Originally published 2021-08-17.
In August 2021, as the Taliban swept back to power and took Kabul, Vrinda Narain, a law professor at McGill University in Montreal, set out four steps she argued the international community should take to protect Afghan women and girls. Writing in The Conversation, she called for an immediate ceasefire, respect for women's rights under Afghan and international law, a real seat for women in peace talks, and making any easing of sanctions or flow of aid conditional on women's rights. Her proposal drew on UN Security Council Resolution 1820, which recognises that sexual violence can be used as a weapon of war.
Those four points were recommendations, not policies anyone adopted. Looking back at them now is useful because the years since have shown, step by step, what happened to the rights she was trying to protect.
Who Vrinda Narain is
Narain is a professor in McGill's Faculty of Law and a former associate dean. Her research covers constitutional law, feminist legal theory and the rights of Muslim women, with a particular focus on South Asia. Her books include Gender and Community (2001), Reclaiming the Nation (2008) and the co-authored Women and Constitutions in Muslim Contexts (2024). She also sits on the executive board of the international network Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Early reports described her as a journalist; she is an academic who wrote for a publication whose articles are written by researchers.
What she warned about in 2021
Narain wrote as US and NATO troops completed their withdrawal and the Afghan government collapsed. The Taliban had promised a more moderate approach than during their first rule, but she argued their conduct on the ground said otherwise.
She pointed to reports from early July 2021 that Taliban commanders in the northern provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar had told local religious leaders to hand over lists of girls over 15 and widows under 45 to be "married" to fighters. Whether those orders were carried out was never established, but they spread fear and added to displacement; she cited some 900,000 people uprooted in three months. In her words, such arrangements amount to "sexual enslavement, not marriage," which she described as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.
She also noted reports that the Taliban intended to stop girls' education after age 12, bar women from most jobs and bring back the rule that women be accompanied by a male guardian, or mahram. She warned that the gains Afghan women had made over 20 years in education, work and public life were under grave threat.
The four-point plan
Narain framed her proposals around Resolution 1820, which the UN Security Council adopted unanimously on June 19, 2008. It condemns sexual violence against civilians in conflict, notes that women and girls are often targeted deliberately as a tactic of war, and states that rape can constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide. It built on the earlier Resolution 1325, which called for women's full participation in peace processes. Her four steps were:
- An immediate ceasefire, so that negotiations could take place in good faith rather than under the pressure of ongoing fighting.
- Respect for women's rights as written into Afghanistan's constitution, its national laws and international treaties.
- Meaningful participation of Afghan women in peace talks. At the time, the Afghan government's negotiating team included four women and the Taliban's included none.
- Conditions on sanctions relief and aid. Any lifting of sanctions on the Taliban, and aid from the European Union and United States, the country's largest donors, should depend on upholding women's rights, especially access to education and employment.
Why the history mattered
Narain's alarm rested on the record of the first Taliban government, which ruled most of Afghanistan from September 1996 until December 2001. Within days of taking Kabul in 1996, it banned women from employment. Women could not appear in public without a male relative, had to wear the burqa and could not attend school beyond about the age of eight. They were later barred from public baths and from most Kabul hospitals, and their voices and images were removed from radio, television and public gatherings. Women were publicly flogged for breaking dress rules.
Between 2001 and 2021, millions of Afghan girls went to school, women entered universities, the civil service, the media and parliament, and the constitution guaranteed equal rights. That was the progress at stake.
What happened after August 2021
The Taliban's actions since the takeover have gone further than many observers expected:
- September 2021: Boys returned to secondary school; most teenage girls did not. The Ministry of Women's Affairs was replaced by the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
- March 2022: A promised reopening of girls' secondary schools was reversed on the day it was due, leaving sixth grade as the limit for most girls.
- May 2022: Women were ordered to cover their faces and bodies in public, and female television presenters to cover their faces on air.
- November 2022: Women were barred from parks, gyms and public baths.
- December 2022: Women were suspended from universities and banned from working for non-governmental organisations.
- July 2023: Hair and beauty salons were ordered to close.
- August 2024: A new "vice and virtue" law barred women from raising their voices in public and from travelling alone on transport, and required them to be veiled.
- December 2024: Women were barred from training as nurses and midwives.
- 2025: The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani on charges of gender persecution.
UN officials and human-rights groups have described these measures as among the most severe restrictions on women's rights anywhere in the world. Afghanistan is the only country where girls are formally barred from secondary and higher education.
How the proposals look today
Measured against what followed, Narain's plan reads as both prescient and hard to carry out. The war did end, but through a Taliban victory rather than a negotiated ceasefire, so there were no peace talks for women to join. For years almost every government withheld formal recognition and tied engagement to rights, as she urged, yet that pressure did not reverse the bans.
Her fourth point exposes a real dilemma. Conditioning aid on women's rights puts pressure on the authorities, but cutting assistance in one of the world's poorest countries also hurts the women and children who most depend on it. Aid agencies have struggled with exactly this since the NGO employment ban, because in many communities only female staff can reach women. Any policy aimed at the Taliban has to be judged by whether it actually improves life for Afghan women, rather than by how strongly it is worded.
How readers can follow and help
Afghan women continue to protest, run underground classes and document abuses, often at great personal risk. People who want to follow the situation can read reports from UN Women, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and established human-rights organisations, and support charities with a track record of delivering education and health care inside the country. Narain's article remains a clear statement of why many argued that women's rights should never be treated as negotiable.
Sources: Vrinda Narain, The Conversation, August 2021: The world must not look away as the Taliban sexually enslaves women and girls; McGill University Faculty of Law: Vrinda Narain; Wikipedia: UN Security Council Resolution 1820; Wikipedia: Treatment of women by the Taliban.
COMMENTS