Politics of the Taliban: Afghanistan-Pakistan Conflict Through a Feminist Lens

The Taliban coming to power in August 2021 represents not only a regime change, but it also reinstated one of the most oppressive regimes towards gender in history. To decode their politics, two crucial steps need to be followed: firstly, the geopolitical realities of the Afghanistan-Pakistan relations, and secondly, analysing the usage of state-sponsored violence from a feminist lens.

Illustration by The Geostrata

As Moghdam states, Afghanistan is the most aggressive cases of  “classic patriarchy”, where women have no legal rights and are excluded from political discourses and are reduced to objects. This analysis delves into how decades-long patronage of militant Islam by Pakistan has resulted in a Frankenstein’s monster, which is now threatening their security, while Afghanistan’s women have borne the brunt of this oppressive administration.

This article argues that any analysis of the Taliban regime is incomplete without a feminist analysis, as gendered subjugation is not just a marginal note, but an ideological preface to their politics.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: PAKISTAN'S STRATEGIC INSTRUMENTALISATION

Pakistan's association with the Taliban reflects what scholars refer to as "strategic depth"—a policy that is based on being able to support a pliable government in Afghanistan to mitigate Indian influence.

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the Pakistan intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), knowingly nurtured the Taliban movement by providing training, financial support (including a multi-million dollar budget which has yet to be fully accounted for), and doctrinal indoctrination through the Islamic schools (madrassas) in Peshawar.

Per its ultra-conservative, and Wahhabi-influenced, doctrine, Islamist-educated younger Afghans "could hardly pass for having lived in any Afghan society." The duplicity of Pakistan's policy was apparent after September 11, 2001. As Nadery recounts, for example, the military dictator Pervez Musharraf called an official meeting to say that Pakistan sponsored the Taliban while simultaneously taking part in the international coalition against terrorism.

This schizophrenia allowed Pakistan to receive over $32 billion in direct U.S. aid, while "secretly empowering the very forces it was fighting." The ISI was training the Taliban on various sophisticated ways used in warfare, such as making explosive devices and on suicide operations, to use against Afghan civilians and caused over fifty thousand deaths in the twenty years of conflict.

Faced with Musharraf's duplicity was Ashraf Ghani's bilateral meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 2015, in which they positioned said brotherhood, only for Ghani to put Sharif on notice for partnering; he showed Sharif explosives that were manufactured in Pakistan and from where they would use, again, to bomb which would often be again the Afghans.

THE TAREEK-E-TALIBAN PAKSITAN: BLOWBACK AND BILATERAL DETERIORATION

The revival of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) signifies a mix of poetic justice and strategic disaster for Islamabad. Established in 2007 as an umbrella group for Sunni Islamist organizations, the TTP aims to create an emirate based on a strict interpretation of Sharia.

After the Afghan Taliban seized power in 2021, the TTP—the two groups notably share similar ideological proclivities and social connections—significantly increased its operations from sanctuaries in Afghanistan.

Statistical metrics suggest the scope of the problem. There was a 28 per cent increase in attacks in 2022 and a 79 per cent increase in the first half of 2023, with over 2,400 deaths reported in the first nine months of 2025. These data points seem to be illustrative of the deteriorating situation: In December 2024, militants from the TTP attacked Pakistani security forces at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, killing 16 servicemen on the spot.

Pakistan responded to the attack by carrying out aerial bombardments in Paktika province in Afghanistan, killing 46 people—mostly refugees, women, and children, according to Afghan sources. These violent acts illuminate the fundamental inconsistency regarding Pakistan’s policy toward Afghanistan.

In the words of one analyst, "Pakistan is now facing what the Afghan governments faced for decades with the Taliban. When Afghanistan claimed the Taliban was receiving instruction and sanctuary in Pakistan, the Pakistanis denied everything." The Afghan Taliban—while proclaiming the TTP is its "guest"—has not acted even when Pakistani officials demand action, most recently described by spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid as, "Afghanistan cannot be held responsible for another country's security failure.”

THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE: GENDER APARTHEID AS GOVERNANCE

The Taliban's approach to gender has evolved beyond a classical patriarchal framework and has become, in the words of feminist scholars, "gender apartheid," or systematic state-sponsored discrimination that portrayed women as sub-human.

After taking Kabul in 1996, the Taliban enacted laws, which included prohibiting women from working, shutting down schools for girls and girls' education, eliminating women's ability to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male, enforcing the recommendation to wear a burqa, and prohibiting  women patients from receiving medical help from men while simultaneously forbidding female healthcare workers from practicing as well.

Monireh Mohagdam notes that women's rights movements have often been a site of contention in Afghan political struggles. In the 1920s, reformers attempted to improve the status of women but were met with strong backlash from traditionalists.

In the 1980s, there was brutal contestation by Marxist-modernizing and Islamist-traditionalist movements over the notion of "women's place." The rise of the Taliban represented a new level of social exclusion, in which they implemented policies against the public participation of women and eliminated the public visibility of women.

The Feminist Majority Foundation relays the horrific reality of the Taliban: A woman who ran an underground home school, was executed in front of her family; a woman who fled with an unrelated man was stoned for committing adultery; an elderly woman got a broken leg after being beaten because her ankle was exposed beneath her burqa. This was not random violence but a systematic application of ideological misogyny. 

Importantly, Taliban oppression is not based on Islamic legitimacy, as pointed out by Moghadam. The 55-member Organization of Islamic Conference refused to recognize the Taliban and even the ultra-conservative Muslim Brotherhood condemned the Taliban decrees.

Before Taliban rule, women comprised 50% of students at Kabul University, 60% of the university teaching staff, 70% of school teachers, 50% of civilian government employees, and 40% of physicians in Kabul. The Taliban's claim of establishing true Islam is instead a version of patriarchy, inflected with tribalism, concealing itself under the banner of religious orthodoxy.

GEOPOLITICAL INTERSECTION: WOMEN AS COLLATERAL DAMAGE

The Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict uses women's rights within disputed nationalist and religious narratives.

The Pakistan military establishment has been steeped in Islamist conservatism for decades of providing military support to Afghan militant groups, portraying women's liberation as a form of cultural imperialism imposed by the West. Their ideological thinking permitted military assistance to the Taliban and other factions when state or military interest was paramount regardless of their gender policies.

The 1978 reform program of the Marxist government—Decree No. 8, which eliminated bride-price and raised the legal age for marriage—was not characterized as modernization from within; instead, it promoted Soviet colonialism. This characterization was also used by the mujahideen in Pakistan when legitimating violent attacks on women's rights.

Moghadam noted, "Afghan women were held hostage to the idea that women's rights were a Western phenomenon and that the modernization effort of the state of Afghanistan was merely copying a bankrupt Western (or Soviet) model."

Current tensions unveil ongoing dynamics. Pakistan's aerial assault of Afghan soil in December 2024—ostensibly targeting TTP bases—killed mostly women and children fleeing Waziristan.

Such fortune and misfortune gives testament to a broader pattern where women’s lives are sacrificed in international conflicts waged only by men in military and political power. While women in Afghanistan can no longer or do not have a political voice under Taliban rule, they cannot advocate for rational or peaceful settlements or ask for accountability from either side.

THE CULTURAL RELATIVISM TRAP AND INTERNATIONAL COMPLICITY

Moghadam expresses criticism about the "slippery slope of cultural relativism" that allowed for Taliban abuses. In the cries for postmodernist "indigenous" and "non-Western" authenticity in the 1980s and later, the moral stones of wrongness for putting women in burqas, depriving women of their educations, and denying women decision-making, slips were overlooked.

This relativism became dangerous as it connected with the U.S. and Cold War geopolitical calculations of emphasis, in their hostility towards the Soviet Union, with relative degree of human rights—Moghadam calls this a "curious response (or non-response)" by the international feminist community. 

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were the only relevant states granting any type of international diplomatic and subsequent bribery recognition of the Taliban regime, enabled gender apartheid phenomena to continue to exist by at least granting diplomatic favor and financial support. Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi ideology, in particular, motivated Taliban religious doctrine, while Pakistan supported, gave military training, and offered strategic, tribal-safe space to the Taliban.

The production of opium extract in Afghanistan occurred in Taliban-controlled territories and thus produced sources of revenue for funding oppression. 

The international community's engagement—or lack there of—reflected, as feminist scholars argue, a selective concern for women's rights, one which was instrumental when geopolitically convenient, or that of which the international community considered implications for geopolitical imperatives, itself purporting to leave behind considerations of other rights for women.

The U.S. invasion after the September 11 terrorist attacks meant by some degree the justification of liberating women—then the attention toward Iraq. The U.S. invasion was successful but failed to produce a properly trained and funded security apparatus; the Taliban reestablished itself and returned by 2008.

CONTEMPORARY DYNAMICS: AN UNSUSTANIABLE ANTAGONISM

At present, relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan could be characterized by what is reputed to be "guaranteed dysfunction." Pakistan, as a more militarily capable and strategically positioned state, has the capability of thwarting continued avenge strikes in the TTP sanctuaries.

The Taliban government states that they are "victorious battle-hardened fighters who fought a long and successful war against foreign occupation" and discards the prospect of Pakistan's even shared grievances. This state of affairs demonstrates what analysts have referred to as "apparent disconnect in their mutual expectations and disregard for each other's capabilities."

Part of Pakistan's leverage includes expelling Afghan refugees (millions of Afghans educated or employed in cities in Pakistan) and closing trade routes to Afghanistan and affecting the landlocked economy.

However, the Taliban also has some counter-leverage. For instance, the Supreme Leader of the Taliban, Haibatullah Akhunzada, could actualize a fatwa declaring war against the security establishment of Pakistan. This type of weaponization could lead to instability in Pakistan at a domestic level due to his religious authority among graduates of Pakistani madrassas and other Islamist political groups.

De-escalation of hostilities may require trusted mediation from Muslim-majority states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who had successfully negotiated temporary ceasefire terms. However, fundamental policy shifts are unlikely. The senior leadership of the military in Pakistan continues to frame the confrontation between TTP and the state in rivalry to India while the ideological and social bonds between the Taliban and TTP preclude intensive or aggressive action that might create space for the self-described Islamic State Khorasan Province, which is a threat to the mutual interests of both the TTP and the Taliban.

FEMINIST IMPLICATIONS : BEYOND STATE-CENTRIC ANALYSIS

The feminist analysis highlights dimensions that are overlooked by traditional geopolitical considerations. First, the gender regime of the Taliban is not an afterthought of their political project, but part of the project itself. Their authority over women in terms of bodies, mobility, education, and sexuality establishes a succession of social hierarchies that splices the gendering of authority across generations and tribal affiliations.

As Moghadam illustrates, a patriarchal form of extended family structure, under which senior men have authority over younger men and all women, requires women's subordination through "restrictive codes of behavior, gender segregation, and the equation of a female's virtue with family honor." 

Second, interstate violence provides a persistent level of gendered violence to women's bodies. Bombings in Pakistan killing Afghan women refugees and Taliban edicts excluding women from public life are two different modalities of state violence against women's bodies.

Both governments pursuing state violence operate based on exclusively male political and military structures to pursue their security policies, regardless of the existence of women or men in those spaces; women are always either excluded, rounded up, or underestimated. Like the Taliban, there is no Afghan woman in the political formulation in Pakistan to address questions for Afghan women. Thus, Afghan women, as designed, become voiceless casualties of masculine interstate rivalry.

Third, the debate over cultural relativism obscures the relations of power. The justification of the Taliban as "an authentic" Afghan culture ultimately creates a discourse that denies women the possibility of voicing their own experiences and history.

Afghan women's activism (from reformers in the 1920s, professionals in the 1980s, to contemporary underground schoolteachers) illustrates a historic record of indigenous resistance to patriarchal oppression. Ultimately, framing women's rights as Western imports serves both Taliban ideological justification and Pakistani strategic rationalisation, effectively silencing Afghan women's autonomous agency.

CONCLUSION

While the Taliban’s trajectory is decided by many factors, it is clear that it has unleashed terror on the ones who ignited the fire, but also its own women, who are possibly the worst off in this scenario.

Pakistan’s duplicity by being a harbinger for militancy is coming back to bite them, but in the end, the common people, far removed from these conflicts, are the worst affected. 

A multipronged approach is needed to address the issue- firstly, Pakistan and its allies must stop using militant groups to erect proxies in areas of strategic importance; various regional-level counter-radicalisation efforts with strategic targeting of radicalising institutions are needed.

The military establishment’s control over the political process must be balanced with democratic governance, coupled with transparency that improves the region’s peace. At the same time, the legitimacy deficits suffered by the Taliban in the international community must be used as a diplomatic tool to advocate for tangible improvements in rights for women and girls. 

From the feminist point of view, helping women regain their agency holds primacy. Support for underground education initiatives, providing a haven and asylum to women who flee and amplifying the voices of female leadership in the country are some crucial steps. The Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict also sheds light on women’s rights, as they suffer at the behest of masculine challenges for territory as collateral damage.

Until policymakers prioritise the protection of the humanity of women over geopolitical chess matches, the country will continuously see cycles of violence, extremism and suffering. The question that riddles the international community is: Do Afghan women’s lives matter enough to warrant meaningful policy change, or will their lives be coldly put into the calculator to understand their value?

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BY SAUHARDI UNIYAL

CENTRE FOR LAW AND POLITICS

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com