Afghanistan under the Taliban is slipping back into its dark recent past. In late March, in a sudden reversal of previously declared policy, the Islamic fundamentalist government said that girls could not attend school beyond the sixth grade. That decision has been couched as temporary, made because of a dearth of female teachers for girls and the lack of religious outfits.
But in Afghanistan and among international observers, the fear is that the decision will become a permanent prohibition and that it signals a return to the repressive treatment of girls and women that marked the Taliban’s first period ruling the South Central Asian nation, from 1996 to 2001. There’s ample reason for that worry. During their successful 2021 military campaign to retake the country, the Taliban closed girls schools and forbade women in certain parts of the country from attending university.
Upon returning to power, however, the fundamentalist group declared that both girls and women would be able to continue their education, saying that would start when the new school year did, on March 23. Although public universities had started reopening before that, most had not allowed women to attend.
Thus March 23 was set to be a momentous day. But the night before, permission for girls and women to resume their educations was abruptly rescinded. Close observers consider that a victory for the hard-line rural faction of the Taliban over the more pragmatic members of the government. Meanwhile, a New York Times investigation has documented the revenge killings or disappearances of almost 500 Afghans who were part of the former government or were erstwhile members of the nation’s security forces.
If the education policy reversal stands, that will mark a huge step backward for Afghanistan, making it the only country in the world that denies education based explicitly on gender, said Heather Barr, associate director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch.
This development also underscores a frustrating reality for the United States: With no a diplomatic presence in Afghanistan, we no longer have an effective way to bring pressure to bear on the Taliban, notes Peter Galbraith, who in 2009 served as a United Nations deputy special representative for Afghanistan. Nor do we have good relations with Pakistan or China, the two nations most influential with the Taliban.
That means other entities will be more effective in taking the lead here. One is the European Union. Its trade ties with Pakistan give it considerable leverage to push that country to pressure its neighbor to restore education for girls, says Sher Jan Ahmadzai, a former aide to former Afghan president Hamid Karzai who is now executive director of the University of Nebraska’s Center for Afghanistan Studies.
In September, Imran Khan, then Pakistan’s prime minister, asserted that preventing Afghan girls and women from furthering their education would be un-Islamic. The Pakistan government has since changed, but that message should be repeated loudly and regularly.
International reporters also have an important role to play, because the Taliban grants them greater access and latitude than it does the local press, said Ahmadzai. In their reporting, they must make it clear most Afghan citizens want their daughters to have full access to education.
“The international reporters,” he said, should “reflect what the people of Afghanistan want and show it back to the Taliban: This is your own people, whom you are supposed to serve.”
The Taliban’s desire for recognition and respect from the world community gives the West an opportunity to send a unified message that no progress will be made on that front until this decision is reversed.
“There can’t even be any notion of having a discussion about recognizing [the Taliban] as legitimate leaders until they start behaving like that, and a baseline is the rights of women and girls,” said Dyan Mazurana, a research professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who has years of experience in Afghanistan.
Mazurana said the international community should also try to identify and elevate those Taliban who do support full schooling for girls. In part, that can be done by inviting them, rather than Taliban harder-liners, to meetings like those held in late January in Norway between a Taliban delegation and representatives of the European Union, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the United States.
Foreign or international assistance to Afghanistan, even humanitarian aid, should be tailored in ways that encourage girls’ and women’s rights and discourage discrimination, added Barr of Human Rights Watch.
“We are saying that donors shouldn’t fund secondary education in any provinces where girls secondary schools are closed,” she said via Skype from Pakistan. Foreign governments must also be vocal about the detainment of Afghans who stand up for human rights, she added.
Concerned institutions or individuals could offer full scholarships, with living stipends, to young Afghan women, said Mazurana of Tufts. With that in hand, they could obtain visas to study abroad; the Taliban is currently allowing that kind of travel through Pakistan, she said.
“This could be government-funded, it could be private initiatives, it could be university initiatives, it could be foundation initiatives,” she said. “Anyone can give a girl a scholarship to go to school.”
These aren’t tools or levers of the first order of effectiveness, obviously. But applied determinedly and continually, they could have an effect. We must try. The world can’t break faith with the girls and women of Afghanistan.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.