A BBC documentary captured an 18-year-old Afghan girl pleading with a Taliban provincial governor to free her from a husband she says beats her, only to be refused and lectured that women are "deficient in intellect."
The girl, whose identity was concealed behind a burqa and sunglasses, sat before Jawzjan province Governor Abdullah Sarhadi and made her case plainly. Her husband is violent. He beats her. She wants out. Sarhadi, a former Taliban insurgent commander who once oversaw military operations in the province where the ancient Buddha statues were destroyed, was unmoved. He tried to talk her out of it, the Daily Mail reported, telling her that women are "mindless" and "don't know a thing."
The encounter, filmed for the BBC documentary The Taliban: Coming Out Of The Shadows, offers a window into how the Taliban's system handles a woman who dares to ask for basic protection from domestic violence. The answer, in short: it doesn't.
Sarhadi did not simply deny the request. He pressured the girl to stay, warning her that divorce would ruin her prospects.
"Ask yourself: 'Who would marry me after I get my divorce?' You'll have to compromise a lot or you'll lose your dignity and honour."
The girl's response cut through his lecture.
"My honour and dignity have already been ruined."
She had arrived with her father and a decision already made. "If there was any chance to live together, I wouldn't be here," she told Sarhadi. "I have taken my decision." But under the Taliban's legal framework, that decision counts for almost nothing. The Taliban's court system rarely grants divorces without the husband's consent, and women who do obtain one may have to return some or all of the money they received at their wedding. In this case, the husband demanded four times the original wedding payment as a condition. The girl's family refused to pay.
Sarhadi's compromise was no compromise at all. He told the girl her husband would be warned not to beat her "otherwise he'd be jailed," and suggested she have her own room. The governor made his remarks about women being "deficient in intellect" to a group of men around him, who responded with approving laughter.
The girl's father said he would try again through the courts. Under the Taliban system, his odds are slim.
Sarhadi's biography tells its own story about who runs Afghanistan. He was a seasoned Taliban commander in the 1990s and served as a military leader in Bamiyan, the province where the Taliban destroyed the famed sixth-century giant Buddha statues in 2001, drawing worldwide condemnation. After the Taliban surrendered following the U.S.-led coalition's intervention that same year, Sarhadi was held at Guantanamo Bay for several years.
He now holds two positions simultaneously: governor of Jawzjan province and deputy commander of a military corps in the northern province of Kunduz. This is the man the Taliban entrusts with hearing a teenage girl's plea for safety.
The documentary arrives five years after the fall of the previous U.S.-backed Afghan government, and the trajectory for women under Taliban rule has moved in one direction. Earlier this year, the Taliban legalized child marriage with the consent of a male relative, reversing a ban that had been in place since 2009.
The consequences are already visible. Earlier this month, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan reported that a 14-year-old girl named Bibi Sediqa spent 21 months in a Taliban jail in Badghis province after she refused to marry Mawlawi Khodainazar, a 70-year-old influential commander in the region. RAWA said she suffered torture during her imprisonment.
That is the system: a 14-year-old girl locked in a cell for nearly two years because she refused to marry a man nearly five times her age. And the man who demanded the marriage faced no consequences at all.
The Taliban has blocked women from secondary and university education. It has forbidden women from speaking in public. Employment restrictions have been imposed across the country. In Panjshir province, Taliban officials told female doctors at a local hospital they could not work unless they wore a burqa.
Morality police enforce strict Sharia-law dress codes and frequently arrest women who allegedly violate them. In June, officials opened fire on dozens of demonstrators who took to the streets to protest the morality police. One person was killed. Several more were wounded.
An unnamed resident of Herat, a major western Afghan city, described the situation to the Afghan outlet Amu TV: "They harass women everywhere under the pretext of enforcing morality." Another Herat resident told the same outlet that "women are being detained, intimidated and subjected to psychological abuse, yet no one is listening."
At the beginning of August, the Taliban held a commemorative military parade to mark the anniversary of its rule. Sporting events were also held. Women were banned from both.
Baroness Helena Kennedy, a British women's rights campaigner and Labour member of the House of Lords, addressed the situation on BBC Radio 4's Today programme around the time of the August parade.
"What is happening is gender apartheid. The extremes against women are extraordinary."
Kennedy called on Britain to pressure allies who maintain contact with the Taliban, specifically naming India and Qatar. Her proposed strategy: use those diplomatic channels to divide moderates from hardliners within the Taliban leadership.
"You apply pressure [through] the people who are speaking to, and who are in contact with, the leadership there. You try to drive a wedge between the people who are more progressive and those who are still in the Dark Ages."
Whether any such "progressive" faction exists within the Taliban's leadership is an open question the baroness did not answer. The record so far, child marriage legalized, girls imprisoned for refusing arranged marriages, women banned from education and public life, protesters shot, suggests the wedge has nothing to split.
One unnamed Afghan woman interviewed for the BBC documentary offered her own assessment of why the Taliban governs this way.
"I think the Taliban are scared. They are scared of educated women because they won't give birth to ignorant beings such as the Taliban."
Five years after the U.S. withdrawal handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban, an 18-year-old girl sits in front of a man who was once held at Guantanamo Bay, tells him her husband beats her, and is informed that women don't know a thing. Her father says he will try the courts. The courts answer to the same men.
When the people who seized power by force declare half the population "mindless," the world can at least take them at their word about what kind of government they intend to run.
