It is not for the West to determine Afghanistan’s future

This time last year the Disasters Emergency Committee – which coordinates action by more than a dozen UK charities in response to major disasters – launched a Christmas appeal for Afghanistan. It warned of famine threatening 20 per cent of the population, as well as dire shortages of clean water, shelter and medical help.

How, you might observe, priorities change. The focus for aid agencies, in the UK as in much of the Western world, is now fixed on Ukraine, as it has been since the Russian invasion more than 10 months ago. Developments in Afghanistan have largely dropped from public view – except, thanks to dogged and dedicated Western campaigners, in one crucial respect: the status and rights of women.

You will remember the chaotic scenes at Kabul airport in August 2021, as Western forces ended their 20-year intervention and scrambled to evacuate their friends before the Taliban consolidated their return to power. There were hopes, even assurances, then that this Taliban was different from the one that the US-led coalition had helped to dislodge in 2001 – different for having mastered some basic diplomatic skills, different in being better equipped to govern; different, above all, in their attitudes to women.

One particular hope was that women and girls would still be able to enter, or stay in, education. As the months passed, however, much of a generation of progress was steadily lost. On a recent – and rare – visit to rural Afghanistan, the Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford showed how young women, now largely barred from formal education, were defiant in their efforts to find new outlets for their abilities. She concluded by noting that higher education was an exception; women were still able to attend university.

Alas, barely two weeks after her programme aired, the Taliban announced that, with very few exceptions, university courses were being closed to women forthwith. Within days, the Taliban had also banned women working for international charities and other non-government organisations, where they might be working, unveiled, alongside men.

The prospects for women and girls are now, it seems, back where they were more than 20 years ago. What is more, many charities have announced an end to their work in Afghanistan. It seems that educated women and girls aspiring to an education have little choice for the time being but to seek a future abroad.

Few would argue that this is anything other than a depressing reversal – certainly not me. But there are two considerations that risk being lost from the West’s near-exclusive focus on Afghanistan’s women.

The first is that 20 years of Western activism in the cause of educating Afghan girls was never quite the success Western governments and campaigners wanted us to believe. Yes, there were successful professional women – doctors, lawyers, a few politicians – but they were few and far between and had largely received at least part of their education abroad.

That is not to belittle their achievement or courage, but they were for the most part a privileged caste. I say were, because many escaped during the Western evacuation or under their own steam. It is an all too familiar sequence. “We” tried to modernise (or westernise) Afghanistan by creating a new class in our own image, only to abandon them or take them with us when we left. As so often, the roots of the social change we tried to implant were too shallow.

This may not be a popular view, but Afghan women, and men, will change their own society if and when they want to. Outsiders cannot do it for them; still less outsiders with scant appreciation of how the majority of Afghan women still live. The women’s revolt against theocracy in Iran illustrates how hard such fundamental change is to achieve – and this is despite the fact that many urban Iranian women will have a template of the very different lifestyle they or their mothers and grandmothers enjoyed in the years before the Islamic revolution. This does not mean education for women in Afghanistan is a lost cause; it means real progress is much slower than many Western campaigners would like – or claim – it to be.

The second, often lost consideration about Afghanistan today, can sometimes be found buried almost as an aside in the many jeremiads about the plight of women under Taliban rule. That aside goes something like this: one village mother vouchsafed that at least she no longer had to fear for her young son or daughter’s safety if they went to fetch water from the well.

This is an admission of the reality: with the foreign troops gone, Afghanistan is mostly at peace. Let me repeat that: with the foreign troops gone, Afghanistan is more peaceful than it has been for a generation. As they swept back to power, the Taliban concluded deals with local power lords that have largely held. That might not last, but opposition to the Taliban remains weak.

And this prompts a third consideration. In an ideal world, you would have peace and safety for everyone, and you would have social progress as well, which would include, high up on the agenda, equal rights, or more rights, for women, including girls’ education. But if you cannot have both right now, which would you choose? Indeed, which should come first?

What price, say, that Western favourite, electoral democracy – which might well include votes for women – if you live in daily fear that your husband or father could be killed fighting; that your home could be razed by a missile, or your child raped by a marauding soldier? Has the West, first and foremost the US and the UK, been getting some things the wrong way round?

The wars in Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – either triggered or exacerbated and prolonged by foreign intervention – have left traumatised, impoverished and divided populations, if they have ended at all. In the past year, Europeans have witnessed a neighbouring country that had been at peace – except in one corner of its territory – plunged into all-out war overnight as the result of the invasion by Russia.

If there is one salutary consequence of this conflict, it may be that it has shown all those Europeans born into peace what war is really like: the lottery of death; the scale of destruction; the perpetual uncertainty; the constant search for a safety that no longer exists.

Those who lived through the First or Second World Wars knew this, even as they rarely talked about it. Their children and children’s children did not – until perhaps now. Medals and war memorials are one thing; the actual experience of armed conflict and all that comes with it and after it is something else. This is why I cannot support the ever greater shipments of Western arms that serve only to prolong the war. Diplomacy has to be preferable.

But it is also why I fear that to train the international spotlight – as the West latterly has – almost exclusively on the Taliban’s mediaeval attitude to women since it recaptured control of Afghanistan is to obscure the whole picture. In our eyes, of course, it is wrong and short-sighted for the Taliban to bar education to girls and to stop Afghan women working for foreign charities where they may learn, or choose, Western ways.

But it must be for Afghans, not for us, to determine the future of their country. And after more than four decades of almost continuous war, the priority surely has to be peace. Or, to put it a different way, there will be a time when every Afghan girl will be able to go to school, but that time is unlikely to come until every Afghan parent knows that their child will return safe and sound after fetching the water from the well.