RASC News Agency: The United Nations has sounded a stark warning that, four years after the Taliban’s forceful return to power in Afghanistan, the country’s women are facing an unprecedented humanitarian, social, and economic collapse. According to a UN statement released late Monday, August 10, to mark the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistani women’s life expectancy and overall health standards have sharply declined, while the de facto rulers have issued nearly 100 decrees aimed solely at erasing women from public life measures the UN describes as having “devastating” consequences. The statement reveals that over 78 percent of Afghanistani women now have access to neither education nor formal employment. For girls, continuing their studies beyond the early grades has become virtually impossible under Taliban edicts, while for women, finding work is “prohibitively difficult” due to sweeping bans and gender-based restrictions. This systematic exclusion has stripped Afghanistan of nearly half its potential workforce, aggravating an already crippling economic crisis and accelerating the country’s decline into poverty and dependency.
The UN further warns of a looming public health catastrophe. Maternal mortality rates are projected to rise by 50 percent by 2026, driven by the Taliban’s deliberate curtailment of healthcare for women, including prohibitions in certain provinces on female patients being treated by male doctors. These policies, the UN asserts, are not incidental but a direct result of the Taliban’s rigid, discriminatory governance including the total ban on higher education for women and the suffocating constraints on their mobility. In addition to economic and health devastation, the statement raises alarm over a surge in child marriage and domestic violence, with credible reports indicating that Taliban officials themselves have been complicit in, or active enforcers of, forced marriages. Women’s exclusion under Taliban rule, the UN stresses, extends deep into private life; 62 percent of Afghanistani women now report having no role in decision-making even within their own households a regression to patriarchal control unseen in decades.
Susan Ferguson, head of UN Women in Afghanistan, described these policies as a “threat beyond Afghanistan’s borders,” warning that the world’s tolerance of the Taliban’s gender apartheid risks normalizing the erosion of women’s and girls’ rights globally. “What is happening in Afghanistan is not only a national tragedy it is a dangerous precedent for the world,” she said, underscoring that silence or inaction will be interpreted as international complicity in the dismantling of fundamental human rights. The UN’s findings once again expose the Taliban’s so-called “Islamic governance” as a calculated system of repression, designed to institutionalize gender inequality and cement their power by stripping Afghanistani women of agency, dignity, and opportunity. In the absence of sustained international pressure and accountability, the regime’s policies risk becoming a permanent blueprint for erasing women from the social, economic, and political fabric of the nation.
