Change the perception, not the substance

We are approaching the anniversary of the Taliban’s seizure of power on August 15, 2021, which led to a decline in women’s rights and democratic and living conditions for all in Afghanistan due to the extremely fundamentalist shift brought about by the Taliban’s restrictive interpretation of Sharia law.

These days, the media’s lack of interest in Afghanistan has materialized in a piece of news that reverberates virtually identically in every short article about it: a new opportunity exists for Afghan women, represented by the resurgence of tourism, as tours in Kabul are now open, led by women and aimed at women.

In reality, it’s a unique experience of its kind, a visit to the Kabul museum led by a young woman and enjoyed by a small group of foreigners, all wearing headscarves but, surprisingly—and this is striking in the gray landscape of the streets frequented mostly by men and a few women hidden in long black dresses—dressed in colorful clothes, as shown in a report by Rai News.it.

Does this mean something is changing in the fundamentalist and repressive Afghanistan of the Taliban? Is it exactly as the Rai News report portrays it, which commented on its documentary with a positive and almost enthusiastic assessment of the possibility of “changing, step by step, the perception of the country”?

In reality, the naive commentary misses the true meaning of these tours, namely, the Taliban’s interest in changing the world’s negative perception of Afghanistan without fundamentally changing the conditions of segregation and deprivation of women’s most basic rights, which continues to be chronicled in countless testimonies and from a wide variety of sources.

Allowing a handful of women a modicum of freedom serves the Taliban to show the supposed “human face” of their government, encouraging the rest of the world to recognize the “normality” of their system of government, which in reality is fundamentalist, violent, liberticidal, and apartheid-like toward women.

It’s not, therefore, a matter of having the courage to challenge prohibitions, but rather of being a more or less conscious instrument of a publicity stunt to camouflage reality.