Having denied Afghan women jobs, education and free movement, ordered them to be totally covered, banned them from parks, removed their critical healthcare and silenced them with a ban on audible speech, the Taliban have plainly reached the point where the joy of torturing half the population has to be balanced, like any sensible exercise in mass persecution, with the needs and enjoyment of the male and free.
What, for example, to do about windows? Doubly enraging to the ruling obsessives, in that they offer female slaves the pleasure of daylight as well as allowing non-residents occasional evidence of their existence, these openings do, on the other hand, benefit the women’s male owners and their sons.
To immure or not to immure? Solomon-like, the Taliban’s supreme leader has now banned windows only on walls that overlook areas where women are still, by domestic necessity, allowed outside. Until such time as Afghan women can be kept – for sex, breeding and housework – perpetually underground, the latest edict stipulates that new buildings should not have windows from which “the courtyard, kitchen, neighbour’s well and other places usually used by women” are visible.
Last week the Taliban government’s spokesman confirmed on X that, to men like himself, even a fully covered woman with, say, an erect mop, is a sexual stimulus too far. “Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts.”
If, as occasionally seems the case, the Taliban do consider opinion in the outside world, they appear again to have been correct in thinking that a further inventively ghastly addition to female misery is unlikely to provoke – to a point that sheds an unhappy light on priorities in many ostensibly enlightened jurisdictions – a meaningful reprisal.
The windows edict, for instance, is still not sufficient evidence of the Taliban’s gender apartheid for the English cricket authorities to want to cancel their match against the Afghan cricket team in Lahore next month. Cricket stands firm, too, against the urgings of women’s organisations explaining that gender apartheid in Afghanistan is as egregious as the racial apartheid that once made the ICC end fixtures with South Africa’s team.
Ecstatic street celebrations after the Afghan cricketers reached the World Cup semi-finals last year confirmed that international cricket is such an important source of pride to male Afghans that, by gifting it, fellow participants remove a valuable means of influence. As for the Afghan team’s coach, Jonathan Trott, the former England cricketer, if that job does not put him in contact with the misogynistic thugs captured in the brilliant fly-on-the-wall documentary Hollywoodgate, it’s only because he has never visited the country since he took the job (in 2022, after women had already been banned from schools and the workforce) as the team play home matches in exile in UAE. But maybe, courtesy of the team’s patrons, Trott still gets to hear some of the Taliban-style bantz recorded in Hollywoodgate: “An uncovered woman is like an unwrapped chocolate.”
No less valuable for the Taliban, as they continue to disregard the UN’s feeble reminders that women are human too, is their collaboration with foreign companies equally keen to revive Afghanistan as a tourist destination. To judge by online reviews, visitor numbers to Afghanistan having soared since 2021, the torture of the female half of the population has yet to come near race apartheid as a tourism inhibitor, such that vacationers show awareness their leisure choice might be considered despicable. On the contrary, the Taliban are often presented in some itineraries and comments in an attractive light, for having made Afghanistan safe. Unless, of course, you are an Afghan woman. UN officials have reported a “sharp increase” in women’s attempted suicides, directly attributed to female despair in the face of Taliban repression.
Specialist travel companies, if they even allude to gender apartheid, are in some cases adopting euphemisms that suggest that the Taliban’s continually intensifying attack on women’s human dignity is one of those fascinating cultural differences, like living in a tent or a team game with a dead goat, that makes adventure holidays so rewarding. The country’s very troubles, without going into who suffers at whose hands, only testify to the visitor’s personal taste for authentic, challenging travel.
Campaigners once headlined a factsheet dissuading visits to South Africa “Apartheid is no holiday”. It is now. Richard Bennett, the UN’s special rapporteur on Afghanistan, has concluded that the Taliban’s deprivations of human rights and their enforcement “may amount to crimes against humanity, in particular the crime of gender persecution”. But the very nature of that persecution, by erasure from public life, assists apparent attempts at normalisation by specialist travel companies, who urge visitors to “see beyond the turbulent current era and experience a beautiful country with a rich cultural history”. Although it would have been richer still, obviously, if the Taliban hadn’t blown up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, in 2001.
Now the Taliban are themselves advertised by one company as a delightful cultural attraction. One past Safarat excursion, for instance, offers “a good chance to have a chat with members of the Taliban who will accompany us on the walk”. Or else.
after newsletter promotion
If no women can contribute, being banned from chatting, it could not be clearer from reviews on TripAdvisor and elsewhere that many current holidaymakers require, for whatever reason, even less encouragement to overlook human rights anomalies than did visitors to apartheid South Africa. In contrast to earlier tourists, or idiots, seeking to know the “real” USSR, real Third Reich, or real South Africa, reviews from Afghanistan suggest that zero evidence of contentment on the part of the subjugated is now required for a rewarding trip.
In the 1980s, it’s true, tour operators were not only mocking sanctions but the ANC, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, vigorous UN leadership and the UK government’s “voluntary ban” on South Africa tourism, reflecting “the strong opposition in Britain to the principles and practice of apartheid”. Women in Afghanistan are still waiting.
Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist