The plight of women helped justify war in Afghanistan. Now they have been abandoned
It was one of the worst phone calls I’ve ever received: a friend in Kabul calling on Sunday afternoon to say that armed men had just visited her house. Her voice was shaking to the extent that she sounded as if she was gasping for air. The men had intimidated her and left, and she had fled to a friend’s house to hide with her children. She didn’t know when they’d return, if they would find her, or when it would be possible to relocate again to somewhere farther away. I have never heard someone sound so scared.
She begged for help to escape the country; I promised I would keep trying. But options were closing all the time. Earlier that day, through a small charity, I’d managed to get my friend and her children booked on to a flight to a third country. The plan was that they’d get to safety and continue to look for a more permanent relocation. It was a brief ray of hope during a dark few days. But within hours of the booking, all commercial flights out of Kabul werecancelled.
Like me, my friend is a female journalist in her 30s who has worked in the media for her whole adult life. There the similarities end. For my friend, working as a journalist in Kabul has led to death threats and intimidation, long before the recent US withdrawal and the chaos of the past few days. When I first got to know her in 2019, she confided that she was being threatened by the Taliban and was afraid to continue with her work. But continue she did. Over the last year, as the Taliban gained more ground across Afghanistan, the risks intensified. She was followed home from work. More than once, an unfamiliar vehicle tried to crash into her car.
As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated in recent months, she was desperate to leave the country. In early July, officials in the Biden administration said they were “considering” 2,000 expedited visas for “vulnerable women”, including journalists, politicians and activists, who might be targeted by the Taliban after the withdrawal. My friend asked me to help her find more information. I searched for details, but even as a native English speaker and a person who finds things out for a living, it was difficult to find any clarity on this proposal, or indeed on any other legal routes by which Afghan journalists could seek resettlement. As it happened, the scheme for vulnerable women never materialised.
This is a particular outrage because women in Afghanistan have long been used as a political talking point in the west; the protection of Afghan women was a key justification for invasion and a reason for western forces staying there. I was just 14 when the 9/11 attacks took place and Afghanistan was invaded, yet I vividly remember the proliferation of images of Afghan women – either brutalised, their noses or fingernails cut off, or shrouded completely, their blue burqas a symbol of the oppression that Bush and Blair were purportedly seeking to overthrow. Then, and since, the position of women was used as a marker of cultural progress, setting up the world into distinct categories: good versus evil, civilised versus barbaric. Take this com
ment from George W Bush’s farewell statement in 2009: “Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harboured al-Qaida and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school.”
Yet what now for those girls who went to school, who took on roles in politics, journalism, activism, sports or other areas of public life? Over the past few years, as foreign military forces left Afghanistan, female police officers, journalists and doctors have been targeted and killed. It is no surprise that the situation has worsened so drastically now. Back in April, Human Rights Watch warned that female journalists faced a particularly acute threat: “Female reporters may be targeted not only for issues they cover but also for challenging perceived social norms prohibiting women from being in a public role and working outside the home.”
In recent days, politicians have talked of the need to protect women’s rights. In Wednesday’s Commons debate, Theresa May warned that “women and girls … will not have the rights that they should have and they will not have the freedoms that they should have”, and Harriet Harman called on ministers to make contact with female Afghan MPs and ask how Britain could help. But given the critical, immediate situation, and the apparent lack of any top-level planning, such calls do little to defy the impression that Afghan women have been forgotten now that they are no longer useful to western governments seeking to justify their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
Until the disastrous events of this week, relocation schemes that bring vulnerable Afghans to the west have been primarily limited to those who worked directly for foreign militaries as interpreters or in other roles. In Britain, even these people have had to fight for their right to protection from the UK, and have been refused on spurious grounds. Kabul, the Home Office often claimed, was a safe place.
Currently available schemes do not match the scale of the need, and the vast majority of those who qualify are men. Around the world, friends and family of vulnerable Afghans are desperately seeking solutions, and NGOs are working around the clock. But there is a void in terms of international government action. At the time of writing, Britain and Canada are the only western countries offeringa more broad-ranging resettlement scheme, both announcing that they would take 20,000 Afghan refugees each.
The British programme, announced late on Tuesday, will supposedly prioritise women and religious minorities: two of the most vulnerable groups under Taliban rule. But the 20,000 figure looks somewhat smaller when you dig into the details: this is the same number that was resettled from Syria, a country with around half the population of Afghanistan. With no clear routes out of Afghanistan, officials suggest that Britain may end up prioritising those who have already made it to a third country such as Pakistan. And, crucially, it will take place over five years, with just 5,000 expected to be resettled by the end of this year. On Wednesday morning, I heard of a female journalist in Kabul being stopped by the Taliban on her way to the airport for a military evacuation flight. They confiscated her passport - a chilling reminder that the most vulnerable people do not have five years to wait.
Perhaps more countries will follow suit with relocation programmes in the coming weeks, but it may be too late for many; government bureaucracies operate on an entirely different timescale to the immediate dangers on the ground.
Right now, as the world watches on in horror, there are thousands of women like my friend: holed up in their houses, or hiding with their friends, unsure when the knock on the door will come.
Samira Shackle is editor of the New Humanist