[Women must have male escorts on long taxi rides, and election commissions are shut down]
Over the past week, the powerful
ministry for Islamic guidance has issued rules requiring women to fully cover
their heads if they ride in a public taxi and to be accompanied by a male
relative if they travel more than 45 miles. The instructions also require
cabdrivers to refuse to carry female passengers who do not comply and to stop
playing music while driving because it is “un-Islamic.”
In the political arena, Taliban
spokesmen announced the shutdown of two national election oversight commissions
and two cabinet ministries. One longtime ministry dealt with parliamentary
issues; the second was formed in 2019 to promote peace during lengthy — and
ultimately futile — negotiations to end the 20-year conflict between the
Islamist insurgents and Western-backed government forces.
These moves follow actions
including the armed occupation and shutdown of the national independent bar
association. Rights groups and analysts see the moves as signals that the new,
deeply conservative Islamist rulers are both tightening and widening their grip
across Afghan society — despite initial promises of leniency after they took
power in mid-August.
“The Taliban are reverting to their
repressive policies of the past, shattering the myth of a kinder and more
moderate Taliban 2.0,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia
Program at the Wilson Center in Washington. Even if their leaders carry
cellphones and laptops now, he added, “they feel emboldened, and they are not
about to change the ideology that defined them” when they held power in Kabul
from 1996 to 2001.
Kugelman and others said Taliban
authorities do not appear to be overly concerned about the looming humanitarian
crisis that international aid agencies predict could engulf the poor,
drought-plagued nation of 39 million this winter. They suggest that Taliban
demands for the release of foreign funds are more a contest of wills — a game
of chicken with the West — than a sign of real urgency over the collapsing
economy and worsening levels of hunger and cold.
In an interview this week, the
Taliban’s deputy spokesman, Bilal Karimi, said that his government
“appreciates” international assistance but that it is working to “manage” the
current humanitarian crisis through its own resources and charities. “We want to
solve problems through negotiations, and we want to have good relations with
the world, but the world must also want good relations with us,” he said.
Asked about the new restrictions on
women, he said that his government is “even more committed to women’s rights
than others” and that there are “no obstacles” to women working or studying as
long as they can be can be physically separated from men.
“We fought for 20 years for an
Islamic system,” he said. “We are still working on putting the mechanisms in place,
but we need more time.”
Karimi said he had “no information”
about the new travel rules prescribed for women in a handwritten order by the
Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. “This is an
Islamic society, and it is natural for women to wear hijab anyway,” he said,
adding that the ministry’s pronouncements are “recommendations, not
compulsory.”
Human rights groups, however,
called the new rules a chilling echo of the draconian strictures that were
placed on women’s activities during the first Taliban era, when those who
ventured outdoors without a male relative, or who did not cover their faces and
bodies with voluminous burqas, risked being punished with lashings by
vigilantes from the same ministry.
“This will have a huge impact on
women and girls. It will make it difficult for those who want to study at
universities away from home, and it will stop those fleeing to escape domestic
violence,” said Heather Barr, an official of the women’s rights division at Human
Rights Watch in New York. “This is another move toward making girls and women
prisoners in their own homes, and a signal that more such violations may be
coming.”
In Kabul this week, lines of male
taxi drivers waited at busy outdoor bazaars, calling out their destinations,
and groups of women crammed inside them with their purchases. One young woman
in a fashionable outfit and makeup, sorting through a sidewalk table of
secondhand sweaters, said she was very upset about the new travel rules.
“The situation is getting more and
more difficult for us,” said Shaqaf Salah, who said she was forced to quit
pre-med studies. “I am married and educated, and still I have no rights. I was
a very good student, and now I am sitting at home. My husband is with me today,
but what if he wasn’t? How would I get out of the house?”
On Wednesday, a group of about 50
women held a brief protest in downtown Kabul, calling for the United States and
foreign agencies to release funds to the Afghan government. They said women are
bearing the brunt of hardship and demand the right to work, but their blame was
pointed mostly at the West, and they carried banners that read, “Joe Biden, my
children have nothing to eat.” The Biden administration is withholding more
than $8 billion in Afghan government assets, although it has begun channeling
funds to humanitarian aid efforts.
The official crackdown on
democratic institutions has drawn less public opposition, in part because
electoral politics and civilian governance were discredited during two decades
of fraud-marred elections and official corruption. But among Afghan lawyers and
other advocacy groups, those Taliban actions are seen as having an even greater
chilling effect on individual rights and freedoms.
Last month, after shutting down the
bar association, the government required all lawyers to be approved by the
Taliban Justice Ministry, raising concerns that criminal defendants will not be
able to get fair treatment and that sharia law courts will dominate the system.
During the first period of Taliban rule, such courts ordered stonings,
amputations and executions.
Karimi said the government is
taking such steps largely to meet its “administrative needs” and priorities
during the economic crisis. The Peace Ministry, he said, “is not needed any
more because there is no fighting, and security is being enforced.” The election
commissions “have only been closed temporarily, and if we need them in the
future, we can rebuild them,” he said.
Some observers say the mixed
signals from Taliban leaders, with vague explanations for some new policies and
others backpedaled as “temporary,” reflect a larger problem facing the new
rulers: persistent internal divisions that have undercut decision-making and
pitted religious imperatives against public and operational necessity.
“The Taliban are facing multiple
challenges, including the need to consolidate power and unify a group with
internal divides,” Kugelman said. The new rash of restrictive orders, he said,
“smacks of a plan to project strength and defiance at a moment when they are in
over their heads.” While millions of Afghans may face a life-threatening
winter, he added, “they are tending to internal politics, and fiddling while
Rome burns.”
Analysts described a state of
competing priorities among Taliban officials — including senior religious
leaders who insist on applying sharia law to every issue, younger
administrators who are more educated but wield little power, and moderate
figures who have traveled abroad to negotiations and conferences and are the
most open to modernization and reform.
Some civilian activists here,
including those who organized the women’s march, assert that there is still
hope for Taliban governance if the more moderate among them can find room to
maneuver and gradually gain influence. Others fear that the die is cast and
that the recent crackdowns are a harbinger of more to come, with or without
international aid.
“We need to work with the Taliban
for change, lower our expectations and give them time,” said Faiz Zaland, a
public policy professor at Kabul University who has built relations with
numerous Taliban figures and has often been criticized for it. “It is a last
chance to save Afghanistan for the next generation. If everything collapses and
they become a rogue state, the country will be lost.”
