Five years after Kabul fell, the reckoning over Afghanistan is far from over

Five years ago Abdul Razaq Khan, a former translator and fixer for Canadian media during the Afghan war, received a late night text from one of journalists he had shepherded through the wild streets of Kandahar.

He had been trying to sleep in his Kabul apartment, having moved on following the Canadian withdrawal from Afghanistan to a job at the American aid agency USAID.

Half a decade later and now re-settled safely in Canada, Khan is still trying to wrap his head around not only the loss of his job, his home and his country, but all of the events that led to the swift collapse of the western-backed government.

Khan is one of the lucky ones. He got out on foot, dashing across the Pakistani border just ahead of a spray of Taliban bullets, around the same time the Afghan capital fell to the hardline insurgents.

His work with the Canadian media — principally The Canadian Press (including myself), but also other organizations such as CTV News and Postmedia — had long painted a target on his back.

It was the same for many Afghans who worked not only for journalists, but also western military, diplomatic missions and aid organizations.

The Taliban victory not only displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans, the reimposition of their strict, authoritarian fundamentalist regime has featured the systematic erasure of women from public life, the suppression of free media and dissent and the enforcement of rigid moral codes through a dedicated ministry.

Women — the focus of much western social policy during the war — have suffered enormously.

The Zan Times , an Afghan women's advocacy and human rights group, has extensively documented rising violence against women in the country, and the absence of justice.

It released a report this week with data that shows only one arrest is made by Taliban authorities out of every four women who are the victims of a sudden death, and the male suspects are usually released within hours of their capture.

"That shows that the Taliban have created a complete impunity for the crime of women being killed by their fathers, brothers and husbands," Zahra Nader, founder and editor in chief of Zan Times, told CBC News.

"If you label the death of a woman, suicide, that means nobody will be [held] accountable for the crime of killing that woman."

Her organization utilized an extensive network of local journalists inside Afghanistan to gather the data and the evidence. Many of their findings contradict the official account of suicide and point to "women who have been beaten down by their husband or relatives."

Since the 2021 collapse, western countries have not been able to directly protect or enforce women's rights inside Afghanistan. Instead, their response has relied on diplomatic condemnation and targeted travel and financial sanctions.