I was talking to a teenage girl in Afghanistan last week. She was on her laptop and I was on mine. She was explaining to me how she came to understand that women don’t have the temperament to be politicians.
And then she vanished. One moment she was there. The next moment — gone.
She hadn’t shut off her computer. She had lost internet access, just like everyone else in Afghanistan. Tens of millions of people went dark in an unprecedented nationwide internet shutdown that lasted more than two days. No phone calls, no text messaging, no emails, no social media — nothing. A complete blackout for everyone in the country.
Blame immediately fell on the Taliban. Properly so. In mid-September, they cut off fiber-optic internet in several Afghan provinces, stressing the need to combat immorality and vice. But they left the mobile internet untouched. This most recent episode seemed like a ratcheting-up to total information control. The thousands of girls and women who defy the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education by taking internet classes — including the students of SOLAx, my Afghan girls’ school’s online academy — found their opportunities eclipsed, gone dark just like their computers and phones.
The Taliban said the blackout was due to upgrades to Afghanistan’s infrastructure. Was the blackout therefore merely due to technical ineptitude? Maybe. But even if so, the Taliban is very obviously working on implementing a dark vision.
The Taliban recently banned all books written by women from being used in universities in Afghanistan. More than a dozen university-level subjects have also been banned. Among them are gender and development courses and courses on women’s sociology.
Women, of course, are not attending these universities. Women haven’t attended any university in Afghanistan since 2022. Indeed, girls haven’t gone to school past sixth grade since shortly after the Taliban’s seizure of power. An Afghan girl’s formal education ends around the time she enters puberty. For the Taliban, no further education is needed for the only job a woman is meant to do.
“I’m 14 now,” the girl I was talking to, the girl who suddenly went dark last week, told me. “I have big dreams. I wanted to be a member of parliament; I’ve always been drawn to law and justice. Then I did research and found out that women are softhearted and cannot be great judges. So, I thought about other things I can do.”
In the space of four years under the Taliban, Afghanistan has become a place where women’s dreams glow only in a dim light. A place where a teenage girl can come to understand that her role in society is not what she desires it to be. A place where she can come to understand that she was wrong to even have that desire at all.
The internet is back on in Afghanistan now. And it needs to stay on. In 2023, when I spoke at the U.N. Security Council, I urged the international community to take the necessary steps to keep the internet accessible within Afghanistan. With the internet, I said, education could come into every Afghan home, into the smartphone in the palm of every Afghan girl’s hand. And we as Afghans — educators and activists — would take care of the rest.
But without the internet, it’s darkness. The Taliban made the internet go dark for two days. They can do it again, and they can do it for much longer. This cannot be allowed.
I’d like to talk to that girl again, the girl on the laptop that went dark. I’d like to share a poem with her, a poem that a different Afghan girl shared with me just a few weeks earlier. A teenage girl looked to the sky over Kabul and saw illumination there that defies all attempts at eclipse.
A girl cries,
not for her scars but for her rights.
She wants her wings to fly.
You can burn her wings
