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By Farima Nawabi
License: RWI report
Human rights violations in Afghanistan have increased to an unprecedented level since the Taliban takeover. The international community and human rights institutes have failed to prevent the devastating abuses. The Taliban takeover and its brutal violation of human rights in Afghanistan will have serious consequences, not only in Afghanistan but around the world, unless strong and constructive action is taken. This paper highlights the current human rights situation in Afghanistan with special emphasis on women and girls and addresses why and how Afghanistan ended up this way. On 15 August 2021, Taliban forces entered Kabul. After 20 years of fighting with the government and foreign forces in Afghanistan, the group has revived its “Islamic Emirate” that was overthrown by the United States (US) in October 2001. Taliban troops arrived in Kabul two weeks before US President Joseph Biden’s deadline for a full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. On that day, the people of Afghanistan woke up to the brutal reality of losing everything overnight. The government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan had collapsed into the hands of the Taliban (Thomas Gibbons Neff, 2021). Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani escaped to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), along with his national security advisor and chief of staff (Jonathan Schroden, 2021). In reality, the country had started to collapse months before. The system started to fail from the day the Americans signed a deal with the Taliban on 21 February 2021, or maybe even earlier (Hafeez Ullah, Dr Riaz Ahmad, Muhammad Mussa Khan, 2020). The Doha Agreement (State Department – State.gov, 2020) was not only a failure for the Afghan government but also a failure for the US (Lisa Curtis, 2021).
Keywords: Afghanistan, Human rights, Women and girls, Taliban, Islamic Emirate, Collapse of Afghan government, Doha Agreement, Foreign forces, Political instability, Failure of governance