On Afghan women's testimony to the BBC, five years after the Taliban's return
It didn't happen all at once. That is the part easiest to miss from outside, and the part Afghan women describe most precisely when asked what the last five years actually felt like from the inside: not a single door slamming, but a sequence of doors, each one closing a little further in than the last, each one preceded by just enough ambiguity that hope was still a reasonable thing to feel right up until it wasn't.
The record is specific and checkable. On 23 March 2022, girls' secondary schools — grades seven through twelve — were set to reopen after a review period the Taliban themselves had promised. Girls arrived in uniform. Some had walked for the occasion. The order came that same morning: indefinite suspension. Nine months later, on 23 December 2022, the Ministry of Higher Education banned women from universities outright, public and private both, effective immediately — reversing an earlier line about education continuing under "Islamic law" guidelines, which had bought exactly as much time as it takes to build a policy and then discard the promise that preceded it. That same December, the Ministry of Economy barred women from working for domestic and international NGOs, cutting off one of the last channels through which women could still earn a wage or hold a professional role in the country's public life. Three separate ministries. Three separate announcements, months apart, each one narrower than a blanket ban would have been, each one just as final.
Staggering it this way is not incompetence. A ban announced in stages lets each stage look, briefly, like a pause rather than a wall — lets the people inside it keep believing, a little longer than they should, that the next review period might go differently. It also means that by the time the full shape of the policy is visible, it has already been normalized in increments too small to organize a single response around. Nobody protests a review period. By the time there's something unambiguous to protest, the roads out are already closed too.
What the BBC's interviews add to the record isn't the sequence of decrees — that part is documented, dated, cross-confirmed by UNESCO and UNAMA, unambiguous as bureaucratic paper trails go. What the interviews add is what the paper trail structurally cannot hold: the specific texture of what it is to live inside the gap between one decree and the next. Public floggings as an enforcement mechanism, not a rumor. Barriers to healthcare severe enough that women describe them as endangering lives — a female patient increasingly unable to be seen by a female doctor, in a system where a male doctor examining her may not be permitted at all, which is not an inconvenience, it's a diagnosis that doesn't happen and a condition that doesn't get caught in time.
Five years is long enough that "unrecognisable" — the word the women themselves reached for — has stopped being a figure of speech. A country can be turned into a different country entirely through nothing but the patient accumulation of narrower and narrower doors, none of them, taken alone, quite dramatic enough to be the whole story. The whole story only exists in the sum, and the sum is the only thing nobody currently in power has to answer for all at once — because it was never delivered all at once. It was delivered in stages precisely so that no single stage would ever have to carry the whole weight of what it was building toward.