Taliban could undo advances made in Afghanistan women's rights: US report

The withdrawal of US and international forces from Afghanistan, which is set to be completed by September 2021, has raised fears that return of Taliban rule would risk undoing the gains made in women's rights.

According to Business Recorder, the two-page National Intelligence Council declassified document states: "The Taliban remains broadly consistent in its restrictive approach to women's rights and would roll back much of the past two decades' progress if the group regained national power."

Taliban's views have not changed since their time in power between 1996 and the US military's 2001 intervention.

At that time, the Taliban imposed their fundamentalist view of religion by prohibiting women from studying or working.

The report further notes that the group has seen little change in its leadership, remains "inflexible" in negotiations and "enforces strict social constraints in areas that it already controls.

Some group leaders have made public commitments to respecting women's rights, but only as a condition of the Taliban's fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia law, or Islamic law, according to the report.

"If the Taliban were again Afghanistan's dominant power, we assess that any prospect for moderating the group's policies toward women would lie with ethnic minorities' ability to maintain local variation and technological development," the report said, referring to the greater exposure to the world Afghans have gotten due to cell phones.

According to the report authors, the progress of the last 20 years is fragile and imbalanced, and depends heavily on international pressure, suggesting that such development would be "at risk" after the withdrawal of foreign forces, "even without Taliban efforts to reverse it."

( With inputs from ANI )