I have heard they have NONE?! is this true?!
Pretty much. Under the Taliban, women were forbidden from working, getting an education, or leaving their house without a man.
What does a regular day consist of for a Taliban woman? They don’t just sit around, what do they do?
I think it’s important to remove your cultural filter when considering this problem.
Under your mores, yes, Afghan women have few rights. That doesn’t mean all are persecuted or in poverty or miserable.
My parents were in Afghanistan for two years in the early seventies. By the reports of their friends who have been there recently, things are a bit set back from then, but the Taliban actually had a beneficial effect on the lives of women.
In 1972, Afghan women would be absolutely honored not to have to work, to have the privilege to raise their children without worrying about feeding them. In poorer villages, women did the same work as in any rural agrarian society. Education was scarce, as in any rural agrarian society. When my parents were learning Pashtu (they knew Arabic and French, both of which helped a bit), the phrase they were taught to answer by rote was “How long have you been married? And how is it that you don’t have any children?”
My parents had a bit of difficulty because my mother could easily pass for Afghan (black hair, somewhat olive skin, nose within reasonable parameters), but my father was clearly Anglo with blond hair and blue eyes. On a couple of occasions they were nearly stoned before my mother spoke up in English that she was with her husband. So things, in the seventies, weren’t on a Western par.
But women above the poverty level – which is vastly different than the poverty level in the US, for example – were not by and large unhappy with their lot. They were allowed to socialize with friends and family. They were allowed to raise their children. Their sons were educated until maybe sixth grade, and depending on how successful the village, their daughters were taught to read before being brought back into the home.
Then the king left, the Russians invaded, and years of civil war ensued. Personal liberties on all fronts were reduced. Before that, local law had ruled. Mullahs and general morality more or less kept things calm. When civil war began, no one was safe, and least safe were women.
The Taliban began a fundamentalist religious movement, one of whose goals was to return law to the land. They started punishing rape and pillage. They started cracking down on outlaws. They also decided that monuments to Buddhism were evil. They definitely had an agenda, but it probably focused more on protecting people than on harming them.
The upshot of this movement from a Western perspective was the persecution of women and the reduction of their civil rights. Well, yeah, from our perspective it sucks to be locked in your house unless accompanied by a father or a brother. It sucks to have no education for any of your children save the use of weapons by your sons. But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently evil. Sometimes people are working within the boundaries of what’s possible for them. And it’s a far sight better than being raped and rendered a burden to your family for the rest of your natural life.
I’m not saying that I want to live under the strictures the Taliban imposes. I don’t. I couldn’t. But they’re a far sight better than wanton rape and pillage, and given a few years of stability I have confidence that Afghan culture will return to where it was 30 years ago and then far surpass it as their economy recovers.
Oh, and my father’s job was teaching irrigation to poppy farmers, one of the only cash crops Afghanistan has ever had. And currently their only cash crop. Either let the people return to an agrarian lifestyle and the tribal politics that allow that to work, or help them build a reasonable alternative.
Yes, it does.
OK. Define evil, please.
OK. Here. My favorites are 1a and 3a.
OK. Thank you. Please define for me how the past four American Presidential administrations have not been evil, with the poverty line income as the baseline.
Pardon? I thought we were talking about the Taliban. I must have missed something.
women have holes in them.
The General Question on the table is what rights do women have under the Taliban.
We are not going to debate whether the Taliban is or is not evil. We are not going to debate American politics. We have another forum for that.
Stick to the OP and the facts in this forum. Debate in Great Debates.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
[philosophical statement]
Of course, one could say that every woman living under the Taliban’s rule is in possession of many inalienable rights (free speech, religion, life, liberty, property, employment, pursuit of happiness, etc.). But the Taliban forbids their practice. A subtle point, I know.
[/philosophical statement]
OK then. Since under the Taliban, you have no rights, per se, except to do what they tell you to, we can safely conclude that women and men had none. Question asked and answered.
Old reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International tell which rights they didn’t have under Taliban. It seems that the only parts of UN’s declaration of human rights which weren’t violated for women under Taliban are article 6 (right to recognition as a person before the law) and article 15 (right to a nationality). Could be that those were violated too - I didn’t look all that closely. (Current reports describe pretty limited rights, too - especially in areas controlled by warlords.)
Not a direct answer, but related: Asne Seierstad’s “The Bookseller of Kabul” describes the everyday life of one middle class family in Kabul just after Taliban’s fall. The women there mostly spend their days doing housework - shopping, cooking, cleaning. Those tasks are rather more labour intensive than people in wealthy industrialised countries are used to, as (almost) everything’s done by hand.
What I found most chilling was the lack of small everyday freedoms which I take for granted. I’d expected stuff like the murder of the woman who was (maybe) having an affair, forced marriage, and not being allowed to work or go to school unless the head of the house allowed you. But having to move away from all your relatives and friends because your husband wants you to look after his possesions in another country, not being allowed to stand outside and chat with friends, never being allowed to feel the wind on your face… * shudder *
I guess I’d better stop before I stray (further) into the realm of GD 
We have to remember that, to say that a woman’s right to life (for example) was violated under the Taliban is not to say that she had no right to life at all. It may be true that, either as a matter of law or in practice, a woman guilty of adultery could be murdered with impunity. This would be a serious infringement of her right to life. It does not follow that Afghan women had no right to life unless we argue that they could be murdered by anyone, at any time, anywhere, on any pretext, with impunity - which I am sure was not the case.
I suspect that under the Taliban Afghan women (and men) had a wide range of rights. They just fell well short of anything that we would regard as acceptable. And of course the rights deficit was probably much greater for women than for men.