What's New: The Taliban Aren't Slowing Down — They're Accelerating

Our previous coverage documented the famine and desperation driving Afghan families to sell children. The oppression is getting worse, not reaching some steady-state baseline.

In August 2024, the Taliban rolled out "Vice and Virtue" laws banning women's faces and voices from public spaces — including reciting religious verses in front of other women, according to the Malala Fund. A woman cannot speak loudly in public in Afghanistan.

Then came the nursing and midwifery ban. The Taliban announced women can no longer study nursing or midwifery. In a country where female patients can't be seen by male doctors without a male chaperone, this is a death sentence — literally — for Afghan women who need maternal healthcare.

The ICC Finally Moved. Now What?

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and the Taliban's Chief Justice, according to Amnesty International's 2025 Afghanistan report.

In theory, this matters. In practice, Akhundzada hasn't left Afghanistan in years. He's a recluse who governs by decree from Kandahar. The warrants are symbolically important but operationally meaningless without international enforcement. Nobody is flying into Kandahar to execute an ICC warrant.

Mainstream outlets reported the warrants. Almost none of them asked the follow-up question: what enforcement mechanism exists? The answer is zero.

September 2024: Taliban Physically Block Women from UN Compounds

According to Amnesty International, in September 2024, Taliban security forces physically prevented Afghan women working for UN agencies and UN contractors from entering UN compound gates.

The UN — which has billions in operating budgets and multiple agencies on the ground — could not protect its own female staff from being turned away at the door. Taliban enforcers intimidated and threatened women working for UN agencies and their families in Kabul as recently as June 2024, per Amnesty's reporting.

The UN's response was more statements. More concern. More process.

The Human Reality on the Ground

BBC News correspondent Yogita Limaye reported from Kabul on a 19-year-old woman — identified only as Alia to protect her safety — who traveled hundreds of miles by taxi, covered head to toe, to escape forced marriage. With formal education banned for girls over 12, marriage is the only option her family sees for her future.

Alia's workaround: a private English language course in Kabul. That's the ceiling. Private courses for those who can afford them. Religious schools for those who can't. Neither substitutes for a real education, and neither leads to a career or independence.

Alia's story illustrates the systemic brutality at work. It's evidence of a system functioning exactly as designed.

The Art Coming Out of Afghanistan Tells You What Reports Can't

Two anonymous Afghan cousins from a remote mountain village — using pseudonyms Mahnaz and Somayeh Ebrahimi, born in 2000 and 2001 respectively — have been photographing life under Taliban rule since 2022, according to NPR. Their work is now showing at the Photoville Festival in Brooklyn.

One image: a woman in a burqa holding an automatic rifle on her shoulder like a violin, titled "The Music of Poverty and Violence." Another: a woman on a bicycle, fully veiled, titled "It will not stand in my way."

They photograph anonymously because being identified could get them killed. They're Hazara, Shia Muslims — a group the Taliban has also targeted for forced conversion to Sunni Islam, per Amnesty International.

The work gets coverage as art rather than news. This framing lets Western audiences feel something without demanding they do anything.

What Mainstream Media Is Getting Wrong

Left-leaning outlets are covering this as a women's rights story with emotional framing. But the nursing ban isn't just an attack on women — it's a public health catastrophe for all Afghans. When women can't train as nurses or midwives, and can't be treated by male doctors alone, maternal mortality spikes. Children die at birth. This affects entire communities, not just women.

Center-left outlets keep treating this as a human interest story rather than a geopolitical failure. A crucial question gets no coverage: what happened to the $2.3 trillion the U.S. spent in Afghanistan over 20 years, and why did it produce institutions that collapsed in 11 days in August 2021?

Conservative media has largely moved on. Afghanistan is inconvenient for everyone — it implicates Biden's withdrawal and the two decades of nation-building under Bush and Obama that didn't build anything durable.

Looking Forward

Five years in, Afghanistan has the only nationwide ban on girls' education in the world, per Wikipedia's documentation of UN findings. The Taliban are expanding restrictions monthly. The ICC issued warrants that won't be enforced. The UN can't protect its own staff. The international community's primary response is funding art exhibitions in Brooklyn.

For regular Afghans, this means a generation of girls growing up with no education, no careers, no voice, and no legal recourse — in a country where the alternative to marriage is fleeing by taxi and hoping you don't get stopped at a checkpoint.

The world isn't looking away anymore. It's watching, taking notes, issuing statements — and doing nothing.