The Debate | Opinion | South Asia

How the World Learned to Live with the Exclusion of Afghan Women

The world has to do more than admire Afghan women’s resilience. It must stand with them by taking concrete actions.

Five years ago, when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, the world watched in shock as images emerged of desperate Afghans trying to escape a country whose future had suddenly changed. For Afghan women and girls, however, the fall of Afghanistan was the beginning of a systematic effort to remove them from public life and rob an entire generation of their future.

Today, girls have been banned from secondary schools and universities; women have been pushed out of workplaces; and restrictions on movement, expression, and participation in society have expanded. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are prohibited from accessing secondary and higher education. More than 2 million adolescent girls have been denied their right to continue learning.

But five years later, the most troubling question is how the world learned to live with the Taliban’s policies toward women and girls.

Since August 2021, the language surrounding Afghanistan has changed. After the Taliban takeover, the world demanded the restoration of the rights of Afghan women and girls. Five years later, much of the conversation has shifted toward how to engage with the Taliban while raising concerns about women’s rights. The U.N. and other international community actors have adopted a policy of “principled engagement,” arguing that dialogue is needed to address Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis while continuing to call for an end to restrictions on women and girls.

Engagement and diplomacy are complicated realities. Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian crisis, and millions of Afghans depend on international assistance. But there is a dangerous line between engaging with a country’s oppressive regime and allowing the systematic exclusion of half the population to become normalized. Consequently, the Taliban’s strategy has focused on waiting for global attention to its treatment of women to decline. Policies that once triggered international outrage have become just another item on the long list of Afghanistan’s unresolved crises.

The Taliban understood that controlling women’s lives requires controlling their visibility and silencing their voices. The restrictions began with education, but they expanded into broader efforts to remove women’s presence from public spaces, workplaces, media, and decision-making. According to the U.N., there have been more than 79 decrees and directives directly restricting the rights of Afghan women and girls since the Taliban takeover, while over 400 additional measures have indirectly affected nearly every aspect of their lives.

As a result, Afghan women’s voices have all but disappeared from public narratives. Afghanistan’s media landscape has faced enormous pressure since 2021. Female journalists have been pushed out, media organizations have operated under increasing restrictions, and public discussions about women’s rights have narrowed. UNESCO has noted that restrictions on women’s participation in media have tightened, including limitations preventing women from speaking on the radio.

This raises an uncomfortable question for Afghanistan’s media institutions: Are they documenting the reality Afghan women face, or are they, intentionally or not, contributing to its normalization?

Speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival in London on June 6, Saad Mohseni, chairman and chief executive officer of MOBY Group, Afghanistan’s largest private media company, described conditions in........

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