Taliban reversal on girls’ education baffles aid groups
KABUL — A news presenter on Afghanistan’s TOLO TV wept as he read the announcement. Images of girls crying after being turned back from school flooded social media. Aid groups and many others remained mystified.
The Taliban have so far refused to explain their sudden decision to renege on the pledge to allow girls to go to school beyond sixth grade. Schools were supposed to reopen to older girls on Wednesday, the start of the new school year.
The ban caught even the Taliban-appointed Education Ministry unprepared. In many places across Afghanistan, some girls in higher grades returned to schools, only to be told to go home.
The move may have been designed to appease the Taliban’s hard-line base, but it came at the expense of further alienating the international community. The world has been reluctant to officially recognize Afghanistan’s new rulers, concerned the Taliban would impose similar harsh measures and restrictions — particularly limiting women’s rights to education and work — as when they previously ruled the country in the late 1990s.
The United Nations children’s agency told the Associated Press on Thursday that they were blindsided by the announcement. “I think that yesterday was a very confusing day for all of us,” said Jeannette Vogelaar, UNICEF’s chief of education in Afghanistan.
On Friday, female foreign ministers from 16 countries around the world called on the Taliban to change their decision.
“As women and as foreign ministers, we are deeply disappointed and concerned that girls in Afghanistan are being denied access to secondary schools this spring,” the foreign ministers of Albania, Andorra, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia, Canada, Estonia, Germany, Iceland, Kosovo, Malawi, Mongolia, New Zealand, Sweden, Tonga and Britain said in a joint statement.
Since the Taliban seized power in mid-August during the last weeks of the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan, there have been reports of divisions among Taliban leaders, with lines drawn between the hardliners and pragmatists.
It’s unclear whether a tussle among the Taliban on how to rule the country could have contributed to Wednesday’s ban, but Torek Farhadi, an analyst who has advised past Afghan governments, called it a misfire.
“They really messed up by not keeping their word,” he said of the militants.