Afghanistan: Sins of the father

Your Proximities deep dive

Afghanistan’s Taliban is a draconian government. There’s no doubt about that.

Since returning to power in 2021, it has cracked down on the media, on its political opponents, on ethnic minorities and, most notably, on women.

The list of restrictions on women and girls is exhausting in its length and horrifying in its extremity. They have been banned from both secondary and higher education, which, according to the U.N., has so far prevented more than two million girls from attending school beyond primary level.

The impact has been devastating for women, and self-defeating for the Taliban.

The U.N. children’s agency says that keeping girls from secondary education is costing Afghanistan 2.5 percent of its GDP a year, and bans on women working for NGOs and the U.N. have hurt the country’s ability to respond to shocks.

According to U.N. Women, early childbearing is projected to rise by 45 percent this year, and maternal mortality could increase by more than 50 percent.

Women now require male chaperones to travel long distances, are not allowed to work most jobs, and can’t even go to parks, beauty salons, or gyms.

Though they bravely resist, they have been all but erased from public life.

Now, there’s a new challenge: their children are starving.

“We have a catastrophic nutritional crisis on our hands with two-thirds of the country in a very serious or crisis level for acute malnutrition,” John Aylieff, Afghanistan Country Director for the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP), told the Independent last month.

“This is the highest surge in malnutrition ever recorded in the country. And the lives of four million children are hanging in the balance.”

More than 17 million people are classified as acutely short of food, ‌including 4.7 ⁠million facing emergency levels of hunger, which is one step above famine.

The thing is, though, this didn’t need to happen, it didn’t have to be this bad, and the Taliban do not shoulder all of the responsibility. Western leaders do, too.