Taliban Celebrates Five Years of Victory, Continues Losing War Against Girls Going to School

KABUL — Afghanistan's Taliban government celebrated its fifth anniversary in power Saturday with armored vehicles, flags and a parade outside the former American embassy, marking what officials called their victory over Western domination while 2.4 million Afghan girls remain barred from secondary education.

It is difficult to celebrate national liberation convincingly while forbidding half the nation from attending chemistry class.

The Taliban returned to power on August 15, 2021 as American and allied forces withdrew after twenty years of war. Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani credited the movement's victory to courage, morale and divine assistance, while acknowledging that unspecified problems remain.

The problems have been kind enough to specify themselves.

According to UNESCO, Afghanistan is now the only country on Earth where girls and women are formally prohibited from secondary and higher education. The Taliban repeatedly promised after taking Kabul that women would continue being educated. Girls' secondary schools were nevertheless closed in March 2022, followed by universities to women that December. Both restrictions were described as temporary.

Temporary has now entered its fifth fucking year.

The consequences extend far beyond the girls currently being denied classrooms.

UNESCO projects the education bans could force another 600,000 women from Afghanistan's workforce by 2066, produce about $9.6 billion in cumulative lost income and increase the risk of early marriage. The country is also heading toward a projected shortage of more than 11,000 qualified female teachers by 2030.

Even boys are being harmed by the policy.

UNESCO says restrictions on women teaching boys have removed qualified educators from an already damaged school system, sometimes leaving children with inadequately trained male teachers or no teacher at all. More than 90% of Afghan 10-year-olds cannot read a simple text, while nearly half the country's schools lack water, sanitation or heating.

Thus the government has developed the impressive educational philosophy of making everybody stupider in the name of keeping girls pure.

This is not cultural preservation.

This is institutional self-harm.

Taliban authorities maintain that women possess rights consistent with their interpretation of Islamic law and Afghan culture.

That qualification matters.

The Taliban's ideology should not be lazily expanded into “Afghan people are culturally backwards”, nor into “Muslims don't believe women should be educated.”

Afghanistan is the only country in the world imposing this particular nationwide educational prohibition.

If the behavior were simply an unavoidable property of religion or geography, UNESCO would have considerably more countries to list.

The repression extends well beyond school.

U.N. Women says the Taliban have issued more than 100 decrees restricting women across education, employment, movement, healthcare, justice and public life. More than half of thousands of women surveyed said they leave home only once or twice per month, and seven in ten described their mental health as bad or very bad.

And this is precisely the point where some Western observers perform an intellectual somersault worthy of Cirque du Soleil:

“See? This is why we had to keep fighting the war.”

No.

It is evidence that Taliban rule is repressive.

Those are different propositions.

The United States and its allies did fight for twenty years.

The Taliban were standing outside the abandoned American embassy five years later holding the victory parade.

Whatever else one believes about the intervention—its early objectives, counterterrorism, the overthrow of the original Taliban regime or the very real gains Afghan women experienced during portions of the republic—the historical result should make one thing painfully difficult to claim:

Military occupation proved to be a durable mechanism for policing Afghan social policy.

You cannot bomb a society into feminism.

You cannot drone-strike literacy into existence.

And you cannot protect a girl's right to education indefinitely by stationing foreign soldiers beside her school.

If the political structure collapses when those soldiers leave, the structure was not durable enough.

That does not mean the international community should shrug, say “different culture,” and abandon Afghan women to the people restricting them.

It means using tools built for something other than war.

Those tools already exist.

The U.N. Security Council's current 1988 sanctions regime maintains targeted asset freezes, travel bans and an arms embargo against designated Taliban-associated individuals and entities considered threats to Afghanistan's peace and stability. The Security Council reaffirmed those measures again in 2026.

Targeted sanctions are imperfect.

Diplomatic isolation is imperfect.

Conditional recognition is imperfect.

Economic leverage is imperfect.

International courts are imperfect.

Education programs are imperfect.

Foreign aid is imperfect.

You know what else was imperfect?

Twenty fucking years of war.

The distinction is that economic, diplomatic and institutional pressure attempts to change behavior without making another Afghan family absorb a missile as collateral tuition.

And aid should be aimed at the Afghan people, not confused with endorsement of Taliban governance.

The World Bank has continued channeling support through U.N. agencies, NGOs and trust funds for food, water, healthcare, education and jobs rather than treating recognition of the Taliban as a prerequisite for keeping civilians alive.

The Security Council has likewise explicitly protected humanitarian assistance from sanctions restrictions so aid can continue reaching Afghans.

That separation matters enormously.

Punish the rulers.

Do not punish a hungry ten-year-old because the ruler is an asshole.

Unfortunately, international aid is now moving in the wrong direction.

U.N. Women reported that the United Nations' $1.7 billion humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan was only 25% funded, while more than half of 74 surveyed Afghan women's organizations expected they might have to suspend operations or close within a year.

At the same time, the International Rescue Committee says humanitarian needs have reached record levels, driven by drought, earthquakes and mass returns and deportations from neighboring countries. The number of Afghans needing humanitarian aid has risen by 3.5 million since 2021 even as foreign aid budgets shrink.

That is the particularly stupid part.

The world looks at Taliban repression and asks how to pressure the Taliban.

Then it cuts funding to the Afghan women already resisting them.

Fantastic work, everybody.

Global governance does not mean establishing some enormous planetary police department that invades every country whose government behaves repugnantly.

It means developing stronger systems capable of producing consequences between doing nothing and dropping bombs.

Sanctions.

Trade conditions.

Asset freezes.

Travel restrictions.

Recognition requirements.

International monitoring.

Human-rights investigations.

Education broadcasting.

Funding civil society.

Scholarships.

Refugee protections.

Economic incentives tied to measurable reforms.

And, most importantly, maintaining enough international institutional legitimacy that these measures do not merely look like whichever empire happens to be angry this week.

The Taliban themselves want international recognition and economic relationships. Five years after seizing power, Russia remains the only country to have formally recognized their government, although Kabul has increasingly pursued diplomatic and commercial relationships elsewhere.

That desire for legitimacy is leverage.

Use it.

Fifty-six countries issued a U.N. statement this month demanding reversal of restrictions on women and girls. China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran and several other regional states did not join, illustrating exactly why multilateral governance remains frustratingly difficult and still more useful than pretending one country can police the entire planet with an aircraft carrier.

Nobody should romanticize the Taliban.

Nobody should romanticize war either.

Afghan girls deserve schools.

Afghan women deserve public lives.

Afghan men deserve an economy and education system not crippled by their government's obsession with controlling women.

And none of them deserve to become the justification for another generation of foreigners proving their concern through explosive ordnance.

The Taliban celebrated five years since defeating an occupying superpower.

Perhaps the international community could spend the next five years trying something more sophisticated than invading them again.

Start with the schools.

They could use the fucking money.