The forgotten contradictions of the post-2001 republic, and the women who resisted them
Aug 07, 2026
When Kabul fell in August 2021, the world watched Afghan women disappear from classrooms, workplaces, parks and public life. It was tempting to imagine that gender apartheid had arrived suddenly, fully formed, with the Taliban.
But the ground had been prepared long before.
The architecture of gender apartheid already existed within social and cultural norms: in the roles assigned to women and men, in the choreography of who belonged at the front and who was expected to remain behind.
During my visits to the women’s prison of Badam Bagh, I met women incarcerated for acts that exposed the limits of the post-2001 order. They had fled forced marriages, escaped domestic violence, chosen whom to love, or simply refused the authority imposed upon them.
Many were said to have committed “moral crimes.” In reality, they had been imprisoned for acts most people would not instinctively recognise as crimes: acts bound up with survival, love, escape or disobedience.
They had been punished for attempting to exercise the most elementary forms of autonomy.
Some were accused of zina, or forbidden sex. Others had crossed boundaries considered intolerable, not because they had harmed anyone, but because they had stepped outside the behaviour expected of them as women.
The Taliban did not invent the policing of women’s bodies, choices and movements. They stripped it of its ambiguities, expanded it across every sphere of life and made it a governing principle of the state.
To understand gender apartheid in Afghanistan, we must therefore look beyond August 2021. We must examine the institutions, laws and social structures that had already taught women that autonomy could be treated as a crime.
This way of understanding women was not confined to conservative families or remote communities. It reached into the highest institutions of the new republic.
The post-2001 period was a landscape of genuine progress and profound contradiction.
Women entered parliament, universities, the judiciary, journalism and public life. Afghan women’s organisations created spaces that had previously been denied to them. These gains were real, and Afghan women fought extraordinarily hard for them.
But alongside those gains, women were still imprisoned for fleeing violence, resisting forced marriage or choosing whom to love. Constitutional promises coexisted with institutions that continued to police women through obedience, family honour and sexual morality.
In her book Kabul in Winter, Ann Jones recounts a statement by Fazl Hadi Shinwari, the chief justice of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court.
Asked about the position of women, he claimed that Islam had given women all the rights they needed, as well as three special privileges not accorded to men.
The first was the privilege of praying, except during menstruation.
The second was the privilege of obeying their husbands.
And the third was the privilege of restraining themselves from committing bad acts.
The language is extraordinary.
Prayer was presented as a privilege. Obedience was presented as a privilege. Moral restraint was presented as a privilege peculiar to women.
This was not the voice of a village elder speaking outside the state. It was the voice of the man presiding over Afghanistan’s highest court, responsible for interpreting the law and protecting constitutional rights.
The women I later met in Badam Bagh lived inside that contradiction.
The republic promised women constitutional equality, while powerful institutions continued to judge their freedom through the language of obedience, sexual morality and family honour.
We must also be careful about the picture of progress we remember from the post-2001 period.
Much of that picture came from Kabul and a small number of other cities: women entering universities, parliament, journalism, the judiciary and international organisations.
Again, these gains were real.
But Afghanistan remained overwhelmingly rural. For many women outside the major cities, the promises of the new constitution remained distant from everyday life. Access to education, healthcare, paid work and justice was shaped by poverty, geography, insecurity, family authority and local power structures.
There was therefore no single post-2001 experience for Afghan women. There were several Afghanistans existing alongside one another.
The visibility of urban achievement sometimes allowed the international community to mistake the advancement of a minority for the transformation of an entire country.
But we must also recognise something else.
Afghan women’s resistance did not begin with the Taliban either.
The women I met in Badam Bagh resisted when they fled violence, refused forced marriages, defended one another and challenged the authority of families, courts and prisons.
Their resistance was often private, fragmented and unseen. But it was resistance nonetheless.
Today, Afghan women continue that struggle in classrooms hidden behind closed doors, in protests, in exile, in writing, and in their insistence that their lives must not be reduced to victimhood.
The Taliban have made gender oppression a governing principle of the state.
But they have not succeeded in extinguishing women’s agency, memory or refusal.
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