After the Taliban took over Afghanistan at the end of the catastrophic departure of the US from Afghanistan last year, the Taliban tried to convey openness to Western values in an attempt to gain legitimacy and international assistance.
In Afghanistan, high school girls and women are prohibited from traveling a significant distance without a male relative. Men were told in government offices to grow beards, wear traditional Afghan clothes and stop working during prayer times.
Music was officially banned, and foreign news broadcasts, television programs and films were removed from the public airwaves. At checkpoints along the streets, the morality police punish women who are not covered from head to toe in burqas and headscarves in public.
A year into Taliban rule, Afghanistan is pushed back in time. The country’s new rulers, victorious after two decades of insurgency, have re-established an emirate ruled by a strict interpretation of Islamic law and issued a flood of decrees that curtail women’s rights, restrict journalists and virtually erase any vestige of American leadership.
To enforce their decrees and quash dissent, the new Taliban government has resorted to police state tactics such as door-to-door searches and arbitrary arrests – drawing widespread condemnation from international human rights groups. These tactics brought fear into the lives of those opposed to their rule, and cut the country off from development aid and foreign aid.
Millions have become unemployed after jobs in foreign embassies, armies and NGOs disappeared almost overnight, malnourished children have flooded the capital Kabul’s hospitals in recent months and more than half the population faces life-threatening food insecurity.
Taliban leaders insist they have deep public support for these changes. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue, which issued the decrees, says the decrees helped restore Afghanistan’s traditional status as a strict Islamic nation. “All these decrees are aimed at protecting women, not oppressing women,” said Mohammad Sadiq Akif, the ministry’s spokesman.
When asked about the travel decree for women who are obliged to be accompanied by a man, Akif replied: “A woman is a helpless and powerless creature. If a woman goes on a journey alone, during the journey she may face a problem that she cannot solve on her own.” According to him, buses and taxis for long-distance travel have been instructed not to transport women traveling alone.
Music was banned, Akif said, explaining that “because our prophet says that listening to music develops hypocrisy in the human heart, foreign news reports and entertainment programs turned people against Afghan culture.”