Neelab Noori was 13 years old when the Taliban walked into Kabul. The first thing she noticed was the silence where her school used to be. 

“Soon after the takeover, the first thing they did was close schools,” she said. She had been in eighth grade, attending both school and an academy, the kind of girl who had carefully mapped her bright future out in classrooms. That future dimmed overnight.

She waited two years. Then, in June 2023, her family left Afghanistan for Pakistan.

“A girl cannot fulfil her dreams there,” she said simply. “Colleges and universities for girls are closed. Only school until sixth grade is allowed. So we left.”

She is 17 now, speaking from Pakistan, where documentation issues have again stalled her education. 

“Sometimes I feel pissed,” she said, with the directness of someone who has run out of patience for diplomatic language. “If I can’t continue education here either, what’s the point of living here? In those times, I think about returning to Afghanistan.”

She paused. “But I know what’s there.”

Far from being an exceptional case, Neelab’s story reflects the lived reality of an entire generation of Afghan girls whose aspirations have been suspended by policies systematically excluding them from education, public life, and the possibility of shaping their own futures. 

A Government No One Chose

Four years after their forces swept into Kabul, the Taliban govern a nation of 40 million people who were never consulted about the takeover. Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s supreme leader, rules from Kandahar by religious decree. He has never faced a vote and likely never will.

The last elected Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, fled Kabul before the Taliban’s forces arrived in August 2021.

The Bertelsmann Transformation Index’s 2026 Afghanistan report found that all channels of public participation in governance are “de facto paralyzed,” with no elections, no jirgas, and no meaningful public consultations. The Taliban’s theological answer is that God guides the deserving ruler.

Most Afghans were not consulted on this theology either.

The composition of the government reflects its origins. The Middle East Institute’s Taliban Leadership Tracker, which maps over 1,200 senior and mid-level figures as of late 2025, found that 90 percent are ethnic Pashtuns. Hazaras, who comprise roughly 20 percent of the country’s population, and who have faced the Taliban’s most violent persecution in the past, hold just 0.7 percent of leadership positions. Not a single woman sits in the cabinet, nor in any local government office anywhere in the country.

Imtiaz Baloch, a researcher tracking political and security developments across the region, is precise about what this means: The Tabliban “do not fully represent Afghanistan’s diverse population,” he said. “Their support mainly comes from rural communities, while many urban residents, women, and ethnic minorities remain excluded. Governance is centralized and ideological, with little inclusivity, which is making it hard for the system to gain wider legitimacy.”

An Afghan scholar now living in Germany, who asked not to be named, went further. 

“This regime is a gift from regional and international players,” the scholar said. “Now it is a prison for its own people, and even more so for women, who face the harshest restrictions and oppression.”

The Erasure

Since 2021, the Taliban have issued more than 80 edicts targeting women’s rights, according to U.N. Women. Girls are banned from education above the sixth grade, leaving 2.2 million out of school. Women are barred from most professions, prohibited from walking alone in parks and going to gyms, and silenced from speaking on the radio. A December 2024 decree banned women from studying medicine or midwifery, closing one of the last professional doors that had remained ajar. More than 80 percent of women working in Afghan media have lost their jobs since the takeover.

The U.N. Sustainable Development Group estimates the annual cost of excluding women from employment at around $1 billion, roughly 5 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. According to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security Index 2025, Afghanistan ranked 181st out of 181 countries due to the severe restrictions and inequalities faced by women and girls in the country. The International Criminal Court in January 2025 applied for arrest warrants for Akhundzada and Taliban Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani on charges of persecution on gender grounds. Several countries have moved to refer the Taliban to the International Court of Justice under the convention against discrimination against women.

“[The] Taliban do claim women’s rights in the media,” she said. “But it is not actual. They only want to keep women in homes, doing household chores.” 

She thinks about the widows she knows, women who have no male relatives, who need to work to feed their families, who are forbidden from doing so and receive nothing in return. “Those women,” she said, “have no one.”

When asked what freedom means to her now, she did not hesitate. 

“Every person born must have the liberty to do what they want, for themselves, without fear. To decide their future without family or societal pressure,” she said. “There must be gender equality. There must be freedom of speech.” 

She says it like a list she has kept in her head for a long time.

What the World Gets Wrong

Both women interviewed for this article were asked the same question: What does the international community most misunderstand about Afghan women today?

Neelab answered without hesitation.

“I think international media has a misperception that all this is propaganda, and that women are actually safe and okay in Afghanistan,” she said. “But that’s not the case.”

Her frustration is not simply with the Taliban, but with the normalization of what has happened since 2021. As global attention shifts elsewhere, the exclusion of Afghan women risks becoming an accepted reality.

The scholar, now living in Germany, describes the issue through the lens of her own life. In Germany, she can study, speak freely, work, and make decisions about her future. The freedoms are so ordinary that they often go unnoticed.

“It is the same person,” she says, “but in one place completely free, and in the other constantly constrained.”

For Neelab, the path forward requires more than statements of concern. She points to divisions within the Taliban itself, noting that some members have expressed support for girls’ education and women’s participation in society.

“Force the Taliban to give women rights,” she said. “There are differences within the Taliban too. Use that. Women must be given their due Islamic rights.”