They are defiant. (Credit: Hoshang Hashimi//AFP/ Getty)
I was a defiant little girl. One afternoon, I came home with my nails painted — a grave sin. My mother took one look and told me to get the filth off of my nails before she chopped off each finger.
My mother could be fierce and she punished me frequently, but even then I knew that her threat was bluster. She might smack me, but she wasn’t going to take off any digits.
Empty threats are used as leverage to entice certain behaviour. But what if the threats are real? For the girls living under Taliban control in Afghanistan, threats are not theatre: they are promises. Even for transgressions as small as painting their fingernails, they face real consequences.
Saturday marks 20 years since the fall of the World Trade Center, a day that brought unimaginable devastation, heartbreak and loss to America. But if there was one glimmer of hope that came from that tragic moment, it was for the women and girls of Afghanistan. After 9/11, and the conflict that followed, a level of freedom unknown to previous generations came to their country.
I remember watching the planes crash on television. I was at work in the Netherlands at the time, and sat, horrified, with my colleagues. As we watched, we wondered how the world’s superpower would respond to such an evil attack on the American homeland. They certainly had the power, resources and reason to go and obliterate their newfound enemy. Sitting there, we could never have guessed that this tragedy would end up bringing more rights and freedoms to women in Afghanistan.
The United States could have gone into Afghanistan, taken its revenge and left. President Biden’s continual defence over the past weeks has been that he was following the original plan. “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.”
But this is not where the legacy of 9/11 ends. It was not all necessary revenge and retaliation. Instead, we offered to help rebuild and provide hope to those who had not had it before. Together with our Afghan allies, we built a more inclusive society for women and girls, in the belief that precisely this kind of modernisation would reduce the danger of a Taliban restoration.
As Adam Tooze explains in his brilliant Substack, from 2003 to 2018, the number of women enrolled in university rose from 7,200 to 49,000. Female life expectancy increased by almost 10 years from 2001-2019. “Whereas in 2000,” Tooze explains, “Afghan men lived longer than women, now Afghanistan has the normal pattern of women outliving their menfolk.” Rates of literacy among females more than doubled between 2000-2018.
A generation of girls was raised without knowing life under Taliban control. And they soared. In 2017, an all-girls robotics team was founded, known as the Afghan Dreamers, who went on to win the Entrepreneurial Challenge at the Robotex festival in Estonia. In 2008, Afghanistan saw its first female mayor, Azra Jafari, in the town of Nili. And she was just the first of many females to hold political positions, including Salima Mazari, Zarifa Ghanfari, and Fawzia Koofi. Women made up 40% of the most recent class of graduates from the American University of Afghanistan. They have their own all-female orchestra. Female entrepreneurs invested $77 million over 18 years, resulting in 77,000 jobs. Their rights were promoted by the 2004 Afghanistan Constitution in Article 44, stating that “the state shall devise and implement effective programs to create and foster balanced education for women”.
Their successes were awe-inspiring. They were also a source of pride for Americans. They were, in part, America’s girls — girls raised to know a certain level of freedom, with their rights secure and protected, thanks to the U.S.-led intervention prompted by 9/11.
In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme produced the Arab Human Development Report, aimed at providing a path for growth and opportunity in the Arab world. The report concluded that three factors contribute to the constraints of human development in the Arab world: “freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge”. Individuals needed to be educated beyond religious ideology, their human rights respected and women’s rights expanded. And for the last 20 years, the United States has supported women and these goals through the US Agency for International Development and State Department-funded programmes, as well as encouraging women’s participation in government and the private sector.
But now women’s rights are being ripped away. Biden’s betrayal reverberates sharply across the country. He offered a false dichotomy to the American people: either pull all troops out or go back to fighting an “endless war”. Pulling out the remaining US troops initiated the swift collapse of the Afghan government, will result in Afghanistan returning to a terrorist safe haven and removed the shield protecting women’s rights in the country. Surely this is not the legacy that Americans want to leave behind on the 20th anniversary of 9/11?
The effects of Taliban control are already being felt by women. The Taliban have announced that women must cover their faces to attend university and genders must segregate, both in class and while entering and exiting the building. They are banned from sports, considered by the Taliban’s cultural commission as “neither appropriate nor necessary” for women. Women can no longer hold ministerial positions. There are no women included in the new administration. Some are being told not to go to work, allegedly a temporary change while the Taliban draw up new “women related procedures”. They face real violence if they disobey. Those speaking out against the Taliban are being deemed “agents of America” and accused of “not being true Muslims”. They are being erased from the public square. And the Taliban haven’t been in control for a full month yet.
What will happen to America’s Afghan girls? The ones born and raised since 2001. The girls inspired by the allure of freedom, liberalism, and chasing their own dreams. Those who have, until now, not known the crushing burdens and barriers of life under the Taliban. What will become of the defiant girls, who speak up for their rights? The ones who question the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban?
Many will suffer severe punishments. Violence will be unleashed against them in a magnitude that those in the West do not comprehend. Body parts will be chopped off. Sexual harassment, rapes, honour violence and murders will become the norm.
But, unlike before, this time is different. The women of Afghanistan will fight back. They’ve already begun. Protests are erupting across the country. Women of all ages are standing firm against the Taliban. In Kabul, women attempted to march to the presidential palace, “demanding the right to work and to be included in government”. They were attacked for it, with videos and photos revealing the bloody violence they faced at the hands of the Taliban. At a subsequent protest in Kabul, one woman stated: “We don’t care if they beat us or even shoot us. We want to defend our rights. We will continue our protests even if we get killed.”
At another protest in Herat, calling for girls’ education, one of the organisers, Basira Taheri, explained: “The women of this land are informed and educated. We are not afraid, we are united.” Pashtana Durrani, the Executive Director of Learn Afghanistan, a bulwark for Afghan women’s rights, said; “We are going to make sure [girls] get to go to school, they get to go to work. If not on the terms that we want in public, we’re going to make it happen anyways.”
As the saying, often attributed to Thomas Carlyle, goes: “Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.” The Taliban cannot undo the last 20 years. These women and girls are refusing to submit to a new Dark Age. That glimmer of hope, sparked after 9/11, has not been extinguished. Even with the Taliban in control, America’s girls aren’t going to give up.
And now the world is watching. Before 9/11, the atrocities committed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan received very little coverage in the West. Now, everyone knows names like Malala and Bibi Aisha. And we will come to know more names, like Basira Taheri’s, as we cheer them on. Two decades on, these women may be the most enduring achievement of the American intervention that followed 9/11.
They are defiant. And, as a former defiant girl, I can say with conviction that they can’t beat or cut that defiance out of you.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an UnHerd columnist. She is also a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. Her new book is Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.
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SubscribeLet’s keep all this in perspective. While this may be true, the US government has focused with laser precision on the key issues, such as pronouns. Women and girls may be raped and tortured in Afghanistan, but the Biden administration is acting resolutely against micro-aggressions. Body parts may be chopped off but no transsexual will be triggered by being referred to as male.
These achievements are well worth America’s having created the world’s first – and most heavily-armed – terrorist superstate.
The Guardian is one step away from endorsing the rape of women / children in Afghanistan. If it was framed as; a mental health service to lessen the stress of western whiteness oppression on Jihadists, via an offline only-fans service provided face to veil by anti-volunteer women / child sex workers and free at the point of use for service using Jihadists.
Well written, as always. It’s not just the Afghan girls and women that are fighting back; their husbands, brothers and fathers too are giving them support. This is a welcome development.
There is another welcome development that is beginning to show up. The average Afghan feels shortchanged and betrayed by America and her allies. They are also incensed by the duplicitous role played by Pakistan in installing the Taliban into power. They want their country back and this feeling is taking on a national character.
Interesting days ahead.
You make the important point that “fighting back”, on its own, is not enough. The resistance needs to have adequate forces at its disposal to make victory possible. The allied withdrawal from Afghanistan has just made that external support near-impossible in the short term.
Women face the added problem of the sheer overpowering nature of male physical brute force, which reaches right into the home on a minute by minute basis, facilitating a regime of total surveillance and total imprisonment of women.
In my view, it is facile to imply that women will have any effective choices available to them for either private, personal or public freedoms in the near future.
“If things continue as they are, there will be no music in Afghanistan.”
As picked out from an article given by a link in this sobering piece.
But what will be the Taliban’s idea of a national anthem?
With the loss of Kabul and District to the Taliban, there is nowhere else in the entire region for young Afghan women, keen to hold on to an artistic vision of life, to fall back on. Would the members of the music school find “solace” in neighbouring countries? In Pakistan? In Iran? Or in, is it Tajikistan? The “Little America” that was a feature of Kabul and District has been truly dissolved, by means of the solvent of Short-sighted America. Moreover, perhaps Afghanistan’s many mountainous zones handily, for the Taliban, block radio waves carrying radio and television signals, solace-filled broadcasts, to the cultured souls of Kabul and District. The sort of stuff that would, a little, enliven in unison a population.
You can’t stop the music? I’m afraid, if America bows out disgracefully, even the music can be stopped. What defiance there is is like being on a hiding to nothing.
We’ve already bowed out disgracefully.
This article made me cry. Just take a moment and think what it would be like to wake up tomorrow and have your life relegated to little more than a living shadow filled with fear, under the threat of violence or a violent death at every turn.
Yes, it somewhat puts the supposed Western patriarchy into perspective, doesn’t it?
Dr Ali’s account is heartbreaking. What strikes me particularly is that she is able to cite no practical measures that anyone has yet put in place for effectively supporting these women. They have, apparently, nothing but their defiance to rely on. That will not be enough. I cannot see that they have any future. That’s the stark reality of how bad their situation is.
This Trump/Biden pull-out needs to be seen as a crime against humanity. Women are not some minority group, to be lumped together with gays or atheists or musicians or similar. They comprise the majority of the population. So a crime against the majority is a crime against humanity.
The media would do well to keep this in mind as the inevitable accommodations start to be made with the Taliban terrorist regime and women bit by bit become invisible again in men’s deliberations.
Whereas crimes against ‘some minority group’ aren’t crimes against humanity? I’m impressed – hadn’t expected the most right-wing thing I’d read today would come from a feminist. Love how Unherd manages to keep the comments section fresh!
…crimes against ‘some minority group’ aren’t crimes against humanity? … the most right-wing thing I’d read today…
A crime against humanity can be viewed quantitatively or qualitatively.
I was highlighting the quantitative aspect, making the point that the sheer numbers of women whose lives will be devastated far outweighs the numbers involved in any other single affected group.
I wanted to make this point because, as I have been reading, listening to and watching a wide cross-section of the media, I have been getting the distinct impression that this difference in scale, and hence in total social impact of the damage, is constantly overlooked. That is why Dr Ali’s article is so important. I only wish the same sort of detailed analysis and passionate caring for women could be seen as a central, primary concern of most male journalists and academics. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.
So my comment could not in any sense be regarded as “rightwing”, as you claim: you put words in my mouth that were not there and not intended. Of course I regard crimes against gays, artists, adherents of minority religions, etc., as crimes against their humanity.
To jump from my comment about the greater seriousness of some crimes against humanity, to a conclusion that I therefore am dismissing all other crimes against humanity as inauthentic, is illogical and unfounded in the facts of what I said.
I was hoping for some constructive responses which would look more closely at the reality of Afghani women’s situation, and extend the boundaries of the discussion in a helpful way.
i don’t think your sarcastic, “smart Alec”, misguided attempt at put-down point-scoring adds anything worthwhile to the discussion of this profoundly serious issue.
Penelope, it isn’t our country, and the West has shown itself unable or perhaps unwilling to robustly combat Islamist extremism even in its own lands.
Someone says, yes, he is now a good boy, ok say the parole board, of course he is telling the truth, what a success for our Prevent strategy. Said Muslim is released and commits carnage on London Bridge.
Frankly, women’s rights in the West are threatened HERE if this pusillanimous, self loathing and weak, woke left liberalism carries in for many more years.
You make a good point. The west has indeed shown itself unable or unwilling to combat Islamist extremism. I suspect inability more than unwillingness, although both can be seen to have been at play. And it is not our country.
Nonetheless, if one believes in universal human rights, then we have some sort of responsibility to work for them: to uphold them in freer societies, and introduce them where they are not yet much in evidence.
Huge questions arise about the best way to do this, of course. It is not proven that war is best. Peaceful intervention may be harder, but in the long run, more beneficial in its effects.
What I find unforgivable is the US’ adoption of an approach—armed intervention—then its reneging on responsibilities it took on with this approach. And worse—its failure even to attempt to plan for positive alternatives to plug the gap now left by its departure.
Our leaders never told the truth about the War on Terror. It’s not a war we can win. It’s a war of “mowing the lawn,” as the Israelis say, of constantly whacking the Islamic terrorists back for as long as it takes to exhaust their rabid desire to kill us. We could never expect to win in Afghanistan if the Taliban had access to almost unlimited funding from opium sales and winter sanctuary in Pakistan. We never made any serious effort to destroy opium crops controled by the Taliban, nor did we attack their sanctuaries in Pakistan in any systematic way.
US rules of engagement in Afghanistan were a joke. Our soldiers needed approval from lawyers in Florida for artillery and air strikes on positions that were shooting at them. Use of the most effective munitions was limited by the rules of engagement. It was like we had to give our enemies a “sporting chance” to win, at the expense of our own casualties.
We need to get real. General officers need to resign over stupid rules of engagement, and strategies billed as decisive that are guaranteed losers.
The US needs to act like the War on Terror is a Marathon, not a sprint. We need to fight on the cheap, training indigenous forces to fight without hugely expensive US style logistical and technical support. We need to kill terrorists, and help their enemies defeat them in affordable ways. We can’t afford to occupy and nation build primitive countries, primarily because it doesn’t work.
If we feel the need to replace a government in a country, we must be ready to do what it takes. That means ruthlessly eliminating all guerrillas’s funding sources and bombing any sanctuaries in “neutral” countries. If we ain’t ready to do the needful, we shouldn’t play. Our resources are not limitless. We can’t waste any more lives and money on losing strategies.
Ayaan,
You are an amazing and brave woman and I am in awe of what you have accomplished in your life. We need more women like you to stand up and speak for oppressed women everywhere who are unable to speak for themselves. I weep for the women and girls of Afghanistan, and hope they continue to have the will to resist the barbaric regime in Afghanistan
Nation change is not our business. Nato is not a social service. Open ended military adventurism is a busted flush and twas always thus. Western women now expect the overwhelmingly young men they despise to go and die for this ’cause’.
This was not unpredictable. Life changing for the young who saw a different future. To resist though can make it worse. If public opinion becomes a threat then an obvious response would be to stifle it by shutting down the internet. That would have an enormouse impact on women working and socialising from their homes.
Lovely lady; refined, enlightened, crisp and easily readable authoress. I read James A Michener’s ‘Caravans’ 40 years ago and dimly now recall how i wanted to visit such an ancient territory and didn’t. Bravo for the Afghan women and girls doing their cultural and social responsibility – it’s truly noble as would be the men who aid and protect them.
I’m very sympathetic to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is a really brave person, who has put her life on the line for her anti-Islamist views.
But… the Afghan state which had promoted these social advances for women, simply collapsed overnight. After 20 years of Western intervention. How deep could its roots have been?
Maybe it’s time for the Afghans to decide for themselves what kind of country they want to live in?