Lyse Doucet found Najia in a whitewashed basement south of Kabul, where a dozen young women make jam jars under Taliban rule. Najia, a 47-year-old Afghan entrepreneur and mother of nine children, says the world must talk to the Taliban in a different way because it is just not working.
Her workshop sits inside a wider squeeze on Afghan women and girls: Taliban authorities have barred girls and young women from secondary schools and universities, and women remain excluded from much of public life. The question now is whether the West can still shape Taliban rule at all, five years after Kabul fell.
Kabul women face narrower choices
Najia was married at 14, and her workshop now depends on women who still have a place to work even as their options shrink outside it. She said, "The lives of Afghan women have to change because we're losing hope". That sentence lands against the daily rules facing women who are told they must ask men to take their products to market.
At trade fairs, only men can sit at women’s stalls to show wares. The Taliban says women are not wearing proper hijab or head covering as the reason for the rules. For women trying to keep small businesses alive, the practical problem is simple: access to customers now passes through men.
The West and Taliban leverage
The West has not found a single answer. The United Nations warns that 22 million Afghans, nearly half the population, rely on some form of foreign assistance to survive, while the Taliban are collecting tax revenues and signing deals in mining, energy and more with Beijing, Moscow, Abu Dhabi and Tashkent. That leaves the Taliban with money and contacts even as their government stays outside formal recognition.
Russia is the only country to formally recognise Taliban rule, and the Taliban have not been allowed to take up their seat at the United Nations in New York. That split between de facto dealings and formal recognition gives the Taliban room to do business internationally without gaining full diplomatic legitimacy, which is why some governments keep talking even while sanctions remain in place.
Afghanistan after 15 August 2021
The Taliban swept into Kabul on 15 August 2021 and has tightened control since then, even as armed opposition groups based abroad and Islamic State fighters remain part of the security picture. International sanctions and aid cuts have fed Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis, but they have not produced the policy change many Western governments wanted.
Najia’s view is the most direct challenge to that stalemate. She wants a different kind of engagement, not because pressure has ended, but because pressure alone has not changed life for women like her or for the dozen young women working below ground in Kabul and the surrounding villages. The unresolved issue is what kind of contact could alter Taliban decisions without closing off the aid that 22 million Afghans still depend on.
