The Taliban government in Afghanistan has passed a law legally recognising child marriage for the first time, according to the Guardian. The legislation also makes divorce nearly impossible without a husband’s consent. The Guardian’s reporting cites data suggesting that up to 70 percent of Afghan girls may currently be in early or forced marriages — a figure that reflects the social reality the new law has now codified. The legal change comes alongside the Taliban’s existing bans on girls’ education beyond primary level, women working outside the home, and women appearing in public without a male guardian. BBC World ran a separate feature on an Afghan woman who “got in a taxi and fled” after being told to accept a forced marriage — a story that illustrates, through individual testimony, the systemic context the new law entrenches.
The received wisdom
The progressive humanitarian response is consistent and sincere: international condemnation, calls for the UN to take punitive measures, arguments for maintaining aid to Afghan civil society and underground education networks, and invocations of women’s rights as universal rather than culturally relative values. The dominant framing holds that this law is a continuation of what the international community has been objecting to since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 — that the appropriate response is continued pressure, targeted sanctions, and refusal to grant the Taliban formal diplomatic recognition. Various European governments and the UN’s Afghanistan mission have been making this argument for four and a half years.
The sincerity of this concern is not in question. The Taliban’s treatment of women is a genuine moral catastrophe.
A different read
The sincerity of concern and the adequacy of response are, however, two different things. And the gap between them — between the intensity of Western rhetoric and the near-total absence of effective leverage — is precisely what Sunday’s law reveals.
The fundamental structural problem is that the West exhausted most of its Afghanistan leverage in the chaotic withdrawal of August 2021. The decision to leave — taken by the Biden administration, implementing a framework negotiated by the Trump administration — was accompanied by assurances that international engagement and conditionality would create incentives for the Taliban to moderate. Those assurances were, as a description of how the Taliban actually thinks, wrong. The Taliban do not operate within the incentive framework that international relations theory presupposes for states that want trade, recognition, and integration. They are a theocratic movement with a fixed doctrinal commitments about gender that have not changed since 1996, and which are, from their perspective, foundational rather than negotiable. No amount of aid conditionality redesign will shift this.
The deeper problem is that much of the humanitarian instinct toward Afghanistan has consisted of what might be called “expressive politics” — statements, resolutions, special envoy appointments, and UN reports that signal moral seriousness without constituting leverage. The UN’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan has issued repeated condemnations. The result has been that the Taliban, observing no meaningful cost to continued escalation, have escalated: from banning girls’ secondary education to banning girls’ primary education, from banning women from universities to banning them from parks and NGO employment, and now to codifying child marriage in statute. Each escalation was met with a condemnation; no escalation has been reversed.
This is not an argument for military re-engagement — there is no serious case for that. It is an argument for intellectual honesty about the limits of the current approach. The BBC World profile of an Afghan woman fleeing forced marriage is humanly affecting, but it is also a data point in a pattern: the women who have resources, family networks, or luck can flee. The 70 percent who will be married as children cannot. International advocacy has not been able to reach them, and the law passed on Sunday makes their situation structurally harder to address from outside.
There is a parallel worth drawing. The international community spent the 1990s issuing increasingly specific condemnations of the Taliban’s first period in power — resolutions, travel bans on Taliban leaders, pressure through Pakistan — none of which reversed a single policy. The lesson drawn after 2001 was that only the decisive application of military force changed the situation. The lesson drawn after 2021 is murkier, but the pattern of expressive condemnation without leverage is identical.
A more honest conservative foreign policy position would acknowledge this gap explicitly, and argue for two things: first, maximising direct support — financial, logistical, digital — to the underground networks of Afghan women’s education and civil society that are operating despite the restrictions; second, abandoning the fiction that UN recognition conditionality or aid pressure will shift Taliban doctrine, and instead focusing what little leverage exists on specific, achievable outcomes — prisoner releases, passage for individuals to leave — rather than systemic demands that the Taliban simply will not accept.
What to watch
Whether any country or multilateral body moves beyond condemnation to specific, targeted coercive measures directed at individual Taliban leaders rather than the Afghan economy — sanctions that hurt the movement rather than its subjects; whether the underground girls’ education networks that have been operating since 2021 can continue to function given the new legal framework criminalising their work more explicitly; whether Pakistan, the one external power with genuine influence over Taliban leadership, shifts its posture in response; and whether the new law accelerates the departure of international NGOs, whose continued presence in Afghanistan has been the only meaningful direct service delivery to Afghan women.
— J