Five Years the World Chose Silence

That date has passed and almost no one noticed. The fifteenth of August came and went like an ordinary day—without commemoration, without headlines, without a single official statement worth mentioning. Yet five years ago, that date marked the day Kabul fell, when a group hunted as terrorists for two decades, responsible for thousands of civilian and security personnel deaths in Afghanistan, walked into the presidential palace and declared itself the government. The Taliban called it a day of victory. For half of Afghanistan’s population, it was the day the systematic erasure of their presence in public space began. This year, the world did not even bother to bid farewell to that date.

Let us count what has actually happened in these five years, because these figures are rarely mentioned anymore. Since August 2021, girls have been banned from continuing secondary school. In December 2022, universities were closed to all female students. Women were banned from working in almost all sectors except very limited healthcare, banned from working for local and international NGOs, banned from entering parks, gyms, and public baths. In 2023, a new decree prohibited women from being visible from the windows of their own homes. In 2024, the Taliban’s morality law went further: women’s voices in public space, singing, reading aloud, even speaking too loudly, were categorised as aurat that must be concealed. It is no longer about access to education or employment. It is a project of erasing women’s existence from public life, carried out gradually, documented, and known to anyone willing to look.

What makes these five years more painful is not only the Taliban’s policies themselves, but also the silence that envelops them. Compare this with how quickly the world moved for Ukraine, for Gaza—sanctions imposed within days, emergency summits convened, hashtags filling timelines within hours. Afghanistan has not received the same treatment, not because their suffering is lighter, but because there is no longer any major strategic interest at stake there.

The United Nations did once label the Taliban’s policies as gender apartheid, a term weighty in international law, but the label stopped on paper. There is no enforcement mechanism, no tribunal, no serious multilateral pressure. Even the global feminist movement, so vocal on women’s rights issues in many other parts of the world, has barely spoken for Afghanistan over the past two years. Solidarity, it turns out, has an expiry date.

This is not merely a moral failure; it is a naked case study of how international human rights norms actually operate. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), R2P, the entire architecture of international law built to protect vulnerable groups, has proven to function only when geopolitical interests align with it. When that interest disappears, when the US has withdrawn its troops, when Afghanistan is no longer relevant in great power calculations, those norms turn into symbolic statements without teeth. The world has not forgotten Afghanistan out of ignorance. The world has chosen to no longer care because there is nothing left to gain from caring.

The consequences of that silence are not merely rhetorical. Several international mental health institutions have reported a surge in depression and suicide attempts among young Afghan women since 2021, while thousands of girls can now only learn through underground schools that risk being raided at any moment. The diaspora of professional women—doctors, lecturers, journalists—has flowed out of the country, leaving Afghanistan to lose a generation of its own educated workforce. This is not a humanitarian crisis that is vague or difficult to verify; it is a crisis that is measurable and documented, and still not enough to stir the global conscience.

Most ironically, the Taliban themselves have never hidden the project. There is no complex disinformation to unravel, no propaganda requiring re-verification by investigative journalists. Every decree is announced openly, every school closure is a fact verifiable within hours. The gap lies not in information, but in the will to act upon that information.

Therefore, the question that should be asked is no longer ‘what can the world do for Afghanistan’, because the answer has already been given through these five years of silence: not much, and not much more to come. The more honest question is how much longer global civil society can call itself concerned with universal human rights while half the population of a country is erased from public space without any meaningful pressure accompanying it.

Five years have passed just like that. The question now is whether the sixth year will be equally silent, or whether there is still anyone willing to remember that the silence is a choice, not an inevitability.