A BBC documentary captured an 18-year-old Afghan girl begging a Taliban governor to free her from a violent husband, only to be told women are "deficient in intellect" and sent back to the man who beats her.
The encounter, filmed in Jawzjan province in northern Afghanistan, shows the young woman, wearing a burqa and sunglasses, standing before Governor Abdullah Sarhadi and a group of men. She asked for a divorce. She explained that her husband beats her. Sarhadi refused, tried to talk her out of leaving, and warned her that no one would marry her again. The footage appears in the BBC documentary The Taliban: Coming Out Of The Shadows, which revisits Afghanistan five years after the fall of the previous U.S.-backed government.
The girl's appeal was direct. The Daily Mail reported her words to Sarhadi:
"If there was any chance to live together, I wouldn't be here... I have taken my decision."
Sarhadi did not grant the divorce. Instead, he pressured her to stay. He told her the husband would be warned to stop the beatings "otherwise he'd be jailed," and suggested she should have her own room in the household. Then he offered his broader view of women.
Women, Sarhadi declared, are "deficient in intellect," "mindless," and "don't know a thing." He urged the girl to consider what would become of her if she left.
"Ask yourself: 'Who would marry me after I get my divorce?' You'll have to compromise a lot or you'll lose your dignity and honour."
Her answer was blunt:
"My honour and dignity have already been ruined."
The man dismissing this teenager's plea is no minor provincial functionary. Sarhadi was a seasoned Taliban commander during the group's first rule in the 1990s. He served as military commander in Bamiyan, the province where the sixth-century giant Buddha statues were destroyed in 2001. After the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban that same year, Sarhadi was held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for several years. He now serves as governor of Jawzjan province and as deputy commander of a military corps in the northern province of Kunduz.
His trajectory, from insurgent fighter to Guantanamo detainee to provincial governor, illustrates how thoroughly the Taliban has reconsolidated power. The men who governed Afghanistan with an iron fist in the 1990s are governing it again, with the same convictions about women and the same willingness to enforce them.
The girl's father said he would try to pursue a divorce through the courts. But under Taliban rule, the court system rarely grants divorces without the husband's consent. The husband, for his part, has demanded four times the original wedding payment as a condition of agreeing to the split. The girl's family refused to pay. The prospects are grim.
This single filmed encounter sits inside a broader pattern of Taliban policy toward women that has only tightened. Women are blocked from secondary and university education. They are forbidden from speaking in public. Young girls are being married off under Taliban authority. And earlier this year, the Taliban legalized child marriage with the consent of a male relative, reversing a ban that had been in place since 2009.
In Panjshir province, female doctors were told they could not work unless they wore a burqa. Morality police enforce dress codes across the country, and women who allegedly violate those codes face arrest. In June, officials opened fire on demonstrators at a protest against the morality police, killing one person and wounding several more.
While Western political figures debate the personal conduct of their own leaders, from high-profile divorce scandals to what a politician's spouse wears, Afghan women face a system that treats them as property with no legal standing and no exit.
A Herat resident described the daily reality to Amu TV:
"They harass women everywhere under the pretext of enforcing morality."
The same resident added:
"Women are being detained, intimidated and subjected to psychological abuse, yet no one is listening."
The case of Bibi Sediqa offers another window into what Afghan girls face. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan reported that Sediqa, a 14-year-old, spent roughly 21 months in a Taliban prison, at times suffering torture, after she refused to marry Mawlawi Khodainazar, a 70-year-old commander in Afghanistan's Badghis province. A child, jailed and reportedly tortured, for saying no to a man old enough to be her grandfather.
At the beginning of August, the Taliban held a commemorative military parade marking the anniversary of its rule. Sporting events accompanied the celebrations. Women were banned from attending those, too.
One anonymous Afghan woman, speaking to the BBC for the documentary, offered a sharp assessment of the regime's motives:
"I think the Taliban are scared. They are scared of educated women because they wont give birth to ignorant beings such as the Taliban."
Baroness Helena Kennedy, a Labour peer and women's rights campaigner, addressed the situation on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. She did not hold back.
"What is happening is gender apartheid. The extremes against women are extraordinary."
Kennedy called on Britain to pressure allies who maintain contact with the Taliban, specifically naming India and Qatar. Her proposed strategy: drive a wedge between more pragmatic Taliban figures and the hardliners.
"You apply pressure [through] the people who are speaking to, and who are in contact with, the leadership there. You try to drive a wedge between the people who are more progressive and those who are still in the Dark Ages."
Whether that strategy has any realistic chance of success is an open question. The men running Afghanistan today, men like Sarhadi, are the same men who ran it in the 1990s. They did not moderate during their years out of power. They did not moderate during their years in detention. And nothing in their conduct since retaking control suggests they intend to start now.
Americans who follow the personal choices of political spouses at home should consider what "personal choice" means for women living under Taliban governance. The answer, for an 18-year-old girl in Jawzjan province, is that it means nothing at all.
In the West, the debate over women's rights often centers on symbolism, media scrutiny of a political wife's wardrobe, for instance, or the semiotics of public appearances. In Afghanistan, women's rights means whether a teenager can leave a man who beats her. Under the Taliban, the answer is no, and the governor will tell her she is too mindless to know any better.
Five years after the U.S. withdrawal handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban, the consequences for Afghan women are not theoretical. They are filmed, documented, and undeniable. The question is whether anyone with leverage intends to do anything about it, or whether the world's attention will remain fixed elsewhere.
When a government tells half its population that they are mindless and have no right to leave a man who beats them, that is not a cultural difference. That is tyranny, and the people living under it deserve better than silence from the free world.
