Summary
Sher Abbas Stanikzai, a senior Taliban official, publicly criticized the group’s ban on education for Afghan women and girls, urging Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada to reverse the policy.
Speaking in Khost province, he condemned the bans as unjust and unsupported by Islamic law, depriving 20 million women of their rights.
This marks Stanikzai’s strongest call for change.
The international community, including Malala Yousafzai and the U.N., continues to pressure the Taliban on this issue, linking education access to potential recognition of their government.
I actually don’t know nearly enough about this situation to comment like that. Incremental progress is good, and sometimes lasts, but is that what’s happening here? This is an autocracy. We actually had very radical progress the wrong way in the last few years. The idea of rolling it back a bit is probably part of palace intrigue of some kind, and probably related to foreign pressure from people like the UAE, but how exactly?
(Also, radical progress has always gone funny to date, but even when it fails it has a way of planting seeds. In a lot of ways the French Revolution is still going and basically why we have democracy, so there’s nuance)
Anyway, I’d just take issue with the wording of “hero”. I still agree that treating Afghan women somewhat like humans would be better.
I guess I was just being facetious that the guy sounds like a Taliban moderate, like he’s not so radical that he’d not kill women and gay people, he’s the compromise candidate who will only kill gay people.
It just feels like a strong parallel to US politicians who are all for not killing women via denial of abortions, but are still for killing poor people and workers via denial of insurance.