The Taliban banned Afghan girls from school 1,199 days ago. I have been counting.
As a lawyer, I spend my days arguing about rights, their definitions, their limits, and their enforcement. We argue about them in courts, in op-eds, on television panels where men in suits debate the finer points of constitutional guarantees.
But there are moments when the law's architecture feels obscenely insufficient, when the distance between a right enshrined on paper and a right lived in a girl's body becomes so vast that the whole enterprise of legal commentary seems like an elaborate performance of indifference. The slow, deliberate destruction of female education in Afghanistan is one of those moments. And the international community's retreat from that crisis is another.
Let me be precise, as lawyers are trained to be. What has happened in Afghanistan is not a cultural dispute, not a governance matter internal to a sovereign state, not a nuanced policy disagreement requiring diplomatic sensitivity.
It is, by any serious reading of international law, a systematic, state-sanctioned campaign of gender persecution. The Taliban have constructed a legal architecture, if one can call it that, specifically designed to excise women from public life. They have used the instruments of government to ban girls from secondary education, to shut university doors on women mid-degree, and to criminalise the very act of teaching a girl to read.
This is not tradition. This is not religion. This is apartheid organised by gender, and the world's failure to name it as such is its own form of complicity.
I speak as someone with a particular vantage point. Pakistan shares a 2,600-kilometre border with Afghanistan. We share ethnicity, language, faith, and, whether we acknowledge it or not, consequence.
The Taliban did not emerge from a vacuum. The ideology that now governs Kabul was, for decades, cultivated, funded, and at various points celebrated in proximity to Pakistani soil. That history imposes on us, as Pakistanis, a moral obligation that goes beyond the comfortable distance of disapproval.
We are not simply observers. We are, in some measure, inheritors of this catastrophe. And so, when I write about what is happening to Afghan women, I do not write from detachment. I write from the particular discomfort of proximity.
Roya, who runs another hidden class, told me that the families of her students have largely surrendered. Most of her girls are now married off or engaged
In the weeks leading up to Afghanistan's new academic year, sources spoke to women who are doing something that would be, in any just world, entirely unremarkable: they are teaching.
They are running secret classes inside their homes, in whispered sessions, at personal legal and physical risk, keeping the machinery of learning alive for girls who have nowhere else to go. What they told me did not merely move me. It indicted us all.
Nahid, one such teacher, told me that her students no longer believe schools will reopen. "In the past," she said, "they held onto hope. Now they are convinced that, as long as the Taliban rule, they will never study again."
The hope, she explained, has contracted into something desperate and small: her students now only ask whether she can issue them a handwritten certificate when they finish, some fragile scrap of paper that might one day unlock a single door. Nahid herself was denied her university diploma when the ban fell mid-studies.
Every time she applies for work, employers demand a degree she was never permitted to complete. As a lawyer, I recognise this pattern immediately. It is the logic of a system designed not merely to exclude, but to ensure that exclusion compounds, to make the punishment for being female self-replicating and inescapable.
Roya, who runs another hidden class, told me that the families of her students have largely surrendered. Most of her girls are now married off or engaged.
Their families, seeing no institutional future for their daughters, have made the only rational calculation available to them under the circumstances: close the door before someone else does it more violently.
And Farida, whose class has just been shut down not by a Taliban raid, but by funding collapse, spoke with a quiet devastation that I cannot set aside. When she told her students the class was over, they wept, she said, not like students losing a course, but like mourners at a grave.
This brings me to the point that I find most legally and morally urgent, and the one that receives the least attention in international discourse. These underground classrooms are not closing because of Taliban enforcement.
They are closing because international donors have stopped funding them. The world produced its outrage on schedule: statements, summits, hashtags, tears at podiums.
They do not require our pity. They require our consistency. They require that the rights we say we believe in not be subject to the news cycle, to donor fatigue, to the attention span of international institutions
And then, as always happens, the cameras moved on. The funding dried up. And the girls remained in the dark, still waiting.
What is the legal significance of this withdrawal? In international human rights law, we distinguish between acts of commission and acts of omission.
States and international bodies can violate the right to education not only by actively obstructing it, but by failing to take reasonable steps to protect it when they have the capacity to do so. The international community had both the knowledge and the means to sustain these underground networks of learning.
The decision to defund them through budget cuts, through the rerouting of humanitarian aid to newer, more photogenic crises, through the quiet administrative decision to classify Afghanistan as a chronic rather than acute emergency is not a neutral act. It is a choice.
And choices of this kind, made by powerful actors with full knowledge of the consequences, are not beyond the reach of moral accountability, even when they evade legal remedy.
Different American presidents have found different words to dismiss Afghanistan: "hellhole", "godforsaken place". From my position here in Lahore, watching a neighbouring country and its women be written off in the language of contempt, I find myself asking a harder question.
Is this merely the rhetoric of individual leaders, or does it reveal how the entire architecture of international relations has privately decided to regard a country and its people? Because rhetoric can be denied, but funding patterns cannot.
Visa restrictions cannot. The systematic defunding of the only educational infrastructure available to Afghan girls cannot.
Afghanistan was not born the way the world now describes it. It was built into this over decades, through interventions that served the interests of external powers, through the arming of factions whose ideology was never a secret.
It was also shaped through the abandonment that followed each intervention once it ceased to be strategically convenient. Pakistan knows this history more intimately than most.
And Pakistan, too, has obligations it has not fully met—obligations towards the Afghan women and girls who have sought refuge here, obligations to push back against an ideology that does not stop at the Durand Line.
As a legal commentator, I am sometimes asked what the international community can "realistically" do. It is a question designed to lower ambition to the level of existing will.
Let me answer it directly. Fund the underground classrooms not as charity, but as the fulfilment of obligations undertaken under international law. Sustain the teachers who are risking their lives to keep these networks alive.
Apply meaningful diplomatic and economic pressure on the Taliban, not condemnation without consequence. Stop issuing statements about women's rights in Afghanistan while quietly cutting the programmes that make those rights liveable, however partially, however provisionally.
The women of Afghanistan have not surrendered. They have kept this project of education alive through bans, raids, internet shutdowns, funding collapses, and the grinding weight of a world that performs concern while withdrawing support.
They do not require our pity. They require our consistency. They require that the rights we say we believe in not be subject to the news cycle, to donor fatigue, to the attention span of international institutions.
I am a lawyer. I believe in the force of argument, in the slow work of building the case, in the obligation to keep speaking even when the audience has stopped listening.
But I also know that an argument without consequence is ornament. The question now is not whether Afghan girls have a right to education—that is settled, in law, in morality, in every framework that claims to take human dignity seriously.
The question is whether the powerful will finally decide that this right is worth protecting with something more than words.
That question is addressed, with equal force, to the international community, to the Pakistani state and its establishment, and to every one of us who holds the privilege of an education and calls ourselves, with any seriousness, a defender of rights.
The flame is still burning. Barely. The question is whether we let it go out.