Women do not matter in Afghanistan any more.
The Taliban, in effective control of the country since the chaotic withdrawal of US and other forces more than a year ago, have gone on deepening the pillars of medievalism one after another despite reassuring the world it would govern differently from the way it did in its earlier phase in power.
As the months have passed, that wished-for difference has not happened. Afghans are hungry, unemployed, and abandoned both by the Taliban and the world. The turban-wearing men who have the country in their grip desperately need assistance from abroad to have Kabul rise to its feet again.
The world, of course, has other ideas. It would like the Taliban to respect human rights, to ensure transparency in government, to guarantee education and employment opportunities for Afghan women before the Taliban can have a seat at the table with other nations. Afghan money is frozen in Western financial institutions and nothing the Taliban can do to bring it back will help.
And let it not be forgotten that Afghanistan, indeed the plight of its people, is fading as a priority on the global scale. Since February this year, the West -- with governments which matter on the scale of geo-politics -- has remained obsessed with punishing Vladimir Putin's Russia over Ukraine.
No conversation in Western political circles is complete without a Demonisation, with or without cause, of Moscow in its ongoing conflict with Kyiv. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has just been to the US, where he happily spoke of Russian crimes before a joint session of Congress. America's Republicans and Democrats, for once united around a cause, gave him a standing ovation.
Even as the Ukrainian leader was being lionized in Washington, back in Kabul terrible things were happening. Girls have been asked to stay home, for going to schools will be a waste of time for them. Young women who had believed in the Taliban promise that education at the university level for them would continue now know the hollowness of the pledges mouthed by the men who control Kabul today.
These men have decided, in the infinity of their ignorance, that women do not have to go to university to get an education. Indeed, they do not need education. Life for them is in the home. On the streets, it is in the asphyxiation of head-to-toe clothing they need to suffer through, under the eagle eyes of all those gun-toting, self-appointed guardians of morality.
And so misogyny is at play. When men in their crude, twisted interpretations of faith take it upon themselves to decree how women should behave and what education they will or will not need, what they will wear and how they will wear it, it is hate which becomes the platform of policy. But, again, since when have the Taliban been sophisticated enough to go for policy formulation?
The analogy might not appeal to some, but what the Taliban did in its earlier stint in power and what it is doing today are what the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia once. The difference is that where Pol Pot and his colleagues looked upon the entire population of the country as a herd of sheep to be taken out to pasture and stripped of its dignity, the Taliban have focused on seeing women as property they can own and command and humiliate in the name of religion.
The consequences have been horrendous. With the Taliban now asking foreign NGOs not to have women on their staff, Afghanistan has successfully retraced its steps back to ignorance masquerading as power. Denigration of women, always a staple of conversation for half-baked clerics around the world, is now once more an established reality.
In the name of morality, in their misplaced supervision of women's modesty, the denizens of the dark now in control of Afghanistan have shut the door to the future once again. Time not just stands still in Afghanistan today, it has slipped back to where it was centuries ago. Modernity on the watch of a handful of enlightened monarchs, inspiring as it was, now seems to have been a blip on the screen of Afghan history. Life remains bare, as bare as the mountains which define the country's landscape.
It is intriguing how certain Islamic societies have often taken it upon themselves -- and these societies are a rowdy mob of men who seriously believe they have a covenant with God to pronounce judgement on every facet of life -- to decree how women should comport themselves in public. The young Mahsa Amini lost her life in Iran because the so-called guardians of the Islamic revolution did not think her head was covered in the religious way.
The ayatollahs, who ought to have instilled enlightenment in the souls of the people they have controlled since the authoritarian Shah fled in 1979, have on their own slipped down the ladder of leadership. The obsession with women's attire remains strong. This preoccupation with women's bodies and clothing interferes with the otherwise strong presence Iran has stamped on the world stage.
Middle-eastern rulers beholden to the West dread Iranian influence in the region. Israel's right and far-right lose sleep over what they perceive to be growing Iranian military might, especially in relation to its nuclear programme. Iran, briefly, is a nation not to be trifled with. Stability around the globe is dependent on the degree to which the developed world is ready and willing to mend fences with Tehran.
And yet, owing to such unwarranted intrusions in women's lives by the ruling circles in Iran and Afghanistan, the light of wisdom does not shine in Tehran and Kabul. Darkness shrouds these beautiful countries, both of which are inheritors of great traditions in poetry, religion, mysticism, and raw military power.
Women in Kabul were once emblematic of modernity, conversant with the ways of the world, and at ease in deliberations on politics. In Tehran the vibrancy of life was reflected in the lives of its women as they went to university and went out into the world to speak for their country.
In both countries women once shone in their wisdom, the light from which illuminated their compatriots. It is a scandal to humiliate these women, any women, in any form anywhere and at any time.
Poetry and aesthetics come under assault when women become targets of men who begin to play God and in that role decide how women will live and how they will die when the women so much as hint at a display of displeasure at the decrees pronounced by these gods with clay feet.
Those empty schools and universities in Kabul will soon go the way, metaphorically, of the Bamiyan statues. That ubiquitous chador in Tehran will worsen life for Iran's women, for it will stifle the growth of intellect and sense of freedom in them.
Modern times call for modern governance. Anything less pushes a society back into primitivism, even as the rest of the world forges ahead.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.