How Afghanistan has changed after a year of Taliban rule

One year on from the Taliban’s dramatic return to power in Afghanistan and the country is in crisis and at a crossroads.

Despite criticism of the often corrupt US-backed governments that ruled the country following the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, the years since saw a flourishing of independent media, dramatic improvements in human rights, relative economic prosperity for a burgeoning middle-class and, perhaps most significantly, an increase in women’s rights and the number of girls going to school and university.

Over the past 12 months, however, “these achievements have been largely reversed”, reported DW.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Women’s rights

“Afghanistan faces a bleak future a year on from the Taliban takeover, as women and girls bear the brunt of the ruling power's hardline stance,” said ITV News.

After the takeover of Kabul, the Taliban promised to uphold certain rights, including for women. “However, the Taliban government, complying with their vision of Islam, has imposed restrictions on women,” said Business Standard. “While teenage girls have been shut out from secondary schools, women have been forced out of some government jobs and barred from travelling alone without a guardian.”

As girls over 11 wait to return to school a year after the Taliban promised it would not ban them from classrooms, women have been forced once again to cover up in public. Anyone peacefully protesting the so-called “burqa mandate” has been threatened, arrested, tortured or forcibly disappeared, according to Amnesty International.

On assuming power, the Taliban immediately dismantled the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and, according to the World Bank, the percentage of women in work in Afghanistan has fallen to just 15% over the past year.

The economic hardship “is having a direct result on women’s and girls’ freedoms, education, and rights”, said ITV. The broadcaster reported that some desperate families have been driven to marry off their young daughters, while child labour is also on the rise.

“Stripping women of their rights is fundamental to the Taliban’s ideology,” said Brian McQuinn, Cody Buntain and Laura Courchesne for The Conversation. “Taliban leaders are using the same playbook to oppress women as they did 25 years ago.

“The only difference is that the game plan is being rolled out more slowly, and is in some ways flying under the radar – an indication of how much Afghanistan has changed since the last time the Taliban controlled the country.”

Economic crisis

The establishment of the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan by the Taliban “triggered an international response that has since crippled the central Asian country: development aid stopped, foreign exchange reserves were frozen and sanctions abounded”, said The Guardian.

This has caused the economy, which had been a relative success story following two decades of US-backed rule, to nosedive, contracting almost 30% in less than a year. Most household incomes fell below the poverty line and over half of the population are living in a state of extreme food insecurity, said Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO).

According to the World Bank, the withdrawal of foreign aid, which had accounted for 45% of the nation’s GDP, has had a particularly devastating effect on the economy and public spending. This prompted the UN to launch its “biggest ever appeal” for humanitarian aid – estimated at $4.4bn – earlier this year, “but the international community has been reluctant to hand over the funds directly to the Taliban, fearing they would use the money to buy weapons”, said DW.

For the same reason, Washington has refused to unfreeze Afghanistan’s bank assets.

Amid an ever-growing economic and humanitarian crisis the Taliban has been pressing the international community to recognise it as Afghanistan’s legitimate ruler, a move that is “crucial” if the Taliban is to avoid potential economic collapse, said DW.

Professionals out, militants in

In the 12 months since the Taliban returned to power, “the country has seen an exodus of refugees that shows no sign of abating”, said Ben Farmer in The Telegraph.

More than 120,000 people were airlifted out of Kabul airport in a frantic two-week period before the capital fell last summer and hundreds of thousands more have poured over the borders since, many into neighbouring Pakistan.

These include journalists, businessmen, politicians, soldiers and civil servants, part of a professional class that had emerged over the past 20 years.

“But the Taliban seem unable to cope with running the country and a brain drain is robbing the government of competent officials,” said Farmer. “What stability there is often seems to be brought by force and imposed by fear.”

“True to form, the Taliban also threatened the lives and families of activists, journalists and anyone who had worked with Western organisations,” said Cosmopolitan, while also massacring ethnic Hazaras, executing dissidents and suppressing the media. According to Reporters Without Borders, 43% of Afghan media outlets have been shut down in the past three months, DW reported.

With global attention focused on Ukraine and Taiwan, Afghanistan has once again become a hub of local and international militant groups. The presence of former Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was killed in a US drone strike in Kabul last month, “suggests that the terrorism threat emanating from Taliban-run Afghanistan is more serious than previously thought”, said Kate Bateman, of the United States Institute of Peace.

“The Taliban have ties with international terrorists,” Farid Amiri, a former Afghan government official, told DW. “Their return to power has emboldened jihadi organisations in the region. As they consolidate themselves, their tactical and strategic ties with terrorism financiers and sponsors will grow and will eventually jeopardise peace and security in the region and beyond.”