Earlier this month, the United Nations sponsored a third round of talks in Doha, Qatar, on whether and under what circumstances the international community might recognize the Taliban government in Kabul. Also on the agenda was the question of U.S. sanctions on the Taliban and Afghanistan’s foreign reserves, which Washington froze after the Taliban took power in August 2022; and how to develop a market economy, stem the narcotics trade and promote peace and human rights in Afghanistan.
The talks were attended by high-level envoys to Afghanistan from 25 countries and regional organizations, including the European Union, and after having turned down an invitation to the previous round, the Taliban also agreed to participate. But there was a hitch: At the insistence of the Taliban delegation, Afghan civil society organizations—and Afghan women in general—who had attended the previous rounds of talks were excluded from the latest one.
This was the latest indignity for the women of Afghanistan after nearly three years under the Taliban-led government, which has deprived them of the right to attend school, work most jobs and travel freely, while all but erasing them from public life. The exclusion of women’s voices from the talks, and the fact that the U.N. organizers accepted their exclusion in return for the Taliban’s participation, was criticized both by Afghan women and their allies in the international community. Agnes Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, said the decision sets “a deeply damaging precedent” and risks “legitimatizing [the Taliban’s] gender-based institutional system of oppression.”