“Everything you did from this morning up to now is criminalized in Afghanistan if you are a woman,” Metra Mehran told the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum audience on Wednesday, October 28. Mehran, founder of the Afghanistan Justice Archive, spoke at an Institute of Politics event titled “The State of Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan” alongside Dr. Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s first Minister of Women’s Affairs, and Mathias Risse, director of the Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights.
The panel was held more than five years after the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021. Introducing the event, Aiden Sakhba ’27 of the Forum Committee said Afghanistan is “the only country in the world where girls are barred from attending school beyond the sixth grade,” and that under a 2024 law “even the sound of a woman’s voice in public is now restricted.” Her remarks set the tone of an event which was refreshingly honest about the state of affairs in Afghanistan, but which left unanswered broader questions about intervention that are otherwise dominating American politics.
All three panelists were straightforward about the dire conditions faced by women in the country, showing the failings of culturally relativist conceptions of the world favored by the left.
Each panelist, for instance, called for “gender apartheid” to be codified as a crime under international law. Mehran said the Afghanistan Justice Archive has documented more than 200 Taliban decrees that “directly target women,” including bans on walking freely on the street and on seeking divorce, while Samar noted that nearly 30 percent of Afghan girls under 18 are married, leading her to call the country “literally the largest open-air prison for women in the world.”
However, Taliban rule is distinct from other, still pervasive forms of misogyny, according to both Mehran and Samar, not just because of the severity of its restrictions but because of their institutionalization: “Most of the cultures around the world are maybe misogynistic,” Mehran said. “But what makes it very different in the context of Afghanistan and under the regime of the Taliban is that it’s formalized, it’s the law of the land, and it serves a very specific purpose: to maintain dominance of the Taliban and sustain their regime.”
Samar, who said she has lived through “12 different governments” and ran hospitals and clinics under the first Taliban regime, thereby drew a distinction between the Taliban of 1996 and the Taliban of today related to the formality of gender-based legislation. In 1996, per Samar, the Taliban was “implementing that policy [gender-based regulations], but it was not law. This time they came in a more professional way, and they established laws and enforce the laws.” As such, while there has been some semblance of a movement to stop gender apartheid in Afghanistan as early as 1998, Samar argued that it has been given new urgency because the Taliban is simply “more organized and powerful” now; indeed, Russia has already recognized the regime there, throwing the weight of a major power behind it.
Most importantly, the panel eschewed the relativism trap that often infects moral conversations about other nations’ policies, especially when the basis of those policies is religious. Indeed, tellingly, a student from the crowd who self-identified as Muslim asked a question about how the critiques the panel was presenting might fuel Islamophobia — a common charge of the left. According to Mehran, however, the religion defense is obviated by the Taliban’s bans on women going to Mosques or reciting the Quran out loud in front of other women: “[Gender apartheid] is not about religion or culture. [...] If religion was a factor, they wouldn’t avoid [sic] women from reciting the Quran.”
Sidestepping the trap of relativism also allowed the panel to have a serious discussion of America’s role, or lack thereof, in upholding human rights. Panelists thus raised ambiguous questions about intervention.
Specifically, Risse argued that failed American policy had led to the current gender apartheid in Afghanistan. According to Risse, the Trump administration “made this arrangement with the Taliban, not even consulting the sitting Afghan government,” before “Biden made it worse” with a “very hurried evacuation.” “We are massively implicated,” he said. “Turning our back does not mean we have lost moral responsibility.” Mehran agreed, saying the failure “began in 2001” when America “totally denied and ignored transitional justice,” and that “since 2021, the American government hasn’t had a foreign policy on Afghanistan.” When the panel was asked whether the Taliban would simply have stayed in power had America never intervened, Risse said the obligation stems from “this very deep American involvement with Afghanistan… The American policy failure here is dramatic, and that’s the source of the obligation.”
But American culpability seems to imply a duty for American action. If the panel was clear-eyed about the nature and extent of the moral problem ongoing in Afghanistan and confident about the important role of America in creating it, then what next for our nation? Does our nation have, by the same token of the “moral responsibility” that its intervention spawned, an obligation to intervene again? If so, how?
This panel was held, of course, at a time when American intervention in the Middle East has become one of the defining issues of our politics, so much so that the Vice President has assigned it near total culpability for Republicans’ recent monumental loss in the midterms. The logic of American intervention in Iran, predicated on the repressive nature of the Islamic Republic (not least toward women), appears analogous to any potential defense of intervention in Afghanistan to defeat gender apartheid there.
But it is obvious that the American public has come out overwhelmingly against the former military intervention, and the panel did not make a strong enough case for how and why intervention in Afghanistan would be distinct, appropriate, and, above all, effective. Still, Samar closed with a powerful message: “I hope we’re not having the same conversation in five years, or even worse.” While wondering about what, if any, responsibility is borne by America, we can nevertheless hope she is right.