This week Canadian kids will head back to school. It’s an entrenched seasonal tradition that we take for granted, repeated generation after generation, and year after year.
But in Afghanistan, one half of kids will not take part in the annual return to classrooms after summer break. There, if you happened to have been born a girl, you will stay at home. There will be no scramble to gather all the school supplies, pick a new backpack, the excitement of reuniting with friends, the anticipation of seeing which teacher you got, or looking forward to a new school year, another grade under your belt.
Three years ago this month, the Taliban closed secondary schools for girls. They had seized power in Kabul barely a few weeks earlier; shuttering girls’ schools was a key priority for them. A year later, in December 2022, they banned women from higher education. Later, some provinces also restricted access to primary schooling. It hardly mattered; many families had become so poor because of the economy tanking and the restrictions on women working, that they couldn’t manage to send their kids to school anyways. The progress that had been made in reducing child labour promptly started to reverse; children as young as three are now working in brick factories, as garbage collectors, or beggars. Child marriage rates have been skyrocketing ever since. Anyone who can, is trying to leave.
As Human Rights Watch recently described it, “Afghanistan is setting the bar for how bad — how dystopian — things can be for women and girls.” Yet the world seems frozen in its response, reliant on controversial attempts to engage the Taliban, which are worse than fruitless; they seem to have actually emboldened the Taliban. Only weeks after the Third Doha meeting between the international community and Afghanistan, the Taliban announced new discriminatory restrictions against Afghan women, including banning their voices from being heard in public, their faces from being seen, their ability to move around freely without a male guardian, among numerous other rules codified in a 35-article “morality law” published in late August. Afghan women are worried about actions leading to a gradual normalization of Taliban rule and rules, such as recent acceptance from the UAE and Kazakhstan of Taliban diplomatic officials.
For these reasons, it is more important now than ever for the countries that invested significantly in Afghanistan’s development between 2001 and 2021, such as Canada, to mobilize the full weight of both diplomatic power and foreign aid to restore the right to education for all Afghan children.
Pleas to the Taliban to moderate or reverse course are not the right strategy. As should be clear by now, the Taliban are not influenced by condemnations from other states, including Muslim ones. Canada does not have diplomatic relations with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and that should remain the case. But we do have diplomatic relations with the UAE and Kazakhstan, and also with China, a significant trade partner, and with Pakistan, a recipient of substantial Canadian foreign aid. These are all states engaging in behaviours that help grant the Taliban the legitimacy they crave, and give them leverage in the international community that has a direct bearing on the welfare of Afghan women and girls. As long as these states are not held to account, other states will follow suit.
Around the time of the third anniversary of the Taliban’s seizure of power, a 15-year-old named Tahera wrote me a letter. Denied an education in her own country, she had become a refugee in Pakistan. She wrote, “we want the world to hear us, see us, and feel us… as a woman, as a human, I don’t want to be ignored” … “we are not dead in a corner, we are still alive, with our dreams and hopes.”
There are millions more girls like Tahera, with hopes and dreams, asking the world to notice what has been taken from them. It seems unlikely that the unspoken international consensus to do nothing will change any time soon, but at least we should not contribute to making it worse by remaining silent as our allies and partners accept the Taliban, and by extension, their hateful treatment of women and girls.
By Lauryn Oates, Executive Director, Right to Learn Afghanistan
