Tracking Women’s Rights in Afghanistan: A Timeline

Shortly after seizing power on August 15, 2021, the Taliban announced, “We are going to allow women to study and work within our framework. Women are going to be very active in our society.”1 But over the following two years, they failed to deliver on this and numerous other promises. In fact, they proactively instituted a set of inhuman edicts to achieve the opposite—a society in which women are brutally forbidden to participate, study, and work.

While the Taliban acted with boldness and impunity, we must not assume the people were complacent or accepted these new policies. Afghanistan is a complex and diverse country, and opinions about women’s role in society vastly differ between cities and rural areas; between the country’s north, where CAI implements most of its programs, and its south, which is the Taliban’s power center; and even within communities and families.

As Central Asia Institute and our partners on the ground continue to navigate the new environment under Taliban rule, we’ve seen this struggle play out. Yes, the Taliban’s bans on secondary education for girls and university for women have forced us to narrow the scope of our programs, predominantly to focus on primary school. But we’ve also found a huge demand for our community-based classes—including for girls—in areas where there are no schools and where many adults have little to no education. And in several instances in which the Taliban sought to interfere with these classes, it was the communities themselves that fought back. Today’s Afghans are not the same as they were 20 years ago. In cities and rural areas alike, most highly value education as the best chance for a better life. Despite the challenging operating environment, we’ve continued to deliver education programs to girls, including in remote, rural areas that are culturally conservative.

The timeline below presents a snapshot of events that reflect both the Taliban’s campaign to strip Afghan women and girls of their rights to education, work, and freedom of movement, as well as big and small ways Afghans are fighting back.