NYT (“Afghan Women Erased From Public Life in Five Years of Taliban Rule“):

The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan five years ago this week, returning to power after two decades and restoring an Islamic government that had severely restricted women’s rights.

In those few years, women and girls have been systematically erased from most public life, experts say. And, some add, the limitations imposed on half the population could hobble Afghanistan far into the future.

The harsh restrictions on women and girls are a return to conditions that prevailed the previous time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, in the late 1990s. More than 160 decrees have been issued targeting women and girls, barring them from secondary and higher education and restricting their employment, movement, dress, speech and decision-making.

“No other country in modern times has dismantled the rights of half its population through law, policy and practice to the same extent,” the United Nations agency on women said on Wednesday. “At the same time, overlapping humanitarian and economic crises and deepening poverty are also having a disproportionate impact on women and girls.”

The official restrictions have reinforced social pressures, and many women say their communities increasingly press them to conform, a new U.N. Women report found, based on recent surveys. “Half a decade of escalating restrictions has narrowed where Afghan women can go, what they can do and how they can live,” it said. “The results are alarming.”

[…]

The report highlights the isolation many Afghan women now experience as a result of the restrictions. A vast majority of the women surveyed — 90 percent — said they must have a male family member’s permission to leave the house. And more than half said they went out only once or twice a month. Among male survey respondents, more than 95 percent reported leaving their homes daily.

Women and girls’ adherence to the new Taliban rules is increasingly reinforced by people around them, like relatives and neighbors. The U.N. report noted that nearly 40 percent of women surveyed this year said they felt more pressure than before to tailor their behavior for fear that those they know will report them for inappropriate dress, speech or actions.

“The Taliban have extended state control deep into the private sphere by transforming patriarchal norms into legal obligations and conscripting families into the enforcement of their ideology,” Belquis Ahmadi, a human rights lawyer and expert on Afghanistan, formerly at the United States Institute of Peace, wrote in a recent report on Taliban rule.

Human rights experts say that the crisis for women in Afghanistan has reached a critical point.

Afghanistan is the only country in the world to formally prohibit access to education for girls and women beyond the primary level. The longer women and girls are excluded from schools, institutions and public life, the more entrenched the restrictive system becomes, the further behind they fall and the fewer models there are, making their ability to recover ever less likely, jeopardizing the country’s long-term prospects.

“As a new generation of girls grows without an education, their future becomes increasingly dark,” UNESCO wrote in a statement this week, calling for the full restoration of the right to education for Afghan girls and women.

While our war in Afghanistan was initially motivated by killing or capturing those responsible for the 9/11 attacks and ousting the regime that harbored them, our aims soon broadened to establishing a modern, democratic state that respected human rights. A lot of effort, in particular, was aimed at improving the lives of women and girls.

Those goals proved too ambitious, if not foolhardy. Imposing an alien way of life is challenging under any circumstances, and Afghanistan may well have been the hardest possible case. Accusations of strategic drift and unclear goals are certainly fair.

Still, the Pottery Barn Rule attributed to the late General Colin Powell applied. Having toppled the Taliban government, the emerging norms of jus post bellum obligated us to make some reasonable effort to re-establish political order. And the extant treatment of women and girls in the country violated the most fundamental human rights law, shocking the conscience.

Alas, here we are. Twenty years of conflict, some $2.3 trillion spent, nearly 4500 Americans killed, and the situation no better than before. Indeed, it’s arguably worse, since they enjoyed basic human rights for years and have had them taken away.