US special envoy: Taliban ‘puts women’s right at peril everywhere’

Special Envoy Rina Amiri: Just last night, I was speaking with a group of 40 women in Afghanistan until one in the morning. What they described to me is absolutely haunting and devastating. There have been over 80 decrees and actions, 75% of them targeted against women and girls that have stripped away their rights at every level, from education to work to mobility, to having any element of choice in their life. They are turning their sons away from them, their husbands away from them. One woman said that her 7-year-old child had come home and said, “I shouldn’t be talking to you, mama.” And she said, “Why?” He said, “Because you’re a demon.” This is what his instructor had told him at school.

I believe that what’s most important is to be honest with them. I recognize how incredibly challenging and painful the situation is for them. I hear them when they say that they feel that the international community has not heard them in the ways that they need to be heard. We have a situation where we have one of the worst human rights situations in the world, as well as one of the worst humanitarian situations in the world, which leaves us with difficult choices, even with the limited tools that we have at our disposal. What are the tools that the international community has, its financial assistance, its engagement and the Taliban’s desire for greater normalization, its sanctions. But I also note that I recognize that these women are leaders, they are not victims, and that they themselves are taking enormous risks. They are engaging the Taliban at the local level in particular, and they are looking for us to support them in concrete ways.

We have established a US Afghan consultative mechanism to bring Afghan women’s voices into US policymaking. Second, we set up the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience, and this is a public-private partnership that aims to bring support to women entrepreneurs to support bringing virtual education for mentoring capacity-building.

Every conversation that the US government has with the Taliban, the key issue that is raised at the beginning of the conversation and continues throughout the conversation with the Taliban is that there’s going to be no progress in normalization or any of the things that the Taliban want until there is progress in respecting the rights of the Afghan population, particularly women and girls. Right now, all of the assistance that the US and the international community deliver to Afghanistan, it only goes through UN agencies. It does not go in any way through the defacto Taliban governance structures. And they want that change. They want a relieving of sanctions. In all of those areas, we’ve noted to them that there’s not going to be any positive movement in that direction. We’ve also noted, as long as they continue to go on this road, they are going to once again become the pariah that they were in the 1990s. And some of them have heard this. We see an increasing level of frustration among some of the Taliban leadership who see that one, this is bad for them, but it’s also taking Afghanistan in a direction that is going to lead to greater destabilization, greater poverty and it’s going to ultimately lead to failure on their part.

I think the issue of normalization is incredibly important. It’s important not just for Afghanistan, but it’s important for hardline elements, extremist elements that are pushing against the rights-based agenda in Pakistan, Somalia, many other contexts. And if they see that there’s a ceding of ground and a normalizing of what the Taliban are doing, that will spread to other contexts. So, enabling the Taliban to do what they’re doing to women and girls in Afghanistan puts women’s rights at peril everywhere. And it’s a it’s a message that we take to every capital. We caution other countries about moving in a direction that could potentially normalize the situation in Afghanistan. And we make that appeal throughout the world.

Yes. You know, Afghan women note to me repeatedly that what the Taliban are doing are contrary to the tenets of Islam. Islam, many Afghan women have noted, is one of the first religions that clarified women’s rights to divorce. And all of this is as specified. So, what the Taliban are doing is anathema to what Afghan women see as them being empowered by their religion. And there is every reason for them to feel that the Taliban, while they claim to have ended the conflict, they have waged a war against women and girls, the minute that they entered into Afghanistan as de facto rulers.