At least some Afghan powerbrokers are open to such explorations. Moreover, informally, the Taliban continuously bypass the government’s negotiating team by engaging with Afghan powerbrokers-all men-as they seek to strike separate behind-the-scenes deals, including potentially a joint interim government. Whether or not the Afghan political system implodes into factional violence and coups d’etat before that are also crucial factors. It will also depend on how long negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban drag onand how badly weakened the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government become.
Whether Afghan representatives on the negotiations team can force the Taliban not to weaken women’s rights and existing behavioral practices and socio-economic opportunities of middle and upper-class urban Afghan women will principally depend on what happens on the battlefield. must exercise whatever leverage it has remaining to preserve the rights and protect the needs of Afghan women.īut whether these hopes of the Afghan government materialize-and even if they do-whether they translate into actual empowerment of Afghan women is a huge question.
The United States’ leverage to preserve at least some of their rights and privileges is limited and diminishing. But there are strong reasons to be believe that the fate of Afghan women, particularly urban Afghan women from middle- and upper-class families who benefited by far the most from the post-2001 order, will worsen. How Afghanistan and its political order is redesigned is left fully up to the negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government and other Afghan politicians, powerbrokers, and-hopefully-representatives of Afghan civil society. and allies’ assets, or allow the territory under Taliban control to be used for such terrorist attacks. and its allies’ targets, conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. In exchange for the withdrawal of its forces by summer 2021, the United States only received assurances from the Taliban that the militants would not attack U.S. The deal that the United States signed with the Taliban in Doha on February 29, 2020, leaves the future of Afghan women completely up to the outcomes of the intra-Taliban negotiations and battlefield developments. As the United States reduces its military presence in Afghanistan while the Taliban remain strong on the battlefield, and while peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban have commenced, a massive question mark hangs over the fate of Afghan women and their rights.