralistic Afghanistan could one day be rebuilt.

Afghan women had received education and participated in professional life—if unevenly—for decades before the Taliban first seized power in 1996 and imposed oppressive policies that dismantled women’s rights and opportunities. After the Taliban regime fell in 2001, Afghanistan, with the support of the United States and other international partners, made remarkable strides in restoring and advancing the rights of the country’s women and girls. By 2021, an entire generation of women had grown up with some access to education. Women, especially in urban centers, worked as doctors, lawyers, judges, journalists, and public servants. They became a significant presence in political life, filling more than a quarter of the seats in Afghanistan’s parliament and serving as ministers and diplomats.

After the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the group swiftly imposed policies that reversed decades of progress for women and girls. In addition to barring women’s access to education, employment, and public services, it dismantled key institutions such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and the High Commission to Eliminate Violence Against Women. The regime also closed women’s shelters, imposed a strict dress code, and restricted women’s access to public spaces. Every year, these measures have become more expansive and entrenched, reinforced by the 2024 Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and the promulgation of more than a hundred decrees that touch on nearly every aspect of women’s lives. More than 3,000 morality inspectors have been deployed across the country to enforce the Taliban’s decrees in public spaces and to pressure male family members to ensure women’s compliance within the home. One former civil society worker described the suffocating effect of these laws in testimony related to the UN Security Council, commenting, “I am afraid that they will ban women from breathing without a man’s permission.” Another Afghan woman compared living under the Taliban to “being buried alive.” 

Yet even in these draconian conditions, Afghan women have continued to fight for their rights, meeting the Taliban’s repression with extraordinary acts of courage. Within weeks of the group’s return to power, scores of women marched through the streets of Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and other cities to demand that the Taliban reverse their newly introduced restrictions. The UN has documented the Taliban’s brutal response to these demonstrations, which has included arbitrary arrests of protesters and their families, enforced disappearances, rape, torture, and other forms of intimidation and violence. Yet women activists have remained defiant, and at times they........

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