Could Engaging the Taliban Help Afghan Women?

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

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🗓️ 25 August 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

This August marks the one year anniversary of American military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s swift return to power in Kabul. It has been an excruciating year for the war-torn nation, marked by economic collapse, famine, and drought. Yet much of the aid that Afghanistan used to depend on has been blocked by sanctions aimed at pressuring the Taliban into a less repressive rule. As a result, nearly half of the country is at risk of going hungry. The journalist Rozina Ali travelled to Kabul in the spring, and spent time wicth former clients and staff of the largest network of women’s shelters in the country, which shut down so as not to legitimize the new régime. Ali joins the guest host Susan B. Glasser, who also reported from Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, on the other end of the American intervention, to discuss the lives of the vulnerable women she met and the dilemma of negotiating with the Taliban. “We have to think about the very real scenario here, and actually the very real fact that girls can’t go to school and women can’t go to jobs if they are starving,” she says.

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this podcast is brought to you by Wilderness, a conservation-driven
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0:49.4	Welcome to the political scene. I'm Susan Gloucer, a staff writer for The New Yorker.
0:54.4	It's unbelievable, but we're coming up on one year since the United States withdrew its military from Afghanistan, and the Taliban returned to power in Kabul after 20 years.
1:03.7	It was a major moment. The end not only have two decades of conflict for the United States, the longest in American history, but yet another chapter
1:11.5	in the decades-long saga of conflict and disaster in Afghanistan. This was definitely one more
1:17.0	disaster for the storybooks. In Afghanistan, in fact, it's been a year not only of Taliban rule,
1:22.5	but of economic collapse, of famine and drought. Rosina Ali recently returned from Kabul, where she reported for the New Yorker on the lives
1:31.4	of vulnerable women under the new regime and what happened after the largest network of
1:36.5	women's shelters in Afghanistan was shut down.
1:39.6	Rosina, hi, and thank you so much for joining us today.
1:44.0	Thank you so much for having me. You traveled to Kabul in the spring, giving us a rare opportunity to get a sense on the ground of what things are really like after nearly a year of renewed Taliban rule. I'm particularly interested in the question of what has happened to women in the capital.
2:03.9	You know, is the city already transformed? Are women really having to retreat to their homes?
2:10.0	Just give us a little bit of a feel for the capital as you experienced it.
2:15.2	So one thing that's very particular about Kabul is that as the capital of the
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