The Unseen Victims of Taliban Rule: Why Afghan Men Are Being Erased from the Human Rights Narrative
Table of Contents
Introduction- Why does the Taliban kill Afghan Men?
- Why are These Male Victims so Easily Overlooked?
- How did the Taliban Become Powerful Enough to do This?
- Why don't Afghans Simply Fight Back?
- The West's Selective Memory of Afghanistan
- And Now Afghanistan is Becoming a Tourist Destination
Conclusion: Afghan Lives Should not be Divided Into Politically Useful Victims
Introduction
For five years, the Taliban have ruled Afghanistan. Their oppression of women and girls has rightly received enormous international attention. Women have been excluded from secondary and higher education, pushed out of much of public life, and subjected to a system of restrictions that the United Nations has described as deeply discriminatory and authoritarian. None of this should be minimized.
But there is another Afghan tragedy that receives far less attention: the systematic killing, torture, disappearance and persecution of Afghan men under Taliban rule.
This is not an argument for paying less attention to Afghan women. It is an argument for paying attention to Afghans as human beings—including the men who have been killed, imprisoned, tortured or disappeared.
The Taliban's victims are not exclusively women. In many of the cases documented since August 2021, the victims have overwhelmingly been men: former soldiers and policemen, former government officials, members of ethnic minorities, resistance fighters and ordinary civilians accused of supporting the opposition.
UNAMA documented at least 218 extrajudicial killings of former government officials and members of the Afghan security forces between 15 August 2021 and 30 June 2023. Former soldiers of the Afghan National Army were identified as the group at greatest risk. The killings occurred throughout Afghanistan and included people who had been detained by Taliban security forces before being killed. (UNAMA)
Amnesty International has likewise documented a continuing pattern of extrajudicial executions. In Panjshir alone, it verified at least 14 extrajudicial executions of National Resistance Front detainees during 12–14 September 2022, while the total number of people extrajudicially killed during that period was estimated at at least 48. Amnesty described the wider pattern of executions of former government personnel and people associated with armed resistance as potential war crimes. (eurasia.amnesty.org)
These are not merely statistics. Every dead man leaves behind parents, children, wives and sisters. The killing of a man in a society where men are often the principal providers can therefore destroy an entire family. Afghanistan has suffered from a huge population of widows as a consequence of decades of war: a UK government research report citing UNAMA noted that more than half a million widows lived in Afghanistan, many of them war widows. (GOV.UK)
There is no single answer. The Taliban's violence is driven by several overlapping motives.
The first is fear of political and military resistance.
The men who served in the former Afghan security forces were not simply former employees. Many had spent twenty years fighting the Taliban. From the Taliban's perspective, they represented a potential nucleus for another uprising. Consequently, the promise of a general amnesty did not prevent systematic reprisals. UNAMA found that former soldiers and police were particularly exposed to extrajudicial killing, arbitrary detention, torture and disappearance. (UNAMA)
Panjshir provides perhaps the clearest example. The predominantly Tajik population of the valley and surrounding areas produced some of the strongest armed resistance to Taliban rule after Kabul fell. The response included mass arrests, torture, collective punishment and executions of alleged resistance members. Amnesty International documented evidence that Taliban forces tortured civilians accused of supporting the National Resistance Front, including cases in which detainees were tortured to death. (eurasia.amnesty.org)
The second motive is ethnic and sectarian persecution.
Afghanistan's Hazaras have endured persecution for generations. They are predominantly Shia Muslims and have repeatedly been targeted because of both their ethnic identity and religious affiliation. The Taliban's return did not end this vulnerability. The UN Special Rapporteur has repeatedly raised concerns about attacks and discrimination against Hazara-Shia communities, while UN reporting has described the persecution of minorities as a serious human-rights concern. (OHCHR)
Hazara men have been among those killed. Amnesty International, for example, documented the killings of Hazara men in Uruzgan and Herat, including religious figures, alongside beatings, destruction of property and other abuses. (eurasia.amnesty.org)
The third factor is ethnic and regional repression.
Tajiks, particularly those associated with the resistance in northern Afghanistan and Panjshir, have faced collective punishment and extrajudicial killings. Minority Rights Group reported that the Taliban's campaign against the resistance included killings of Tajik members of the National Resistance Front and described a surge in extrajudicial executions in the context of resistance in Panjshir. (minorityrights.org)
And the fourth factor can be tribal revenge.
The persecution of members and supporters of the Achakzai tribe in Kandahar illustrates how Taliban reprisals can intersect with old political and tribal rivalries. Supporters of the late Afghan security commander Abdul Raziq Achakzai have reported killings, disappearances, torture, detention, displacement and property seizures since the Taliban takeover. These allegations cannot all be independently verified, and the Taliban has denied targeting the Achakzai community. Nevertheless, individual cases of former security personnel from the Achakzai community being killed have continued to be reported. (RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty)
2. Why are These Male Victims so Easily Overlooked?There is another, more uncomfortable possibility: that the international narrative surrounding the fall of Afghanistan has made Afghan men unusually difficult to recognize as victims.
When the Afghan government and security forces collapsed in August 2021, the explanation offered in much of the Western political and media discourse focused heavily on the failure of Afghan forces themselves. Afghan soldiers were portrayed as unwilling to fight, unwilling to die for their government, or simply incapable of defending their own country. Such explanations contained elements of truth—there were undoubtedly serious problems within the Afghan security forces—but they also risked obscuring the failures of those who had designed, financed and ultimately abandoned the system.
The United States and its allies had spent two decades building Afghanistan's political and military institutions. They negotiated directly with the Taliban, agreed to withdraw, reduced their military presence, and ultimately left the country in August 2021. The collapse
This is an important distinction: not every killing in Afghanistan can automatically be attributed to the Taliban, and not every allegation is independently verifiable. But the accumulated evidence from UNAMA, Amnesty International and other organizations establishes a broader pattern that cannot reasonably be dismissed as isolated incidents.
The uncomfortable answer is that the international intervention ultimately created the conditions for the Taliban to inherit the Afghan state.
It would be inaccurate to say that the United States simply "handed Afghanistan to the Taliban." The Taliban captured territory and Kabul as the Afghan state and security forces collapsed during the withdrawal of US and NATO forces in 2021.
But the political outcome was unmistakable: the internationally backed Afghan government collapsed, the Taliban seized the capital, and the movement became the de facto government of Afghanistan.
The military consequences were equally profound.
For two decades, the United States and its allies had equipped and trained the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. When those forces collapsed, substantial quantities of equipment remained in Afghanistan and were captured by the Taliban. SIGAR documented that the Taliban consolidated captured Afghan military equipment and sought to place it in the hands of its own security forces. (SIGAR)
This does not mean that the United States deliberately armed the Taliban. Much of the equipment had originally been provided to the Afghan government, not to the Taliban. But the final result remains difficult to escape: the Taliban inherited a state containing weapons, military infrastructure, vehicles, aircraft and surveillance capabilities that had been built largely with Western assistance.
The Taliban therefore did not merely conquer a country. It inherited the machinery of government.
And that machinery matters.
The answer is more complicated than the romantic image of Afghans endlessly resisting foreign or domestic rulers.
Afghans certainly can fight the Taliban. They have done so. The National Resistance Front and other armed groups continue to conduct attacks, although the United Nations has assessed that they do not pose a significant challenge to Taliban territorial control. (UNAMA)
But an insurgency against the Taliban today faces a fundamentally different strategic environment from the one the Taliban itself enjoyed during its years as an insurgency.
The Taliban now controls the government, the police, intelligence structures, checkpoints and much of the country's security apparatus. A suspected opponent is no longer merely fighting an armed group hiding in the countryside; he is confronting an organization that controls the roads, border crossings, detention facilities and administrative structures of the state.
The Taliban also possesses a substantial recruitment base.
Historically, the movement recruited heavily through rural communities, religious networks, madrassas and tribal structures in Afghanistan and Pakistan. European asylum authorities have noted that the Taliban traditionally recruited large numbers of rural Pashtun men and drew recruits from religious institutions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. During 2021, thousands of Taliban fighters and supporters reportedly entered Afghanistan from Pakistan as the movement consolidated its territorial gains. (EUAA Preproduction)
That makes the Taliban difficult to defeat through isolated acts of armed resistance. Killing a few Taliban fighters does not dismantle the organization. The movement has access to a large social and religious network from which it can replenish its ranks.
The Afghan resistance, by contrast, has no comparable state apparatus. That asymmetry is one of the principal reasons why the Taliban can persecute suspected opponents with relative impunity.
There is another uncomfortable question: Why does the killing of Afghan men attract so much less attention?
Part of the answer is that international reporting quite understandably focuses on the extraordinary oppression of Afghan women and girls. Their situation is catastrophic, and the Taliban's gender apartheid deserves sustained international condemnation. But there is a danger when Afghanistan is reduced to a story in which women are victims and men are either perpetrators, Taliban supporters or potential fighters. Afghan men can also be victims.
A former Afghan soldier dragged from his home, tortured and executed is not less deserving of attention because he is male. A Hazara man murdered because of his ethnicity and religion is not less of a human-rights victim because he is male. A Tajik resistance fighter executed after detention is not outside the scope of human rights because he carried a weapon. And the killing of an Afghan father does not become politically irrelevant because his widow and children are the ones who remain behind.
The international community should resist the temptation to view Afghan society through a simplistic gender binary: oppressed women versus violent men. The reality is much darker and more complicated. Afghan men have fought, suffered, disappeared and died in enormous numbers throughout the country's modern wars. They have also been among the principal victims of the Taliban's reprisals. The tragedy is that this is hardly a new phenomenon.
In a CNN interview from the late 1990s, Ahmad Shah Massoud argued that Afghanistan had been abandoned after its usefulness to foreign powers had diminished. In discussing the Soviet war, he described how Afghans had suffered and resisted while the wider world eventually turned its attention elsewhere. (north-afghanistan.blogspot.com)
His broader warning remains relevant: Afghanistan has repeatedly been treated as a battlefield in which outside powers pursue their own strategic objectives, while Afghans themselves are left to bear the consequences. During the Cold War, Afghans were enormously valuable to the West as part of the struggle against the Soviet Union. After the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan descended into civil war. The Taliban eventually emerged from that chaos. After September 11, the country again became strategically indispensable. Twenty years later, the Western military presence ended, and Afghanistan once again became a country the outside world would prefer not to think about.
The pattern is depressingly familiar: Afghans are strategically important when foreign powers need them and forgotten when they no longer do.
There is perhaps no more striking symbol of this moral contradiction than the growing number of Western tourists visiting Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Tourism has increased since the Taliban takeover. The Taliban actively promotes foreign tourism as a means of presenting the country as safe and normal. Nearly 9,000 tourists reportedly visited Afghanistan in 2024, with thousands more arriving during the first part of 2025. (AP News)
Of course, a tourist visiting Afghanistan is not automatically a supporter of the Taliban. Some visitors genuinely want to experience Afghan culture, history and landscapes, and some argue that tourism provides income to ordinary Afghans.
But there is an unavoidable ethical question.
What does it mean to spend one's holiday in a country governed by a regime that denies basic rights, imprisons dissidents, persecutes minorities and has been accused of extrajudicially killing its opponents?
A foreign visitor can often move through Afghanistan with privileges that an Afghan citizen does not possess. The Taliban wants precisely this image: a country that is peaceful, stable and open to the world.
Tourism can therefore become an unintended contribution to the normalization of Taliban rule.
The contradiction is striking. Western governments warn their citizens about travelling to Afghanistan. Human-rights organizations document persecution. The United Nations repeatedly warns about the deterioration of human rights. Yet an increasing number of foreigners enter the country voluntarily, take photographs, visit historical sites and return home with stories of an "authentic" Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Afghan men disappear from their homes.
Former soldiers are arrested.
Resistance fighters are executed.
Hazara communities remain vulnerable.
Tajiks accused of resistance are punished collectively.
And Afghan families continue to live with the consequences.
The answer is not to stop talking about Afghan women.
It is to stop pretending that Afghan women are the only Afghans whose suffering matters.
The Taliban's oppression is a system. It targets women and girls through institutionalized discrimination; it targets political opponents through imprisonment and execution; it targets minorities through discrimination and violence; and it maintains power through surveillance, coercion and fear.
These are not separate tragedies. They are different parts of the same authoritarian system.
The international community therefore needs to speak about Afghan human rights rather than only Afghan women's rights.
The widow whose husband was executed deserves justice.
The Hazara family whose son was killed deserves justice.
The former soldier who was promised amnesty and then disappeared deserves justice.
The Tajik family whose father was executed as an alleged resistance supporter deserves justice.
And the Afghan woman who has been denied education and employment deserves justice.
These demands do not compete with one another.
They reinforce one another.
The Taliban should not be allowed to decide which Afghans are visible to the outside world. Nor should Western governments, journalists, activists or tourists unconsciously make that decision for them.
Afghanistan's men are not merely potential perpetrators. They are also victims.
Their deaths deserve to be counted. Their families deserve to be heard. And their suffering deserves to be remembered.
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