There is approximately 11,500 km of distance between Sydney, Australia, and Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
That’s a completely useless fact that will mean almost nothing to you – if you are a man, it means even less. But if you are a woman, that distance is a blessing.
The Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice formally passed laws in August this year to prohibit women from freely speaking in public – or more specifically, from speaking aloud at all, anywhere out of the home. This law includes singing, humming, reciting and reading.
For those who have heard of this but are looking for some brief (but skippable) context…
The Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s and aimed to establish a radical Islamic state, predominantly formed of Mujahideen fighters who were trained in Pakistan during Afghanistan’s decade long civil war. They conquered Kabul and almost the entirety of the nation in 1996, establishing themselves as a government and strictly imposing their extreme interpretation of Islamic Sharia Law. A coalition of anti-Taliban forces called the Northern Alliance still controlled some key areas in the North and East, however the Taliban’s control was almost entirely comprehensive until 2001.
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the US launched an operation to overthrow the Taliban for harbouring the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. The Northern Alliance predominantly regained control in Afghanistan.
From 2001 onwards the Taliban initiated an insurgency to regain control, which grew to be so prominent that it remained and even intensified after US Navy SEALs executed Osama bin Laden in 2011. In 2020 a peace treaty declared for the withdrawal of US troops in exchange for the prohibition of al-Qaeda operating in the nation. Promptly following US withdrawal, the Taliban rapidly reinstated control and collapsed the Afghan government.
Under the Taliban, women are prohibited from attending secondary school and university. Women are required to wear a burqa at all times in public that fully cover their body. Their entire face, excluding the eyes, must be covered. Women are banned from most jobs in government, private sectors, in NGOs or from studying journalism, engineering or medicine. Women must be accompanied by a male guardian to travel long distances and cannot enter a taxi without a suitable male escort. Women are prohibited from attending sports matches, concerts, visiting parks, gyms and other public spaces.
Women are not allowed to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage.
Women cannot speak in public – their voice alone is seen as a tool of temptation and vice.
These facts are not just numbers but daily realities for Afghan women. Behind each restriction lies a lifetime of oppression.
In 1995 a young 15 year old girl watched as her father was executed by the Taliban in her living room, murdered for allowing his daughter (the girl interviewed) to go to school. The same year, another young girl had her fingers cut off publicly in Kabul for wearing nail polish on one of her nails. These two girls are not dissimilar or special to other women under the regime. They are both still the lucky ones.
Women who contravene or protest the Taliban’s horrific laws are punished by incarceration, beatings, torture, flogging, stoning, public humiliation, electric shock, rape and death. Typically, incarceration does not occur without rape or gang rape, and rape does not usually occur without a camera. Nor does a beating, or torture, or any other listed form of punishment applicable to women in Afghanistan. So their best option is… to die?
There is an active attempt to erase women in Afghanistan – and this is not a new fact. But if women are so deeply confined to the domestic sphere and restricted in general day-to-day life, so much so that they aren’t even allowed to speak in public, why haven’t they been collectively locked away? Why are they even allowed outside if they’re so passionately despised and degraded? You might just think, why doesn’t the Taliban just kill them all?
Well the answer is, they are. Female death in Afghanistan has skyrocketed in recent years beyond anything we’ve almost ever seen – but it’s not all being directly done by the Taliban. Women are doing it themselves. As of 2022, over eighty percent of all suicides in Afghanistan are committed by females which is over ¾ of the nation’s suicides, while at the same time, and as casually as you would kill a fly on the wall, their husbands are doing it for them.
Domestic violence rates have surged in recent years, alongside the rising use of at-home ‘honour killings.’ These male-committed atrocities are the murder of a typically female family member by their male husband or father, due to the belief that the woman has brought dishonour upon the family. The grounds for committing these vile killings have evolved from women expressing resistance by refusing arranged marriages, requesting divorce or being a victim of sexual assault, to merely giving birth to a female child. In most cases, both wife and newborn are killed.
This is a slow-motion, large-scale pandemic of female death. We all know these facts are absolutely terrible and this violence so grotesque it’s almost subhuman. It’s supposed to ruin your day.
And it’s not the fact that Afghanistan is the lowest ranked country in the 2023 Women, Peace & Security Index, or that each day the Taliban is more broadly contravening all 30 UDHR articles with more and more abominable violations, or violating all moral constructs of human rights for that matter.
It’s the fact that you had a 50% chance of being born either female or male. In this exact moment, you are part of the fabric of a unique global population that as each second passes, changes, and will never, ever be the same again. You are 1 in 8.13 billion people existing in the world right now, which looks like 1/8,130,000,000. Out of that long list of zeroes, you escaped the current 17 million women that live under the Taliban, which looks like 17,000,000/8,130,000,000.
Let’s say you didn’t escape those odds – you live in Afghanistan under the Taliban, right now. With almost absolute certainty unless you died at birth, you would have experienced at least one of the atrocities I just detailed, and you would live a life of suffering just as these women do. Or maybe you drew a final straw of luck in an already horrible haystack – and you were born a man. Now you’re not directly the victim, but you too are a victim in many ways. You’re demanded to perpetrate horrors against women, endorse them or at least silently comply. If you question or condemn any of the laws, or god forbid let a single rule slide in private for someone you love, you die too. But you die and your family watches.
Let’s go back one final time, just so you know how lucky you are. You exist in a group of 8,130,000,000 out of 109,000,000,000 people predicted to exist on planet earth ever, since the beginning of time. The odds of you being born as the exact, unique individual you are and landing in the exact country you were born in were 1 in 400,000,000,000,000. The draw you pulled in life is so unlikely, it is almost incomprehensible to the human brain – so improbable you couldn’t close your eyes and picture what 400 trillion even looks like, even if you tried.
These women living in Afghanistan had the exact same odds.
In writing this, I know that we are all in a way almost completely powerless to create tangible change in the lives of these women. There is very little that a population of young 20 year olds can do to create any significant impact, particularly when many of our world’s most powerful military forces have failed to dethrone the Taliban.
Like me, most of you reading have not experienced an international war, civil war, any form of armed conflict or even any severely dehumanising oppression that actually alters the course of our life – and we likely never will. Never to this same degree. We will almost always exist as spectators of these events and of other similar atrocities that will inevitably follow, so privileged that we get to watch and read about it all on our phones. It’s happening in real-time right before our eyes, just through a distance of 11,500 kms.
So the easiest and one of the most valuable things you can do in circumstances like these, for victims that could have easily been you, is remember them and speak about them. They have been erased in their own lives, in their religion and home, erased on the plane of political relevance and forgotten in many ways amidst other global conflicts and war in the Middle East, but your memory is one of the most simple and powerful tools you can use to legitimise, retain, acknowledge and humanise these women as real and important.
To us they will always be nameless – even the reports and statistics we are given to account for their mere existence end in zeros – and that exactly is how we know that we will never, ever truly know.
As Afghan journalist Hamina Adam said, “the voice is like the sign of life.”
You wear the invisible crown of human rights these women don’t have – mourn for them and speak about them.
Do not let them be erased.