RASC News Agency: A coalition of Afghanistani civil society groups, women’s rights defenders, and human rights activists has issued an urgent open letter calling for an international investigation into the alleged complicity of Cheryl Benard American academic and spouse of former U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad in whitewashing the Taliban regime. The coalition accuses Benard of lending intellectual cover to one of the most repressive gender apartheid systems in modern history. The letter, addressed to the International Criminal Court (ICC), United Nations human rights agencies, the European Union, the U.S. government, and international media institutions, charges Benard with complicity in crimes against humanity, including propagating misinformation about the Taliban, minimizing their systematic persecution of women, and misleading global public opinion through ideologically driven commentary.
Central to the allegations is a controversial article authored by Benard in The National Interest, in which she describes Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as a “safe and appealing” destination for returning migrants and dismisses credible reports of human rights violations particularly against women as exaggerated or politically motivated. These remarks, civil society representatives argue, stand in direct contradiction to the extensive documentation of Taliban atrocities by leading global organizations such as the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. Far from being a benign political force, the Taliban have imposed a brutal and suffocating regime that has systematically erased Afghanistani women from public life banning them from education, work, healthcare, and even basic mobility. Yet, Benard’s article not only trivializes these crimes but also attempts to normalize them within international discourse. Her portrayal of Taliban rule as preferable to life in democratic states such as India is not only grotesquely inaccurate, but an affront to the suffering of millions.
The signatories of the letter are now urging the ICC Prosecutor to initiate a formal investigation into Benard’s role in legitimizing a regime that stands credibly accused of institutionalized gender persecution. They have also called for her suspension from all professional affiliations with Western think tanks and media outlets pending the outcome of this inquiry. Furthermore, the letter demands that Afghanistani women who have been directly impacted by the Taliban’s policies women who have been flogged, imprisoned, or driven into exile be given space to testify before international bodies. It also calls for a public forum, convened by the European Parliament or the United Nations Human Rights Council, to examine the disturbing trend of Western intellectuals and policymakers aiding in the rehabilitation of authoritarian regimes through selective narratives and ideological bias.
The backlash against Benard escalated after she controversially claimed that “women under Taliban rule may be safer than women in India.” Legal experts and rights defenders have widely condemned this comparison as dangerous revisionism that seeks to deflect attention from the Taliban’s medieval practices, including public floggings, child marriage, the banning of female aid workers, and the mass imprisonment of women for so-called ‘moral’ offenses. Dr. Mohammad Amin Ahmadi, a prominent legal scholar and former member of the Islamic Republic’s negotiation team, noted in a published response that Benard’s statements may amount to “intellectual complicity in the psychological and structural abuse of Afghanistani women.” He wrote: “To justify or romanticize a regime that systematically weaponizes religion to strip half the population of its most basic rights is not a policy position it is moral bankruptcy.”
At a time when the Taliban continue to enforce one of the world’s most extreme systems of gender-based repression, Cheryl Benard’s public defense of their regime represents more than an academic controversy it is a case study in the intellectual laundering of authoritarian violence. The attempt to repackage the Taliban as a stabilizing force, or worse, a government worthy of return migration, cannot go unchallenged. Afghanistani women are not the unfortunate collateral of geopolitics they are victims of a regime whose crimes must not be sanitized for the sake of Western strategic convenience. The international community must decide whether to protect truth and justice or to indulge the ideological apologists of tyranny.
