The world ignores Afghan women on and off the football pitch

That the exiled Afghan women’s football team are in Australia but neither participating in the World Cup – their chance to qualify stripped away – nor eligible to take part in future Fifa-sanctioned competitions is one of those dismal Fifa-adjacent facts that should not be rushed past.

Let’s take this one to VAR, replay the events that led us here, then look at the miserable implication of their sidelining.

No country has extended diplomatic recognition to the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan since it seized back control. But in the executive boxes of international football, power sides with power. The Afghan men’s team has resumed competing in Fifa matches, even as the edicts of the Taliban taunt their female counterparts across continents.

The women’s team was drawn in Group B for the autumn 2021 qualification tournament for the AFC Women’s Asian Cup – the regional path to qualification for this World Cup – but the fall of Kabul meant the team never made it on to those pitches. The Afghan Football Federation could no longer recognise them, so Fifa stopped too.

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[ US envoys meet Taliban officials for the first time in two years ]

In a bureaucratic echo of the brutal repression that has seen women and girls disappear from public life in Afghanistan, these players disappeared from the world stage the moment they were evacuated to Australia under threat of death.

Their status matters. Sport is both an international language and a global platform. The presence of an Afghan women’s team on any attention-commanding pitch is a reminder of the catastrophic fate endured by women and girls still stuck in their homeland. It is stunning that such reminders are needed – and yet they are.

With the second anniversary of the chaotic withdrawal of Nato forces approaching, former British prime minister Gordon Brown, the UN envoy for global education, popped up this week to call for gender apartheid in Afghanistan to be declared a crime against humanity. US officials have expressed “concern”. Otherwise, the high-level silence is remarkable.

Gender apartheid is not Brown’s term, nor was it coined by Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, who nevertheless concludes it is “an accurate description” of how women and girls are systematically oppressed by the Taliban.

His June report itemises more than 50 directives issued between September 2021 and May 2023, from the denial of education beyond primary level to the erasing of women from most forms of employment, including vital aid work. Experts are said to be “deeply concerned” that some edicts addressed to men – a civil servant can be suspended if his wife or daughter does not wear “proper hijab” – are designed to normalise violence against women and girls. Afghan women speak of sexual enslavement and walls closing in.

Already banned from parks, gyms and sports clubs, they have now had one of their last remaining spaces taken away: beauty salons were ordered shut last month. Taliban fire-hosed dozens of women and shot rifles into the air as they dispersed the rare, brave public protest that this new screw-tightening provoked.

[ Afghan police attack women protesting against Taliban edict to shut beauty parlours ]

“Hope is very hard to find in Afghanistan. Very, very hard to find,” BBC News chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet told a European Broadcasting Union conference in Dublin this summer.

“How can any of us here in this room say we are living in a world where girls are not allowed to go to school and women are not allowed to work? But that country exists.”

Gender apartheid might not be recognised as a crime under international law, as Afghan and Iranian women have campaigned for it to be, but gender persecution is. The UN special rapporteur wants “perpetrators and complicit actors” to be held accountable. Women around the world won’t be holding their breath.

“In the heat of the moment people cared, but afterwards they could care less,” says footballer Farkhunda Muhtaj in the WhatsApp-produced short film We Are Ayenda.

In 2021, when the Canada-based captain of the senior Afghan women’s football team served as an instrumental liaison in US efforts to help the under-18 girls’ team flee, her suspicion was that evacuators were racing against a clock of political indifference as well as the Taliban’s advances. In fraught added time, the girls and their families were granted asylum in Portugal, where they now play under the name Ayenda FC.

Ayenda means “future” in Farsi. A future was something a generation of Afghan girls had before the US and its allies cut and run in August 2021 amid airport crushes, bodies falling from aircraft and desperate pleas for help.

In the searing Evacuation, a much-recommended Channel 4 documentary series by James W Newton, RAF police squadron leader Diana Bird recounts in some pain how she had to tell a group of young, educated and single Afghan women that they did not meet the criteria to leave.

“They were asking me how, as a woman, I could do that to them. Was I not human, did I not understand? And the answer was, of course I understood, of course I got it. But I couldn’t help them. I still couldn’t help them.”

[ Transition: A trans film-maker living alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan after the fall captures a nation and a person in flux ]

Even as Evacuation’s conscience-scarred frontline interviewees struggle to make sense of the frenzied departure, western political leaders abscond from the subject, unable to reckon with the bone-chilling betrayal of so many Afghans during the mangled pullout or admit that after 20 years of conflict fuelled by Afghanistan’s status as a terrorist haven, they are back to square one.

Meanwhile, the Taliban exports its extremist non-regard for women through the obliging filter of Fifa, the football governing body’s feeble abdication of responsibility remaining, as ever, a bleak prism for understanding how the world works.

The message here does not need the amplifiers that have lately been thrown on to Taliban bonfires of musical instruments. It is loud and clear. Women don’t take penalties. They pay them.