Harvard Afghanistan Panel: Clear on the Horrors, Not on the Action

“Everything you did from this morning up to now is criminalized in Afghanistan if you are a woman,” Metra Mehran told the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum audience on Wednesday, October 28. Mehran, founder of the Afghanistan Justice Archive, spoke at an Institute of Politics event titled “The State of Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan” alongside Dr. Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s first Minister of Women’s Affairs, and Mathias Risse, director of the Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights.

The panel was held more than five years after the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021. Introducing the event, Aiden Sakhba ’27 of the Forum Committee said Afghanistan is “the only country in the world where girls are barred from attending school beyond the sixth grade,” and that under a 2024 law “even the sound of a woman’s voice in public is now restricted.” Her remarks set the tone of an event which was refreshingly honest about the state of affairs in Afghanistan, but which left unanswered broader questions about intervention that are otherwise dominating American politics.