A month ago, when all eyes were on the war in Ukraine, the Taliban quietly reneged on their promise to put school-age girls back in classrooms. This followed a six-month period in which women faced crippling restrictions on their employment, freedom of movement, dress, access to healthcare and participation in sports, plus gender-based violence, torture and arrest if they protested. But the international community’s initial response—to pull humanitarian aid, for instance—threatens to make matters even worse.
Since the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, U.S. government agencies and representatives, like the wider international donor community, have been struggling to determine how best to support women’s human rights in Afghanistan against the Taliban’s repression. Dilemmas abound. For instance, should the U.S. insist on improved conditions for women in return for lifting sanctions, even if the sanctions themselves are hurting women? And should the U.S. support contenders against Taliban rule even if renewed civil war puts women at risk?
In a new report released this week, Human Security Lab, a research project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, took on these dilemmas, and found that U.S. efforts to influence the Taliban through sanctions, aid conditionality and shaming are not likely to be effective, and could in fact backfire. Based on consultations with 16 academic experts, numerous international practitioners and a wide variety of Afghan civil society representatives, the report argues that Washington should instead focus on mitigating the consequences of its withdrawal on women using whatever mechanisms remain within its control.
Simply put, even if the U.S. can’t force the Taliban to respect human rights in the short term, some women’s rights are largely within the United States’ power to implement if it makes important course corrections in its own human rights policy.
For example, this past winter, 1 million Afghan children risked starvation because the U.S. government chose to freeze Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves, forcing the Afghan economy into a tailspin. While the intended goal was ostensibly to force the Taliban to uphold its pledge to protect women’s rights in the country, the result was indiscriminate suffering: A World Bank report released this week showed a third of Afghans experiencing severe food insecurity. As an NGO practitioner quoted in Human Security Lab’s report stated, “Women can’t think about their rights when their children are starving.” Indeed, food insecurity and extreme poverty exacerbate other problems for women as well. Some families, for instance, have even resorted to selling their daughters due to the economic crisis. But in reality, access to food is itself a basic human right.
Academics consulted for Human Security Lab’s report almost uniformly argued against continued economic pressure on the Taliban for this and other reasons. Scholarship shows broad-based sanctions are rarely effective in achieving their stated political goals and hit civilians disproportionately. Even targeted or “smart” sanctions can have detrimental outcome for civilians if their impacts are not closely monitored. Keeping the Afghan reserves frozen—or worse, appropriating them for Americans—has not only been unhelpful, but counter-productive, since the Taliban has been able to point to the international community as the source of starving Afghans’ problems.
Even if the U.S. can’t force the Taliban to respect human rights in the short term, some women’s rights are largely within the United States’ power to implement.
Worse, the report notes, perceptions of Western hypocrisy, coupled with the association of women’s rights with Western culture, now risk delegitimizing Afghan women’s own human rights activism. Gender diplomacy by outsiders, especially with coercive measures, often creates a backlash in conflict-affected societies. But perhaps the best reason to moderate these sanctions is that they themselves fundamentally violate the human rights of Afghans, even if they are well-intended.
It is absolutely the case that the U.S. and wider international community must keep up the pressure on the Taliban to improve women’s rights as well as prevent violence against minorities and other groups, and that they should offer more than just lip service. But the U.S. has other options at hand for pressuring the Taliban that do not necessitate infringing on the food security of civilians. For example, international recognition can and should be withheld until some basic human rights standards are met. Taliban individuals could be targeted with no-fly lists and weapons bans. But, as the report notes, “these measures need not be coupled with crippling and indiscriminate sanctions.”
Another way the U.S. could unilaterally do more for Afghan women—regardless of Taliban decisions and in ways that support long-term gender equity in the country—is by implementing the human right to seek asylum when facing a well-founded fear of persecution, a status to which arguably every woman and women’s rights defender in Afghanistan has a particularly valid claim. This now underutilized mechanism to support human rights and win the geopolitical long game through soft power was once a mainstay of U.S. foreign policy. Yet current U.S. policy had made it extremely difficult for Afghans to avail themselves of this right, with women at a particular disadvantage just when they need exit options the most.
For example, the U.S. has prioritized Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, for those who worked directly for the U.S. government. But the program has been excruciatingly inefficient and, moreover, it suffers from an unaddressed gender gap that has made it more difficult for women to apply, according to data collected by the Association of Wartime Allies. Many Afghan women were personally trained by and worked for the U.S. government and ostensibly qualify for SIVs, but are unable to access support in navigating the complexities of the system. The Afghanistan office of the U.S. Agency for International Development does not consider asylum assistance to be part of its gender programming mandate for the country, because the State Department typically handles refugee claims. But the State Department no longer has an embassy in Kabul, and is therefore primarily focused on helping refugees that have already crossed a border. That does not make it easy for Afghans still in the country to seek help. It also doesn’t help that U.S. embassy staff destroyed numerous passports before they left, leaving families in bureaucratic limbo.
The bigger problem is that the SIV program touches only a tiny proportion of the U.S.-aligned Afghans who risked their lives supporting the prior government or working in civil society organizations as women’s rights defenders. Afghan National Army servicemen and women not directly employed by the U.S. do not qualify. In theory, NGO workers employed by a project directly funded by a U.S. grant could get such a visa—but much U.S. development assistance gets channeled through layers of international sub-contractors. Employees of local Afghan NGOs that received subcontracts from the U.S. but didn’t work directly for the international consulting firm or organization that received the original contract would not meet this bar. Often, it is these local women’s rights defenders that are in the most danger.
Beyond these individuals, many other women currently feel that their lives are at risk and wish to evacuate, including women and girls facing forced marriages and domestic violence, and who, with the Taliban shutting down domestic violence shelters, have little safe recourse within Afghanistan. Yet even those who have made it across a border into Pakistan, Iran or Uzbekistan now face poverty, limbo and endless red tape in poorly funded humanitarian camps.
The U.S. should, therefore, improve interagency coordination between USAID offices and the State Department to help Afghans smoothly navigate exit procedures. It should also prioritize aid to countries bordering Afghanistan to assist with refugee support. And of course, the U.S. could lead the way by streamlining its own immigration and asylum procedures for Afghans. Exit options could be expanded for former employees of U.S. companies or organizations, as well as of any organization that received even indirect aid from the U.S. government. While many women will prefer to stay and fight for their rights, the U.S. could prioritize claims from women generally, as a persecuted group, and to women’s rights defenders. Such claims should not be conditional on employment with the U.S., but are a human right under international refugee law.
Such a strategy would represent a significant change in how the U.S. thinks about prioritizing asylum claims. But it would mirror the United States’ welcoming policy toward Soviet refugees during the Cold War, who were fleeing a different repressive adversary, and would do far more to undermine the Taliban’s legitimacy and protect women than current U.S. approaches. By all means, the Taliban should be isolated and shamed, and diplomatic recognition should be withheld until an inclusive government is in place. But in the meantime, the U.S. should do all in its power to protect and expand the human rights of women in the interim. Leading by example can be the most powerful form of advocacy.
Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. She tweets at @charlicarpenter. Her weekly WPR column appears every other Friday.