A nation divided: Stolen future of Afghan girls

Shakina Adil, what happens to Ayesha’s future?

For Shakina Adil, the question is enough to stifle her voice. A 45-year-old mother of five, Shakina is watching the clock run out on her daughter’s education. Since the Taliban’s return in 2021, the classroom door slams shut for Afghan girls after the sixth grade.

For Ayesha, the end of the academic year marks an exile from the secular world. Subjects like computer science, geography, and math will soon be replaced by a purely religious curriculum at a madrasa—or by nothing at all. The social fabric of her life is also tearing; while some classmates may study in secret or flee the country, many will simply disappear from her life.

“Ayesha is in immense pain,” Shakina says. “Her three brothers will continue their education, but she will be left behind.” As the one tasked with providing answers to a daughter who only asks, "Mother, what will happen to me?" Shakina's anxiety is peaking.

The tragedy is a mirror image in the home of Hashmat Stanikzai, a translator whose own daughter, also named Ayesha, is in the same grade. Over a century ago, Rabindranath Tagore wrote of the Kabuliwala, a man haunted by the distance between him and his daughter. Today, Hashmat lives a modern version of that grief. Though his daughter is right beside him, her future is being partitioned away. Like the character of old, this modern Kabuliwala has no answers for the road ahead.

The grief of parents like Shakina and Hashmat is not an isolated sorrow; it is a sentiment echoed, unexpectedly, within the ranks of the Taliban itself. Even those bound to the movement admit a quiet dissent against the ban on female education, though their loyalty forbids them from challenging the high command.

I encountered this internal conflict while traveling toward the Iranian border from Herat. My co-passenger was Maulana Akhtar Jan, a devoted Mujahid from Farah province. To Jan, the word of the Supreme Leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, is absolute law. Yet, when I tentatively broached the subject of girls’ schools, his conviction wavered.

"The leadership is considering it," he admitted. "It would not be a bad thing if the doors were to open. But the Emir’s decision is final."

My translator, Hashmat, later revealed a deeper layer to Jan’s perspective. According to Jan’s conversations with senior officials, the ban is being used as a geopolitical pawn. The Maulana suggested that the 2021 withdrawal negotiations included a provision for girls' education, one the Taliban now withholds because they feel the US failed to honour its end of the bargain.

Upon further investigation, however, the narrative provided by Akhtar Jan proves to be only a partial truth. A review of the 2020 Doha Agreement reveals a jarring silence on the matter of human rights; nowhere in the four-page document is there a mandate for girls’ education. The core of the deal was strictly transactional, the Taliban would cease terrorist activities, and US forces would withdraw. The ‘women’s liberation’ that served as a moral cornerstone for the 2001 invasion had, by 2020, been sidelined in favour of an exit strategy.

Yet, Jan’s claims aren't entirely baseless. They reflect a shift in how the West now uses the "women's issue" as a tool of modern diplomacy. While the US cancelled high-level meetings in 2022 to protest the schooling ban, the Taliban remains defiant, labelling the rights of women an "internal Afghan matter."

An anonymous official from the Afghan Foreign Ministry explained it more bluntly. He said, to the leadership in Kabul, the West’s – or any other country’s – outcry over schools is merely a negotiation tactic.
"If we accepted their demands regarding troop redeployment or distancing ourselves from China," the official claimed, "they wouldn't make a fuss about women’s freedom." In this cold calculus of power, Maulana Akhtar Jan’s assessment—that the girls are being held back as leverage—may be more accurate than it first appears.

However, it would be a mistake to assume these restrictions are fuelled by diplomacy alone. A deeper, more stubborn truth lies in the soil of Afghan history. For the better part of a century, through every cycle of political upheaval, women have consistently been the first to suffer the consequences of instability.

The famed Bengali scholar and writer Syed Mujtaba Ali documented this tragic pattern nearly a hundred years ago in his classic, Deshe Bideshe (In Lands Far and Near). Having travelled to Afghanistan to teach during the reign of King Amanullah, Ali witnessed the brutal civil war between the reformist monarch and the warlord Habibullah Kalakani, known as Bacha Saqao. The parallels to today are striking. As soon as the tides of war shifted, the progress of women was the first casualty. Ali observed then, as we see now, the sudden shuttering of schools and the forced return of the ‘tent-like’ burqa to the streets.

Even if we lend credence to Maulana Jan’s diplomatic logic—that education is a bargaining chip—a devastating moral question remains: Is it ever justifiable to punish a nation's daughters simply because a foreign power failed to keep its word?

The answer eventually came from a man known simply as ‘OB.’ A truck driver from London with a name too long to remember and a stature—under five feet—that made him an anomaly among his Pashtun kinsmen, OB had grown weary of the "collapsed" British economy. To him, true happiness had migrated back to the subcontinent.

One night, over steaming bowls at a Chinese restaurant called ‘Lanzhou Beef Noodles,’ OB’s frustration boiled over. He pointed toward the young Chinese cook, whose head was bare and who laughed freely with the male patrons.

“Look at the irony,” OB said, his voice sharp with anger. “Her face is uncovered, she is vibrant, she is human. If an Afghan girl did this, she’d be thrown in jail. It’s as if the laws of "crime" only apply to Afghans—specifically to Pashtun girls.”

His observation echoed a sentiment I had heard from Aryan Nasimyar, a twenty-year-old student in Kabul. Aryan had been at the top of her class, destined for a degree in Computer Science, until the Taliban’s arrival turned her ambitions into tears. She had noted a bitter hierarchy of restriction: “All the strictness is for Pashtun girls. The Tajiks get a fifty-per cent relaxation, the Hazaras don't cover their faces at all, and the Uzbeks have no obligations.”

While Aryan’s words carry the weight of truth, the reality is more nuanced. Life for Tajik or Hazara women is by no means easy; the hand of the Taliban may be lighter in some provinces, but it is never absent, as I would soon discover in the Hazara-dominated city of Bamiyan.

However, the idea of "relaxation" is relative. While the Pashtun-led Taliban may interfere less in the social spheres of minority communities, "less" does not mean "not at all." Even in the Hazara heartland of Bamiyan, the shadow of the state remains long – as I witnessed during my trip to Bamiyan. But the specific struggles of these minority women are a story for another time, for now, we must return to the convictions of Maulana Akhtar Jan.

“Of course she will go to school”

"Is it right to punish your own daughters for America''''s broken promises?"

Maulana Jan fell silent. He stared out at the sunset, watching a train from Iran roll slowly along the tracks into Herat. It was a stark reminder of the world beyond the border—a neighbour that, despite its own rigid laws, had never seen fit to erase women from its schools.

I broke his reverie by asking about his own family. He told me he had two daughters, both of whom had been students before the 2021 takeover.

"If the ban is lifted, will they return?" I asked.

The response from the Taliban Mujahid was immediate and stripped of political posturing. "Of course they will," he said. "Education is necessary."

For Shakina Adil, the philosophical debates of commanders and the manoeuvres of diplomats offer no comfort. December is slipping away. In a week, the school gates will swing shut for Ayesha, perhaps for the last time.

I thought of calling Shakina, but the language barrier—the gap between her Pashto or Farsi and my own tongue—felt insurmountable. Instead, I messaged Hashmat. His own daughter, also named Ayesha, faces the same looming silence. His response arrived via voice message the following morning, his voice heavy with the weight of a father’s helplessness.
“The ban remains,” he said. “Ayesha won't be taking her seat in the seventh grade. I will spend the next few months searching for a way out—perhaps a madrasa, or a private school that hides a general education behind a religious curriculum. But for now, we are living in total uncertainty.”

How will this uncertainty, shared by millions, be resolved? In the Islamic Emirate, the answers to these fundamental questions of life and law do not come from the Foreign Ministry or the Interior Office. They lie with the Amr-bil Ma'ruf—the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—an institution whose influence dwarfs nearly all others. I took the stories of Shakina, Hashmat, and their daughters to the Ministry’s spokesperson, Saif-ul Islam Khyber.

That conversation will follow in the next episode.

* Suvojit Bagchi is Prothom Alo's Kolkata correspondent