Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Rina Amiri, an Afghan-born American scholar and mediator who worked at the State Department under previous President Barack Obama, will be named special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights.
Blinken said Amiri will address topics of “vital relevance to me” and the rest of President Joe Biden’s cabinet, months after the US finished its 20-year war in Afghanistan. “We want a peaceful, stable, and secure Afghanistan,” Blinken said in a statement, “where all Afghans may live and flourish in political, economic, and social inclusion.” During its 1996-2001 administration, which was overthrown by a US invasion, the Taliban imposed an ultra-conservative form of Islam on Afghanistan, notably prohibiting women from working and girls from attending school.
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Despite Taliban promises to act differently following their takeover in August, many women are still unable to return to work, and girls are disproportionately excluded from secondary education. The Taliban said on Sunday that women would not be permitted to travel large distances without the presence of a male guard. “I wonder how those who rehabilitated the Taliban by convincing the world that they had grown explain the Taliban’s reintroduction of regressive and harsh practices against women,” Amiri said on Twitter soon before her appointment.
The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice has previously requested that television stations stop airing dramas and soap operas starring women actors, and that female television journalists wear headscarves. Afghan women have continued to speak out, notably through infrequent public demonstrations. Amiri’s family moved to California from Afghanistan when she was a toddler.
She became outspoken about Afghans living under Taliban rule, especially women, while still a student as the September 11 attacks prompted the US war. She went on to become an adviser to Richard Holbrooke, the storied US diplomat whose last assignment was on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and has also worked with the United Nations. In a recent essay, Amiri called for “principled yet pragmatic diplomatic engagement” with the Taliban while continuing to hold off diplomatic recognition.
“The United States and Europe should also go beyond limiting engagement with the Taliban for the purposes of evacuating their citizens and allies and coordinating humanitarian access,” Amiri, now at New York University, wrote in Foreign Affairs in September. “Humanitarian aid alone will not prevent the collapse of the economy or forestall further radicalization and instability.”
She said that regional players such as the Taliban’s historic ally Pakistan have not adequately included women’s rights in their calls on the Taliban to be more inclusive. But she also doubted that Afghans, most of whom were born after the Taliban’s last regime, would accept a return to the previous treatment of women, saying that the country has “internalized the progress and cultural changes of the past 20 years. “In a letter last month to Biden, all 24 women serving in the US Senate urged him to develop an “interagency plan” to support Afghan women’s rights.”
Lacking a legitimate Afghan government and military forces to protect them, women and girls are now suffering the predations of a Taliban regime with a track record of brutalizing, isolating and denying them life and liberty,” they wrote. US policymakers frequently highlighted the treatment of women when then president George W. Bush ordered the invasion. Biden was a longstanding critic of America’s longest war. In a fiery exchange with Holbrooke recounted in George Packer’s biography of the diplomat, the then vice president was quoted as shouting at him, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights!”