As I write, former President Joe Biden is battling prostate cancer that has spread rapidly. His suffering deserves compassion, and I mean that sincerely. But compassion does not absolve accountability.
We are fast approaching the fifth anniversary of the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. It remains one of the defining foreign policy failures of the modern era, abruptly ending a twenty-year Western commitment and creating a vacuum that radical extremists rushed to fill.
Executive orders directed General Kenneth McKenzie and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to abandon Bagram Airfield overnight, leaving intelligence networks across Central Asia in disarray. Western forces left behind seven billion dollars in advanced military equipment. American leadership surrendered tens of millions of vulnerable people to a medieval religious dictatorship. Half a decade later, the consequences of that surrender continue to mount.
The regime has built a totalitarian state around the systematic oppression of women, with Afghan human rights groups rightly describing it as a nationwide gender lockdown. Radical Islamist dogma governs every aspect of Taliban rule. Sheikh Mohammad Khalid Hanafi directs the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, commanding thousands of morality police who enforce the regime’s suffocating social order and make a woman’s very presence in public life punishable by law. Under Article 13 of the Vice and Virtue decree, the state defines a woman’s body, face, and voice as awrah—something forbidden from public display or expression. Even making eye contact with an unrelated man is deemed unlawful.
Armed morality inspectors have sweeping authority to beat, fine, and detain women for days without access to legal counsel or basic judicial oversight.
