ISLAMABAD: Zalmay Khalilzad, the former US special envoy for Afghanistan during Donald Trump’s first term as president, said on Monday that Afghan deputy foreign minister Shir Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai’s remarks calling upon his government to scrap the ban on education for women was a “promising development”.
Stanikzai’s rare public criticism coincided with ongoing international pressure on Afghanistan’s leaders to lift restrictions on women’s access to public life in general and to allow girls to attend secondary schools and beyond. He made a direct public appeal to the country’s reclusive leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, to lift the ban and called the exclusion of girls from education an “injustice” on part of the Islamic Emirate against half of Afghanistan’s 40-mn population.
“The whole world has a problem with us on this issue. They criticise us for it. But the path we have taken is a matter of our own liking, not the Sharia,” Stanikzai said.
Welcoming the stance, Khalilzad highlighted that Stanikzai is an important IEA official who played a key role in the Doha negotiations. As special envoy for Afghanistan, Khalilzad was lead negotiator during the Doha talks.
He also asked Afghan religious scholars and leaders of the Islamic Emirate who privately oppose the ban on girls’ education to make their opposition public. Further, he emphasised that schools and universities should be reopened by the beginning of the new solar year, in late March.
After the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, Akhundzada had imposed his strict interpretation of Sharia law through dozens of decrees, mainly restricting girls’ access to education beyond the sixth grade and banning the majority of women from working or participating in public life.
Last August, the Taliban announced a new law on the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice, which bars women from traveling or using public transportation without a male guardian. The law requires women and girls to cover their faces in public and prohibits them from singing in public or letting their voices be heard outside the house.