How Taliban’s Performative Governance Masks Gender Apartheid

The contemporary socio-political landscape of Afghanistan is defined by a profound disconnect between digital narratives curated by Taliban-aligned social media accounts and the lived realities of millions of Afghan women. This strategy of performative governance is not unique to the current Afghan regime. History is replete with similar efforts, such as the ghost cities of North Korea, specifically Kijong-dong on the South Korean border, built to project a false image of prosperity and modernity to the outside world.

While the de facto authorities utilize highly publicized showcases of factory labor and localized employment to project an image of economic inclusion, a closer analytical lens reveals these instances to be tactical exceptions rather than systemic progress. This selective visibility serves as a propaganda tool designed to mask what international observers increasingly describe as a framework of gender apartheid. A central pillar of this narrative is the showcase factory model, used to counter global criticism. However, these isolated environments are statistically insignificant against the backdrop of a nationwide economic collapse. Since the 2021 takeover, the Afghan economy has contracted by approximately 25 percent, a decline exacerbated by the systematic removal of women from the workforce.

In academic terms, these showcases function as Potemkin villages, designed to deceive external observers into believing that female economic participation is thriving. In reality, UN Women reports indicate that nearly 80 percent of young Afghan women are now excluded from education, employment, or training. Their participation in these factories is often a desperate response to a vacuum left by the Taliban’s own policies, which have barred women from most public sector roles, the judiciary, and high-level ministries. The dismantling of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and its replacement with the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice signals a fundamental shift from the protection of rights to the enforcement of surveillance. By early 2025, survey data showed that 80 percent of rural women were unable to reach a health facility without a male chaperone.

Perhaps the most catastrophic impact is the ban on secondary and university education for girls. Economic recovery is dependent on a pipeline of skilled labor, yet the Taliban have shut schools for approximately 2.2 million girls. This educational blockade ensures long-term stagnation. UN Women estimates that denying girls a secondary education costs the Afghan economy 2.5 percent of its GDP annually. Furthermore, the August 2024 morality laws have codified the erasure of women from the public sphere, even classifying women’s voices as to be silenced in public. Amnesty International has documented that this climate of fear has led to the arrest and detention of dozens of women for moral crimes, with many reporting torture and degrading treatment.

The analysis must also address the role of external commentators who provide intellectual cover for these policies while remaining silent on the economic suffering of the population. There is a profound irony in advocating for a regime of repression from the safety of a democratic state. If such commentators truly believed the kabul model represented a viable path, the logical step would be to renounce the freedoms of the states they seek to undermine. By framing the current situation as a success, these voices ignore the 840 recorded incidents of gender-based violence, including 332 killings, documented between 2022 and mid-2024. The Taliban’s attempt to decouple economic activity from human rights is a failed experiment. Selective factory labor cannot offset the systemic damage of banning education, restricting mobility, and silencing dissent. For Afghanistan to achieve a genuine recovery, it must address the structural repression that ensures Afghan women achieve only 17.3 percent of their potential to exercise their rights and freedoms. A nation that builds its future on the systematic exclusion of half its people is not building a state, it is managing a decline.