Today, Explained - The Taliban vs. women

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

When the Taliban took power, it promised a place for women in its new Afghanistan. Now, hardliners are embracing policies that do the opposite. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When the Taliban took over in Afghanistan late in the summer of 2021, the world had a question for them. Would they preserve the rights that women had spent two decades fighting for, and in a lot of cases winning? Pressed on this question, Taliban leaders said yes, they would. The state policy is that we will give every right to the female members of our society that comprise half the population, their right to work, their right to education, and every single other right that has been afforded to them in Islam.

But within weeks, they banned almost all girls from going to high school. They told women to stay at home. Travel was no longer allowed. Women were banned from appearing on TV dramas or traveling more than 45-ish miles from home without a male chaperone. And then late last year, another huge blow. One that has the potential to affect not just women, but everyone in Afghanistan who relies on humanitarian aid. That's coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. After all of those restrictions, late last year, the Taliban issued more decrees limiting women's rights and freedoms. One of them banned women from attending university altogether after first restricting what subjects they could major in. And one decreed that women cannot work for the non-governmental organizations or NGOs that are providing aid to millions of Afghans. According to Taliban's justification, there are jobs that women are not fit for them. And they started from

women's employment in security and defense sector, of course. Hosna Jalil was Afghanistan's deputy minister of women's affairs and deputy minister for interior affairs. And as you might guess, she thinks these restrictions on work are ridiculous because for 20 odd years, Afghan women did many types of jobs. We did have women in police forces. We did have women in the army. We did have women in the intelligence services. And we had civilian women who have been working throughout the institutions in terms of service delivery to the forces. And then we had 28% of the civilian civil servants in Afghanistan's government. So they are banned from all those,

I would say, opportunities. But then they reached a point where they signed the decree and issued the decree to ban women from showing up in their workplace at the international NGOs and local NGOs. Any such group that continues to employ women will lose its license, according to the Economic Ministry. In response, four of the largest international NGOs, upon which the country depends for aid, decided to suspend operations entirely. Next phase was to ban women from higher education. So their access to education, their access to employment, and of course, access to justice, that was the first thing we lost. And even access to humanitarian aid, with most of their decrees,

that is heavily affected and negatively affected. The only decree they haven't issued yet is to dictate how to breathe or should they breathe or not. The Taliban are Afghan. They are Afghan citizens. And Hosna says that's indicative of the fact that Afghans themselves are divided on women's rights. But some Afghans have started to push back against these restrictions, including, crucially, men. First, the students, they didn't attend their final exams. Students quickly showed their opposition to the new law, both men and women, including at Nangarhar University in the city of Jalalabad. Male medical students there even walked out of their final exams

to support their female classmates. And for them, they had this slogan of either all or none. And then the university professors, tens of them, resigned from their positions. They're not going to teach at universities. I'm a professor. Today I've brought my teaching diplomas and my doctorate. From today, I don't need these diplomas anymore

because this country is no place for an education. If my sister and mother can't study, then I don't accept this as an education. I will tear this up. And then, of course, women have always been on the street, and then men joined them. It was a bright spot because we have never had men taking the initiative to stand for women's rights in the past, and so loud, and being beaten by the Taliban. What are you hearing that you're finding it hard to get out of your mind?

When you talk to people in Afghanistan and you hear how they're responding to women effectively being cut out of society, what sorts of things do friends tell you, family tell you, young people tell you? First of all, the Afghans, they are so new to most of these civic movements, or protestings or expressing themselves on the street, but at the same time, who they are dealing with, like the Taliban. Is that the right way to express themselves or to react? Or there's a better way to react through the system or to work through different factions of the Taliban? Maybe there's someone in the Taliban who disagrees with it. And let's build on that, which is, of course, another complicated situation. So that's the first reaction. Like, what should we do so that

we can get a reverse in that policy or that decree? But then at the same time, they're hopeful for the next three months because it's their winter break. In Afghanistan, we have the three months winter break. So for them, have the three-month winter break. So for them, because the decree is issued at the end of the fall semester, if the reaction is strong enough, then we do have the chance to reverse the decree or the policy. If a young woman chose to go into university anyway, what would she be risking?

If she said, I'm not going to pay attention to this, I want to go to school, I'm going to school, what would she be risking? If she said, I'm not going to pay attention to this. I want to go to school. I'm going to school. What would likely happen? Based on what the Taliban have done since the last one and a half years, to my friends, to my ex-colleagues, to my very close, I mean, women who are really close to me emotionally, what they have done to them, they will not be allowed from the doors to enter the university campus. If they would resist to them, they will not be allowed from the doors to enter the university campus. If they would resist, of course, they would be arrested. They would be detained. They will be raped. And if they would raise their voices or they express themselves, they will be killed brutally. The Taliban have banned women from working for NGOs.

And as a result of that, as a way of pushing back, some of those organizations have said, we won't operate in Afghanistan. Do you think that is the right decision given what's at stake here, which is that millions of Afghans are dependent on those organizations for food and for basic services? I think as painful as it sounds to support the decision of the international NGOs, I do support that decision. Wow. I mean, since the very first day. The reason is because first, how is that possible to serve women without engaging women? Plus, the last 20 years, I've witnessed and I've worked with most of these women that women have been the voice and leading the initiatives to make sure that women are having access to those resources.

The resources available through international NGOs are the aid, the vulnerable groups, the marginalized groups and the children. And those are the main victims of the situation, right? The humanitarian crisis. If the Taliban are banning women from working for those international NGOs to deliver humanitarian assistance, it basically means that international NGOs are allowed to serve only men and boys in Afghanistan. And if it's not for all, it should be for none. But at the same time, I also think that if the pain is shared, then there will be a collective voice. If men go through the same thing, then they should also stand for women. If aid organizations stop providing services to both men and women, the men will eventually have to say something.

That's correct. Do you have family in Afghanistan that depend on these NGOs? I do. You do. And you still believe that what it's going to take is everybody essentially needs to take this hit so that the men will stand up. In Afghanistan, women has never had anything equal to men. Never. for the international NGOs, most of the funding for these international NGOs are coming from democratic countries and from people who believe in democracy, who believe in gender equality. How can they justify serving only men in Afghanistan? I mean, it's just putting my feet in their shoes. How can they justify spending that money only on men in Afghanistan?

It just affects their core value. It affects the reason why they are in Afghanistan. You were in Afghanistan at a time in which women achieved extraordinary gains. Is there any hope of going back to the way it was when you were in government? Or do you think Afghanistan is essentially going to be stuck for many years in the way that it was in the 1990s? The first option that the women would start from where we left in August 2021, that's, I mean, that's not possible. But when it comes to would Afghanistan be stuck where it was in the 1990s, I would say no. The Taliban are, of course, the same. I've never thought that the Taliban has ever changed. But Afghanistan has definitely changed. I was a child under the

previous Taliban regime, and the entire nation was silent because they had gone through civil war, and that was worse than the Taliban regime. And then they had the Taliban regime. So there has been more than a decade where they didn't have any sort of stability. So the people have been pretty much silent and things had been normalized. The level of violence, the level of, I would say, brutal treatment of the Taliban, their policies, they had somehow been normalized for people. But now it's different. You see men and women both together are reacting to the Taliban's decrees and they're pushing them back. But at the same time, they're connected to the world. They can see what's happening outside the world. Back then, Afghanistan was entirely locked. But Afghanistan and the people, they have changed.

And the generation is a different generation. So there will be certain pushbacks. The Taliban has to open up at some point in time. But we can't go back where we were in 2021 in terms of the progress we had. Coming up, not all of the Taliban are hardliners. A look at what it might take to get moderates in a position to make decisions. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or

concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Can you just tell me your name and what you do? Hassan Abbas. I am a professor at National Defense University in Washington, D.C., and I teach courses on politics, history and culture in South Asia and Middle East. Professor Abbas has also written a forthcoming book called The Return of the Taliban. And he says the Taliban right now are divided between hardliners in the city of Kandahar and more moderates in the capital, Kabul. It is the hardliners outside of the capital who are winning,

even if, he says, they don't quite know what they are winning. I think Taliban are themselves at this point not very clear on what their strategy is. They are going through a very complicated and difficult transition from being an insurgent group and a terrorist group to a group which is now responsible for running the government. There are so many different groups in Taliban. For instance, there are some who are more religious-oriented, clerical, who had spent all their lives in seminaries, teaching religious doctrine. And there are others who were fighters, who were military commanders, who were fighting on the ground.

And then there are a third group, for instance, which are all criminals involved in drug smuggling. And then there's a fourth group of the young people for whom there was no other opportunity but to be employed by Taliban in the areas where Taliban were strong. So at this moment, there's an internal struggle between these groups. The hardliners want a very dogmatic, extremist worldview. Those who are interacting with the U.S US and other international organizations in Doha, they want a relatively open society, not open or liberal in a sense

that we think in the West, but somewhat what can be seen as a decent society. The reason I said there is no clear strategy is because at this moment, they're all struggling internally to see who becomes dominant. Can we assume that the hardliners within the Taliban are winning? That is tragically true. At this moment, Mullah Haibatullah Hunzada, who is the supreme leader, so to say, who sits in Kandahar, interestingly, not in the capital city. He took over the group's leadership when his predecessor,

Akhtar Mansour, was killed in a US drone strike. He has authority over the Taliban's political, religious and military affairs and is from one of the most powerful Pashtun clans. And this is more like following the Iran model, if I call that, where there's a supreme leader. And then there are others who are in Kabul, who are cabinet ministers, who have more exposure. But at this moment, the clerical hardliners and the extremists who are very retrogressive, I should say, have a dominant role. Professor Abbas, why do the hardliners have the upper hand? How did that evolve over the last year or so? The expectation was that the relatively moderate elements or pragmatic

elements, that they will have an upper hand and they will form the government. However, I think it was the former Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, who disrupted the whole plan. The shock has come that he has actually left the country altogether and is now in Tajikistan. Ashraf Ghani, the day he fled, he disrupted the whole possibility of an interim government arrangement. So it does beg the question, where is this transition agreement up to? Is there a transition agreement for negotiators in Doha to agree to, to consider? So it really adds to the uncertainty as we get into this Sunday evening here in Kabul. We know if there was an interim arrangement through negotiations between Taliban and US

and the Afghan government, then there would have been a relatively smooth transition in a sense that the interim government surely would have representatives from Ashraf Ghani's government, other civil society elements and Taliban. But the way things turned out when Ashraf Ghani, along with Oz's colleagues, fled, all these well-known political leaders, we used to call them warlords and very, very powerful ethnic groups with the militant groups as well. They all fled, some to Pakistan, some to Turkey, some to Doha.

There was not even a single fire shot, even in anger in Kabul. It was very strange. So a road was, and the pathway was laid out for the hardliners among the Taliban who just came in and said, look, everyone ran away with relatively moderate elements. They got kind of sidelined because the hardliners said this is all about our victory, our worldview. The fact is that a trillion dollars that we spend, all the security forces that were built with support from the United States primarily, but NATO and other countries, people have a legitimate question to ask,

where are all those people? Why they never put up any resistance to Taliban? So about what's happening to women in Afghanistan, what all the other terrible things, atrocities are happening, it's not only Taliban and hardliners in Taliban who I would blame. I would actually blame also those who were supposed to fight and take a stand for that, and they are nowhere to be seen also. Historically, one of the problems in Afghanistan has been this tug of war between hardliners and more moderates. And we see what happens when the hardliners win, as they have in this case.

What would it take for more moderates within the Taliban to be the ones making the decisions? I think one of the very important factors at play here is international engagement. Because one of the major disputes between Kandahar, the hardliners, and the moderate element says that the hardliners want a total control. They think they need no support and help from anywhere else. Whereas the moderate elements argue that we have now inherited a different Afghanistan. There's a new banking system at play. There are imports and exports.

The Afghans, even the Taliban, need international revenues to buy things from the international market. The moderate elements are saying we need to continue to engage with the West. And some regional countries are doing that. China is continuously engaged. Uzbekistan, for example, is still providing free electricity. So the moderate elements are arguing we need electricity, which is a new power generation system. We need our, if not 5G, at least 3G,

so that our telephones and mobile phones will work. And the hardliners perhaps are not, I read somewhere actually, in one of the interviews, I came to know that Mullah Haibatullah, the leader in Kandahar, even has no cell phone. So that doesn't matter to him. But for the cabinet members and other officials, other bureaucrats, security senior officials in police and military, they all need to be connected. They know that they can stay connected with the world. Their mobile phones can work and their electricity can work only if there is some international recognition, even if it's not diplomatic recognition at this point, but some engagement. So that engagement, if that continues to happen,

is going to empower the moderate elements. That's my theory. And I wonder about the flip side of that, right? So you say engagement could empower moderate elements of the Taliban. That makes a lot of sense. But should those same countries that have some leverage in Afghanistan say to the hardliners and the Taliban, we're not going to give you electricity if you don't let women back into society? Should there be a more aggressive quid pro quo? Hundred percent. Absolutely. I think Qatar has a huge leverage there. UAE, Turkey.

These three countries are currently competing for big contracts of security of the Kabul airport. Many other actually power generation projects as well. These three countries together, along with Pakistan also, because they have a huge connection and role to play in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan. I was recently in Uzbekistan, and I asked this question to some of the people because many of the government officials and think tankers and academics were very critical of their own government's policy to be very engaged with Taliban. And I asked them, so why are you engaging? There were various reasons, but one was that, look, we don't want that the extremist elements in Afghanistan to succeed because that will start having an impact on our society as well. So Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the two countries which are providing them electricity and gas, can actually say that, OK, we can switch it off as well.

But that requires a coordinated, cohesive regional strategy. But the challenge is that all these regional countries are competing with each other with financial trade interests in Afghanistan. They are not talking to each other. And they don't want to be seen as an extension of, at this moment, of the U.S. policy, because the U.S. policy got discredited in the region for a variety of reasons, rightly or wrongly. There's no leader at this moment also who's calling the shots. But what I'm not clear on is, what is the leverage that the United States actually has here?

We still have their money, their Afghan reserves, that $3.5 billion. More than half of the country's 40 million people face acute hunger. The U.S. president has signed an order to redistribute the funds and keep them out of the Taliban's hands. They desperately need that money.

There's another leverage also, which is about security. Taliban have been demanding and asking for security support to fight ISK and Daesh. Blood covers the walls and ceilings of this mosque in Kandahar, the aftermath of a deadly suicide bombing. More than three dozen people were killed in the explosions and scores more were injured. The so-called Islamic State group has said it was behind the attack. The Taliban consider IS their enemy and have vowed to hunt down the perpetrators and bring them to justice under Islamic law. I find myself unfortunately feeling very, very pessimistic, if only because of what has happened in Afghanistan over the last couple of decades. And if only because it seems like women at the moment just do not have a seat at the table. Is there any part of this that makes you optimistic? is no answer, is no policy answer. Pessimism takes us in a totally different direction.

So I am optimistic for two or three primary reasons. Even if Taliban have not changed in their ideological sense, Afghanistan has changed. The tens of billions of dollars in investment in building new institutions in Afghanistan, I think they will show an impact at some point. On social media, every day we are hearing from local Afghans who are getting us these small clips. And this is Afghan diaspora,

which is very active as well. This is new. They all want a different Afghanistan. It is not that the Taliban's hardliner extremist views are being implemented without being challenged. If Taliban are going to continue with these atrocities against women and other minorities, the regional countries ultimately are going to push back strong as well. Professor Hassan Abbas, his forthcoming book is The Return of the Taliban, Afghanistan After the Americans Left. And earlier we talked to Hosna Jalil. She's a former official in the Afghan government. Today's show was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you