Merry Christmas; but today is not a very Merry Christmas today!
On Tuesday, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Higher Education instructed every public and private university in the country to suspend education for female students until further notice. The order was effective immediately. By Wednesday morning, women arriving at universities were being stopped at the gates and told they could no longer enter.
The decision extends a pattern that has become increasingly difficult to describe as temporary. Most Afghan girls have already been prevented from attending secondary school beyond sixth grade. Women have faced expanding restrictions on employment, movement and public life, including rules governing dress and requirements concerning male guardianship. In November, women were prohibited from entering parks and gyms. The university ban now closes one of the few major educational spaces that had remained available to them.
There is an obvious moral judgement here. Denying women access to university because they are women is discriminatory and violates the principle that educational opportunity should not depend on sex. But stopping at that judgement leaves an important political question unanswered. Why would the Taliban impose a policy that appears so obviously damaging to Afghanistan itself?
Afghanistan is already one of the poorest countries in the world. Its economy contracted dramatically after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. International assistance fell, foreign reserves became inaccessible, unemployment and poverty increased, and the country remains dependent on humanitarian support. Afghanistan desperately needs skilled workers, doctors, teachers, administrators and entrepreneurs.
Preventing women from becoming those people makes the economic problem worse.
This is particularly obvious in healthcare. Conservative rules concerning interaction between unrelated men and women create strong demand for female doctors and nurses because many Afghan women need or prefer female medical professionals. Yet a government cannot indefinitely demand female healthcare workers while preventing the next generation from attending medical school.
The policy contains an internal contradiction.
But perhaps it only looks contradictory because we are assuming the Taliban’s principal objective is maximising Afghanistan’s economic development.
Governments do not always optimise GDP.
They optimise according to whatever objectives their leaders value.
For a liberal democracy, those objectives might include economic growth, individual rights, electoral support and social welfare in varying proportions. For a revolutionary ideological movement, preserving a particular conception of social order may rank much higher.
The Taliban’s decisions become more intelligible when analysed through that framework.
Its leadership appears willing to accept lower economic growth, greater diplomatic isolation and weaker state capacity in exchange for enforcing its interpretation of Islamic social organisation, particularly concerning gender.
That does not make the policy rational in any universal sense.
It makes it instrumentally rational relative to a different objective function.
This distinction matters because foreign governments frequently assume that economic incentives will eventually force ideological regimes towards moderation. The argument is straightforward: exclusion from international finance and recognition is costly, therefore sufficiently high costs should encourage the government to change behaviour.
Sometimes that works.
Sometimes ideology changes the government’s willingness to pay.
If Taliban leaders value preserving their preferred social order more strongly than they value additional foreign investment or diplomatic recognition, threatening to withhold those benefits has less leverage than outsiders expect.
Sanctions and diplomatic pressure do not operate through some automatic economic mechanism.
They operate by changing incentives.
Their effectiveness therefore depends on what the target values.
This is a basic principle of coercive diplomacy that appeared earlier this year with Russia. Increasing the cost of a policy changes behaviour only when the additional cost exceeds the value the government assigns to continuing the policy.
The Taliban may be demonstrating that international recognition is less valuable to its leadership than outsiders hoped.
When the movement returned to Kabul in August 2021, there was considerable discussion about whether the “new Taliban” might govern differently from the movement that controlled most of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Taliban officials spoke about women’s rights within their interpretation of Islamic law and attempted to reassure foreign governments that Afghanistan would not simply return to the political order of the 1990s.
There were reasons to watch before reaching conclusions. Political movements can change over twenty years. The Taliban had experienced two decades of insurgency, diplomacy and interaction with foreign states.
But evidence matters more than rhetoric.
The restrictions imposed since the takeover increasingly suggest that whatever tactical differences exist within the movement, the political space available to Afghan women is contracting substantially.
The secondary-school decision is particularly revealing. Taliban officials repeatedly suggested that closures were temporary while appropriate arrangements were developed. Yet girls remain excluded from most secondary education. The university decision now moves in the same direction.
Repeated temporary restrictions eventually become policy.
This should change how international governments evaluate Taliban promises.
Credibility is accumulated through behaviour.
A government cannot repeatedly say restrictions are temporary while expanding them and still expect outsiders to assign the same probability to future assurances.
Again, credibility behaves like capital.
Once spent, promises become more expensive.
The university ban also demonstrates that authoritarian control is not only about preventing citizens from voting. It can operate through control over human capital.
Education changes more than wages.
It changes information, social networks, expectations and individual autonomy.
A university student meets people outside their family and immediate community. They encounter different ideas. They acquire qualifications that can produce independent income. They become more capable of participating in professional and political life.
Education therefore redistributes power inside society.
This is one reason authoritarian or highly patriarchal systems can view women’s education as politically threatening even when it is economically productive.
An educated woman has more outside options.
She can earn income.
She may marry later.
She may have fewer children.
She can access information independently.
She becomes less economically dependent on male relatives.
Those effects alter bargaining power inside households and communities.
The economic return to education is therefore also a political return.
If a regime’s preferred social order depends partly on maintaining particular gender hierarchies, education can undermine that hierarchy even while making the country richer.
Seen from that perspective, the Taliban’s policy becomes less mysterious.
It is not merely sacrificing economic growth accidentally.
It may be sacrificing some economic growth to preserve a distribution of social power.
This is why describing every discriminatory policy as irrational can actually weaken analysis. Institutions that are terrible for society can still serve the interests or ideological objectives of the people controlling them.
Slavery was economically and morally destructive for enormous numbers of people while providing benefits to slaveholders.
Corrupt patronage systems reduce national efficiency while benefiting political networks.
Restrictions on women’s employment reduce aggregate output while preserving particular household and social hierarchies.
Bad institutions persist partly because their costs and benefits are distributed differently.
The relevant question is therefore not simply whether Afghanistan would be richer if women could study.
It obviously would possess a larger pool of human capital.
The political question is who gains power when women study, and who believes they lose it?
That is political economy.
Human capital also produces intergenerational effects. Educated mothers tend to have children with better educational and health outcomes, while female labour-force participation increases household income and expands the productive capacity of the economy.
Preventing university education therefore does not merely reduce the opportunities of women currently enrolled.
It affects Afghanistan’s future stock of skills.
A student removed from medical school today is a doctor who may not exist five years from now.
A student removed from teacher training means future pupils lose a teacher.
A woman prevented from studying engineering means infrastructure loses a potential engineer.
The policy compounds over time.
This is why educational exclusion can damage development long after the original decree disappears.
Human capital takes years to build.
A government can reopen a university tomorrow.
It cannot instantly produce the cohort of graduates who would have completed their education during the years it remained closed.
Lost education creates a form of economic scarring.
Afghanistan can particularly ill afford that loss because decades of war have already damaged its human capital and encouraged skilled workers to leave.
The Taliban takeover generated another wave of emigration among educated Afghans. Restricting education creates further incentives for families with resources to leave if they want daughters to study.
That produces brain drain.
The people most capable of contributing to rebuilding the country become the people with the strongest incentives to escape it.
Again, the policy can become self-reinforcing. As educated citizens leave, the domestic constituency capable of challenging restrictive policy becomes smaller. The state loses skills while the political leadership faces less organised opposition from professional groups.
An economically damaging outcome can therefore provide a political benefit to rulers who value control more highly than growth.
This is one of the darker trade-offs in authoritarian development.
Governments do not necessarily want citizens to be poor. But some may prefer a poorer society that is easier to control over a richer society that is harder to control.
China demonstrates that authoritarianism does not require choosing poverty. The Communist Party has spent decades encouraging education, urbanisation and technological development while constructing sophisticated mechanisms of political control.
The Taliban possesses a very different ideology and much weaker administrative capacity.
It appears to be making a different trade-off.
This should make us cautious about assuming all authoritarian governments converge towards the same developmental model.
Ideology matters.
Institutions matter.
History matters.
Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis also makes the restriction particularly severe because women’s participation is essential to delivering aid. In many conservative Afghan communities, male humanitarian workers cannot easily interact with women. Female workers therefore provide access to households and populations that male workers may struggle to reach.
Restricting women’s employment can consequently reduce the effectiveness of humanitarian assistance.
The Taliban may then demand greater international aid while simultaneously imposing rules that make aid harder to deliver.
Again, this can look contradictory if humanitarian welfare is assumed to be the government’s dominant objective.
It becomes more coherent if ideological control outranks administrative efficiency.
This creates a difficult problem for international organisations. Humanitarian agencies do not want to abandon Afghan citizens because of decisions made by the Taliban. Cutting assistance can punish precisely the people suffering under Taliban rule.
Yet continuing assistance without conditions can reduce the economic costs imposed on the Taliban by its own policies.
Humanitarian aid can therefore create moral hazard at the level of governance.
The international community pays part of the cost of policies it opposes because refusing to pay would harm innocent people.
The Taliban understands that dilemma.
This does not mean humanitarian assistance should stop.
Allowing civilians to starve in an attempt to change government behaviour would be morally indefensible and may not work politically.
It means aid needs to be designed, where possible, to reach citizens without unnecessarily strengthening the institutions responsible for repression.
That is extraordinarily difficult when those institutions control territory.
Again, there is no clean policy.
Recognition creates a similar dilemma. No country has yet broadly accepted the Taliban government as possessing normal international legitimacy. The Taliban wants access to diplomatic recognition, financial institutions and frozen Afghan assets.
Foreign governments possess leverage through those mechanisms.
But leverage decreases if the Taliban believes recognition can be postponed indefinitely without threatening its domestic survival.
This is why economic coercion is often much less powerful against ideologically committed governments than policy discussions assume.
Citizens suffer first.
Leaders can redistribute the cost.
The government then blames foreign sanctions for hardship.
The outside world blames government policy.
Ordinary people become trapped between both.
Afghanistan has experienced versions of this dynamic repeatedly.
There is also a broader question about sovereignty. Taliban officials can argue that Afghanistan is an independent country and foreign governments have no right to dictate its educational policies.
Formally, states possess enormous authority over domestic institutions.
But sovereignty does not mean immunity from judgement or consequences.
Other governments cannot necessarily force Afghanistan to educate women.
They can decide whether to recognise the government, provide development assistance, maintain sanctions or cooperate diplomatically.
Sovereignty gives governments jurisdiction.
It does not guarantee international approval.
The more interesting argument concerns whether women’s education should be treated as a culturally relative policy preference or a universal right.
I think the answer has to be universal.
Cultural diversity deserves substantial respect because societies reasonably organise family, religion and public life differently.
But cultural autonomy cannot become a blanket defence for coercive exclusion imposed on individuals who themselves want another option.
The female students arriving at university gates this week were not outsiders demanding that Afghanistan become culturally Western.
They were Afghans trying to continue their education.
That matters.
The relevant conflict is therefore not simply “Western values versus Afghan values”.
Afghanistan contains competing Afghan values.
Women protesting the restrictions are Afghan.
Male professors opposing the ban are Afghan.
Conservative clerics supporting it are Afghan.
The Taliban does not possess exclusive ownership of Afghan culture simply because it controls the state.
Governments often attempt to transform political preferences into national authenticity.
They say their policy represents tradition, religion or the nation, making domestic opponents appear foreign-influenced.
That is politically powerful because it moves the argument from “is this policy good?” to “are you really one of us?”
The second question is much harder to contest.
Iran uses similar rhetoric against protesters.
Russia uses it against political opponents.
Nationalist movements across democracies do too.
The antidote is recognising that cultures are internally plural.
There is rarely one authentic national position.
Political authority cannot manufacture cultural unanimity.
The Taliban can prohibit women from entering university.
It cannot demonstrate from that prohibition that Afghan women did not want to enter.
That difference between compliance and consent returns again.
Authoritarian governments are extremely good at producing visible compliance.
The gates close.
Students disappear from classrooms.
Statistics eventually show fewer women enrolled.
From the outside, society can begin looking consistent with the government’s ideology.
But the observed behaviour was produced through coercion.
We should not infer preference from it.
A woman staying home after being legally barred from university has not revealed that she prefers staying home.
This sounds obvious.
Political systems repeatedly confuse the two.
That is why rights matter.
Rights protect choices against governments that would otherwise interpret their ability to prohibit behaviour as evidence that the behaviour does not belong in society.
The university ban therefore concerns more than education.
It concerns who gets to decide the range of lives Afghan women are permitted to construct.
Education expands that range.
The Taliban is narrowing it.
That may preserve the social order its leadership wants.
It will also make Afghanistan poorer, less skilled and more isolated.
Perhaps the most important point is that the Taliban appears willing to accept that trade.
Foreign governments should design policy accordingly.
Economic incentives will matter only when they target something the leadership values enough to exchange.
Moral condemnation will matter only if it changes domestic or international political costs.
Humanitarian assistance will remain necessary because Afghan citizens should not become bargaining instruments.
And predictions that economic necessity will inevitably produce moderation should be treated sceptically.
Governments do not always choose prosperity.
Sometimes power determines what prosperity is worth.
