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The Architecture of Oppression: Five Years of Taliban Rule

  • Belquis Ahmadi

Today marks five dark years since the Taliban forcefully took power in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021—five years in which the country has undergone a profound political, legal, and social transformation that has pushed Afghanistan back by generations. At a time when much of the world is being transformed by extraordinary advances in science, technology, medicine and innovation—and when young people elsewhere are preparing for careers shaped by artificial intelligence and discoveries once unimaginable—Afghan girls are being denied the right to attend secondary school, women are being pushed out of universities and professions, and fundamental freedoms that Afghans worked for over a century to secure, are being systematically dismantled.

This anniversary is therefore an important moment to move beyond documenting individual decrees, restrictions, and abuses and to take stock of what Taliban rule has actually meant for Afghanistan. What has emerged is not simply a change of government, nor merely the return of an exceptionally conservative political order. It is the deliberate undoing of Afghanistan’s constitutional, legal, and institutional order and the construction in its place of an authoritarian system in which power is concentrated in the hands of an unelected ruler (emir) and enforced through ideological conformity, unquestioned obedience, exclusion, and fear.

For millions of Afghans, these five years have meant watching their fundamental rights taken away one after another. Women and girls have borne the most visible and devastating consequences, but also some of the most profound and less visible ones. Beyond exclusion from schools, universities, workplaces, and public life lies the psychological toll of being told that they are less worthy, less capable, and less entitled to autonomy and opportunity than men. Women have effectively been relegated to second-class status, portrayed not as equal members of society but increasingly as potential sources of moral temptation and religious transgression whose presence, movement, appearance, and even voices must therefore be controlled.

Perhaps even more consequential is that this message is not directed at women alone; it is being transmitted to society as a whole and to a new generation of Afghans. Young men and boys are growing up in an environment in which the unequal status of women is reinforced not only through laws, decrees and their daily enforcement, but through mosque loudspeakers, schools, madrasas, public sermons and the institutions of the state. Children are absorbing these messages at an age when their understanding of women, religion, authority and their own place in society is still being formed. A boy repeatedly taught that his sister requires male supervision, that her voice or presence can provoke moral transgression, and that opportunities available to him are forbidden to her is being taught something much larger than a set of rules: he is being taught a hierarchy of human worth.

This ideological conditioning is especially troubling because it is embedded within a political system in which ultimate authority rests with the supreme leader of the Taliban and where obedience to the emir is presented as a religious obligation. In such a system, rules governing women’s lives are not presented merely as government policy open to debate or revision; they are invested with religious authority, making disagreement appear not simply political but sinful. This fusion of political authority with religious absolutism risks normalizing women’s subordination in the minds of an entire generation.

The Taliban are not only restricting the lives of today’s women; they risk reshaping how tomorrow’s men and women understand one another. By giving state authority and religious justification to patriarchal attitudes that Afghan women spent decades challenging, they are reinforcing social norms that could survive long after individual decrees are gone. The damage is therefore institutional, social and intergenerational.

Rule by Decree 

Afghanistan’s pre-2021 political system was deeply imperfect. Corruption, weak implementation of laws, insecurity, political interference and unequal access to justice were serious and persistent problems. Afghan women themselves were often among the system’s fiercest critics.

Yet, Afghanistan had a Constitution that recognized Afghans as citizens possessing rights and placed obligations on the state to protect those rights. Importantly, this constitutional commitment to rights did not reject Afghanistan’s Islamic identity. The Constitution explicitly provided that no law could contravene the tenets and provisions of Islam. At the same time, it also committed Afghanistan to respecting the United Nations Charter, international treaties and conventions to which it was a party, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The constitutional reform was therefore an attempt—however imperfectly realized—to build an Islamic republic in which faith, citizenship, human dignity and internationally recognized rights could coexist. 

That framework provided the basis for an evolving body of legislation designed to respond to the needs of Afghan society. The 2009 Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, for example, criminalized 22 forms of violence and harmful practices, including rape, forced marriage, underage marriage, beating, the buying and selling of women under the pretext of marriage, and baad—the practice of giving a girl or woman to another family to settle a dispute, compensate for a crime or resolve a blood feud.

Afghanistan subsequently adopted a Child Protection Law recognizing children’s right to protection from sexual exploitation. These laws were far from perfectly implemented. But their existence mattered. They established the essential principle that the state had a legal responsibility to protect citizens from abuse, and citizens possessed rights they could invoke against the state, their families and other powerful actors.

The Taliban have reversed that relationship.

They have replaced a rights-based constitutional framework with governance through written and verbal decrees, directives, edicts, and increasingly codified rules rooted in their own highly restrictive interpretation of Sharia law.

The consequences are evident in Taliban decrees, including the Criminal Rules of Courts, which institutionalize discrimination based on gender, religious belief, and social status, codifying a legal hierarchy in which rights, legal standing, and punishment vary according to a person’s identity and status. 

Dismantling of Institutions that Protected Rights

The Taliban did not simply change Afghanistan’s laws. They dismantled many of the institutions through which Afghans had sought protection, justice, and accountability.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission was abolished. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs disappeared. Specialized prosecution units, commissions and mechanisms established to address violence against women and protect children and vulnerable citizens were dismantled.

These institutions had not emerged in a vacuum. Afghanistan had endured decades of political upheaval, foreign intervention, civil war and the imposition of increasingly conservative social practices during periods of conflict. Building a modern legal system and institutions capable of protecting citizens—particularly women, children and marginalized communities—was part of the effort to restore the rule of law after decades in which armed actors exercised power over ordinary people with impunity.

The Psychological Cost of Erasing Half a Population

The consequences cannot be measured only in decrees and statistics.They are visible inside homes where young women who once imagined becoming doctors, judges, journalists, engineers or teachers now spend their days uncertain whether those futures will ever be available to them. They are visible among girls who have watched school doors remain closed year after year.

Five years is a significant portion of a young person’s life.

A girl who was 13 when the Taliban returned is now 18. A university student expelled from her classroom in 2022 has lost nearly four years of education and professional development. A woman barred from employment has lost income, experience, professional networks and independence.

These losses cannot be reversed simply by reopening classrooms. By excluding women from education and public life, the Taliban are creating a generational deficit of female professionals and leaders that Afghanistan will bear for decades.

The question now is not simply whether the international community is willing to condemn what is happening in Afghanistan, but whether it is willing to act on the legal obligations and principles it has spent decades constructing and defending. Will the world continue to watch the erasure of Afghan women and girls and treat severe human rights violations that constitute crimes against humanity as matters for mere statements of concern? Or will international institutions finally move beyond ritual condemnations and use the legal, diplomatic and accountability mechanisms available to them?

Five years of documented violations should have consequences. International law cannot be invoked selectively, nor can treaty and convention obligations be set aside when they become politically inconvenient. States are bound by international law to protect fundamental human rights and pursue accountability for international crimes. 

The danger now is that geopolitical priorities, including migration control, counterterrorism, regional stability and diplomatic expediency, will gradually displace these obligations. The choice facing the international community is therefore not between isolation and engagement. It is between engagement grounded in international law, accountability and clear conditions.

 If five years of documented persecution, exclusion and institutionalized discrimination are ultimately met only with statements of concern while the Taliban move incrementally toward international acceptance, the consequences will extend far beyond Afghanistan. It will signal that even the most systematic violations of women’s fundamental rights can eventually be normalized if those responsible remain in power long enough.

The credibility of the international legal order is at stake. Afghanistan is not merely a test of what the world is willing to say about the rights of women and girls; it is a test of whether the international community is prepared to uphold the laws, obligations, and principles by which it claims those rights are protected.

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