Lara Kajs
Dispatches from the Field — The Genocide Report
Washington, DC — 10 September 2026
Five years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, the country presents the international community with an uncomfortable contradiction. The war that defined Afghanistan for two decades has largely receded. Large-scale fighting had declined, allowing many Afghans to experience a measure of security that was impossible during years of armed conflict. Yet the end of one form of violence has not produced a society grounded in rights, inclusion, or accountability. Instead, the Taliban have consolidated a system in which women and girls have been progressively removed from education, employment, public life, and meaningful participation in their country’s future.
The United Nations has acknowledged both realities. Five years after the Taliban takeover, UNAMA reported that improved security has brought tangible benefits to many Afghans, while warning that restrictions on women and girls, terrorism concerns, and limitations on civic space continue to obstruct Afghanistan’s recovery and international reintegration. Sustainable peace, the UN argues, requires more than the absence of conflict.
That distinction matters. Afghanistan is quieter than it was before August 2021. It is not, however, more free.
Five Years of Consolidation
When the Taliban entered Kabul on August 15, 2021, they inherited a country dramatically different from the one they had ruled between 1996 and 2001. A generation of Afghans had grown up with access to schools and universities, professional employment, independent media, civil society organizations, and political institutions that, despite profound weaknesses, had created space for women and girls in public life.
The Taliban did not dismantle that progress in a single act. Instead, they built a system of restrictions that accumulated over time.
Girls were first excluded from secondary education. Women were subsequently barred from universities and from increasing areas of employment. Restrictions on movement, dress, public participation, and interaction with men outside their families narrowed the physical and social space women could occupy. Women working for humanitarian organizations and the United Nations faced additional restrictions, undermining both their livelihoods and the ability of aid organizations to reach Afghan women and children.
Five years later, Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are formally prohibited from education beyond the primary level. UNESCO estimates that approximately 2.4 million girls are excluded from secondary education. By contrast, nearly one million girls were enrolled in secondary school in 2021. The significance of those numbers extends far beyond education.
A girl removed from school today is a future teacher, physician, lawyer, engineer, journalist, civil servant, researcher, or community leader who may never have the opportunity to become what she could have been. When an entire generation is systematically excluded, the consequences become societal rather than individual. The loss is measured not only in missed classrooms but in diminished economic capacity, weakened institutions, poorer health outcomes, and a country deprived of the participation of half its population.
The restrictions have also become increasingly institutionalized. What might initially have seemed like a series of temporary decrees has developed into a system governing nearly every aspect of women’s lives. That distinction is important for understanding the Taliban’s fifth year in power. This is no longer simply a question of what restrictions the Taliban have imposed. It is a question of what kind of society those restrictions are creating.
Security Without Inclusion
There is a temptation, particularly after decades of war, to measure Afghanistan’s progress primarily through security. That measure cannot simply be dismissed. The reduction in conventional armed conflict has brought tangible benefits to civilians. Families who once lived with the constant threat of airstrikes, ground offensives, checkpoints, and shifting front lines have experienced a different security environment since 2021. UNAMA has explicitly recognized this improvement. The Taliban have also taken steps such as banning opium poppy cultivation, while seeking greater regional economic engagement. But security is not synonymous with human security.
A woman who is not being shot at but cannot attend university is living with one form of insecurity. A girl who is physically safe but prohibited from continuing her education is experiencing another. A journalist who is not on a battlefield but cannot report freely, a former judge who cannot safely practice law, or a woman humanitarian worker prevented from entering a UN compound is living under restrictions that shape the course of her life. The distinction becomes especially important in atrocity prevention.
Atrocity prevention is not limited to preventing mass killing. It also requires attention to the conditions that make populations vulnerable to systematic discrimination, persecution, exclusion, and abuse. The progressive removal of a population from public institutions does not become less consequential simply because it occurs without conventional warfare. In Afghanistan, the erosion has been remarkably systematic.
The Legal Question
The international legal response to Afghanistan has increasingly moved beyond political condemnation. In January 2025, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants for Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, alleging the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds. The prosecution’s application describes the severe deprivation of fundamental rights of women and girls, as well as people perceived by the Taliban as allies of women and girls, as part of a widespread and systematic attack on the civilian population. The significance of the proceedings extends beyond the two individuals named.
International criminal law is concerned with more than isolated violations. Crimes against humanity address certain acts when they form part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. The legal question, therefore, is not simply whether individual Afghan women have been denied education or employment. It is whether the cumulative system of deprivation constitutes persecution as an international crime. That question has particular significance because the restrictions are not random.
They are imposed through policy, enforced through institutions, reinforced through social controls, and increasingly embedded within the legal and administrative structures of the de facto authorities. TGR reported in February 2026 that a new Taliban criminal procedure code further deepened discrimination and repression, including by narrowing protections available to women experiencing domestic violence and imposing severe restrictions on dissent.
The legal framework matters because terminology matters. Calling systematic discrimination a human rights crisis describes the harm. Examining whether it constitutes an international crime asks a different question: who may ultimately bear responsibility for creating and enforcing it?
The Cost of Normalization
Five years after the Taliban takeover, the international community faces a difficult policy dilemma. Afghanistan cannot simply be abandoned. Twenty million people require humanitarian assistance in 2026, according to United Nations estimates, while restrictions affecting women and girls compound humanitarian needs. At the same time, the international community must engage with the de facto authorities on issues ranging from humanitarian access and counterterrorism to economic stability and regional security. Engagement, however, carries its own risks.
When governments engage with the Taliban, when diplomats meet Taliban officials, when economic agreements are negotiated, and when Afghanistan’s authorities participate in regional diplomacy, there is an unavoidable question about what becomes normalized in the process.
Engagement does not have to mean recognition. Nor should humanitarian assistance be withheld from civilians because of the conduct of those who govern them. But principled engagement requires maintaining a distinction between dealing with a de facto authority and accepting the system that authority has created. The distinction becomes harder to maintain as time passes. That distinction becomes harder to maintain as time passes.
The fifth anniversary matters precisely because five years is long enough for emergency conditions to become permanent ones. Restrictions introduced as temporary responses can become institutions. Children who were initially told they could not return to school may become young women who have never attended secondary school. A generation can grow up knowing only one political reality.
This is how normalization works. It does not require the world to approve of what is happening. It requires only that people become accustomed to it.
The danger is not only that repression continues. It is that the world begins to treat repression as the permanent condition of Afghan life.
An Afghanistan Still in Motion
Yet Afghanistan should not be understood solely through the politics of the Taliban. Afghan women and girls continue to learn where formal education is closed to them. UNESCO and other organizations support community-based education, literacy, skills development, and psychosocial programs that keep pathways to learning open.
Women continue to work where they can. Families continue to educate daughters through informal means. Afghan journalists continue to report. Civil society activists continue to document abuses. Afghan women outside the country continue to advocate for their communities and challenge the international community not to forget them. These efforts matter because repression is not the same thing as surrender.
The history of Afghanistan has repeatedly demonstrated that political systems can change. What is more difficult to recover is time. The years of education lost by a fourteen-year-old girl cannot simply be returned to her. The professional career interrupted in 2021 cannot be reconstructed as though the intervening years never happened. The institutions dismantled, and the civic space erased, cannot be rebuilt overnight.
Five years after the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan therefore stands at a complicated intersection of security, repression, humanitarian need, and international accountability. The country is no longer at war in the way it once was. But peace requires more than the absence of fighting. It requires institutions capable of protecting rights, laws capable of constraining power, and a society in which people are permitted to participate in shaping their own future.
For Afghan women and girls, that future remains profoundly restricted. For the international community, the challenge is to ensure that restriction does not become invisible simply because it has become familiar.
Atrocity Prevention Lens
Afghanistan demonstrates why atrocity prevention must extend beyond the immediate prevention of mass violence. The systematic exclusion of women and girls from education, employment, public life, and meaningful participation in society represents a sustained pattern of rights deprivation that can deepen vulnerability and institutionalize discrimination. When such restrictions become embedded in law, policy, and administrative practice, they can become normalized both within a society and internationally. Effective atrocity prevention therefore requires sustained attention to patterns of persecution, discrimination, impunity, and institutional erosion, while preserving accountability mechanisms and ensuring that engagement with de facto authorities does not come at the expense of civilian rights.
Legal Framework
Crimes Against Humanity
Crimes against humanity encompass certain acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population. Under the Rome Statute, these acts include persecution against an identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, or gender grounds, among other prohibited acts. The International Criminal Court’s Afghanistan investigation has examined allegations of persecution against women and girls and others perceived to support their rights, placing the treatment of women under the Taliban within an international criminal law framework.
Rome Statute and International Criminal Law
The Rome Statute establishes the jurisdiction and legal framework of the International Criminal Court and defines genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. International criminal law recognizes individual responsibility for serious international crimes, including where political leaders or other persons exercise authority over policies or conduct that meet the applicable legal requirements. In Afghanistan, the ICC Prosecutor has pursued allegations that senior Taliban officials bear responsibility for persecution on gender grounds.
International Human Rights Law
International human rights law protects fundamental rights and freedoms regardless of gender, political status, or the identity of the governing authority. Afghanistan remains bound by international human rights obligations arising from treaties to which it is a party, including protections relating to education, equality, non-discrimination, and fundamental freedoms. The systematic restriction of women and girls therefore raises questions not only of domestic policy but of Afghanistan’s continuing international legal obligations.
Rule of Law
The rule of law requires that governmental authority be exercised within a legal framework that protects fundamental rights and provides meaningful avenues for accountability. Where laws and institutions are used to institutionalize discrimination or deprive a population of fundamental rights, the existence of formal rules alone does not establish the rule of law. Afghanistan illustrates the broader principle that legal systems must protect rights and constrain the exercise of power rather than serve solely as instruments of authority.
Accountability and International Justice
International accountability mechanisms provide avenues for addressing serious violations when domestic institutions are unwilling or unable to provide meaningful justice. Accountability may involve international courts, national courts exercising appropriate jurisdiction, investigative mechanisms, sanctions, documentation, and other lawful measures. In Afghanistan, contained documentation and legal proceedings remain important not only for potential individual accountability but also for preserving an evidentiary record of violations that might otherwise become normalized or forgotten.
Suggested Citation
Kajs, Lara. “Five Years Under the Taliban: The Cost of Normalization.” Dispatches from the Field. The Genocide Report. Washington, DC, 10 September 2026.
Photo Credit
Afghan Women and Girls by Kenneth Taylor. Licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
About TGR
The Genocide Report (TGR) publishes analysis and educational resources on conflict, international law, and atrocity prevention. Its work seeks to bridge academic research, field realities, and public understanding of mass violence and civilian protection.
About the Author
Lara Kajs is the founder and executive director of The Genocide Report, a Washington, DC-based educational nonprofit focused on atrocity prevention and international law. She is the author of several field-based books on conflict, displacement, humanitarian crises, and international humanitarian law, drawing on extensive research and field experience in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan. Her writing and public speaking focus on atrocity crimes, forced displacement, the protection of civilians, and the legal frameworks governing armed conflict.