Unfair deal

An executive order signed in January by Donald Trump imposes a strict security review of foreigners seeking to enter the US and calls for a list of countries that pose a risk. This list apparently contains Afghanistan and Pakistan and could include nationals of other Muslim countries.

This would punish Afghans who fought with US forces, acted as translators, and worked for the former US-sponsored Afghan government during the 2002-2021 battle against the Taliban. The ban would leave them and their families stranded in Afghanistan or Pakistan at a time Islamabad is preparing to deport hundreds of thousands of Afghans who cannot settle in the US or Europe.

A return to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan could be deadly for men who partnered with the US and could amount to a sentence of home confinement for Afghan women who have been driven from public life by the Taliban. “The Washington Post” reports that 800,000 Afghans, some of whom were born in Pakistan, have already been sent to Afghanistan.

Thanks to Trump’s freeze on funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), 82 young Afghan women who have been studying science, technology and engineering in Oman have lost their scholarships. An unidentified student told the BBC, “Everyone was shocked and crying. We’ve been told we will be sent back within two weeks.”

Since returning to power in August 2021 under a bad deal reached with the Taliban by Trump at the end of his first term and implemented by former President Joe Biden, the Taliban has systematically stolen women’s rights and banished them from normal social interactions.

The greatest deprivation suffered by girls and women is the Taliban ban on education above primary level. This affects their entire lives, denies them the chance to advance socially and economically, deprives their children of educated mothers and negatively impacts the entire nation.

UNESCO has reported that 1.5 million Afghan girls have been starved of higher education and 300,000 girls lose access every year. The number of girls and boys in primary schools has dropped by 1.1 million. This amounts to an internal brain drain for boys as well as girls.

UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay stated, “Today, Afghanistan is the only country in the world to prohibit access to education for girls over the age of 12 and for women. This situation must concern us all, the right to education cannot be negotiated or compromised.” She called on the international community to mobilise fully and “obtain the unconditional reopening of schools and universities to Afghan girls and women.”

Women have also been prohibited from traveling more than 72 kilometres without a male escort, appearing on television, playing sports, going to a park or a gym, accessing health care without a male chaperone, leaving home without a burqa and a male guardian, continuing medical studies at private universities, and employment. Women have been banned from singing, speaking and showing their faces in public. Women and men who fail to comply with laws and regulations can be detained and punished by Taliban officials.

In late December 2024, the Taliban’s Economy Ministry declared that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which fail to comply with a December 2022 decree prohibiting the employment of Afghan women will have their licences revoked. Until then, NGOs involved with women provided jobs for women.

Recently women were barred from training as midwives, leaving pregnant women to rely on often illiterate local midwives who cannot deal with emergency births and problems during pregnancy. Afghan girls cannot resist early marriage and Afghan women are not protected from abusive husbands, brothers, and fathers.

Amnesty International found “that human rights violations against women and girls have reached the levels of gender persecution, a crime against humanity.”

Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Afghanistan has been ostracised and isolated on the global scene and its economy has contracted by one-third, causing unemployment underemployment and household debt which impacts nearly half the population. Adding to this dire situation, Trump has frozen funding to international relief agencies which have struggled to aid needy Afghans. According to the 2025 Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP), “22.9 million Afghans will require humanitarian assistance this year, including 21 million lacking adequate water and sanitation, 14.8 million facing acute food insecurity, 14.3 million experiencing limited access to healthcare, and 7.8 million women and children requiring nutrition assistance.”

Taliban policies and practices have also negatively affected assistance. The 2025 HNRP notes that the “Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” adopted by the Taliban in August 2024, has promoted “restrictive policies,” created bureaucratic and administrative obstructions and complicated humanitarian operations.

Women were not always excluded and persecuted in Afghanistan. In 1919, Afghan women were given the right to vote although there was no elected parliament. The first school for girls opened in 1920. In the 1970s, the Afghan government raised the marriage age for women from 18 to 21, abolished polygamy and introduced compulsory education. But the country’s conservative society rejected such innovations, and the process of reform has been slowed by one step forward and two steps backward. While limited emancipation was accepted by the elites in the capital, the countryside resented and resisted change. Revolutionary reforms initiated by successive rulers was met with a reactionary backlash which brought the Taliban to power in 1996-2001 and 2021 until now.

Photo: TNS