Afghanistan faces two devastating and interrelated crises. One is the systematic erasure of women from public life through bans on education, employment, mobility, and participation. The other is a deepening environmental emergency marked by drought, water scarcity, deforestation, and unchecked resource extraction. These crises are often treated as separate disasters. They are not.
What connects them is a shared logic of domination that treats both women and nature as objects to be controlled, managed, and exploited rather than living agents.
Ecofeminism, which is a framework linking the oppression of women to environmental destruction, helps make this connection visible. It argues that systems built on hierarchy and control tend to treat women, land, and natural resources in the same way: as passive entities stripped of agency and value unless they serve power. In Afghanistan today, this logic is not theoretical. It is a governing policy.
Under Taliban rule, women are not rights-bearing citizens. They are perceived as moral problems requiring regulation. Their bodies are policed, their voices silenced, and their presence in public life erased in the name of order. Women are not seen as contributors to society, but as risks to be managed.
The same logic governs the Taliban’s approach to the environment. Forests are cut without restraint. Mining is conducted without transparency or community consent. Agricultural land is degraded while water scarcity worsens, especially during repeated droughts. There is no coherent environmental policy, only extraction without responsibility.
The Taliban believe that nature holds no ethical status of its own. That stance means there is no meaningful discussion of stewardship, sustainability, or the rights of future generations. Local communities are excluded from decision making, especially those with deep, everyday relationships to land and water. The result of such beliefs is environmental damage that is often irreversible.
As usual, women are among those who pay the highest price. In rural Afghanistan, women have long managed water use, sustained household agriculture, and passed down ecological knowledge critical to the survival of their families and communities. Yet they are also the most vulnerable to environmental collapse. As water sources dry up, women are forced to travel farther to secure water and other basic needs. As crops fail, food insecurity rises.
As disasters strike, women often bear the burden of family survival while remaining excluded from any official crisis response and recovery planning. This is not a coincidence. It is a structural defect inherent to the Taliban way of governmening.
The Taliban’s ideological framework makes this connection explicit. In Nizam-e Amarat-e Islami, a key reference text authored by senior Taliban figure Abdul Hakim Haqqani, women are defined entirely within a logic of control and obedience. They are not presented as agents with rights, choice, or social responsibility, but as subjects to be regulated for the preservation of moral order.
Equally striking is what the text omits. There is no serious engagement with environmental responsibility, natural resource management, or the ethical relationship between humans and the land. Nature appears as a silent backdrop, outside the realm of moral or political concern.
This dual absence of women and nature is revealing. In the Taliban’s intellectual order, both women and the environment have no intrinsic value. Neither is recognized as deserving participation, dialogue, or care.
Understanding this philosophical underpinning of Taliban decision making matters because it exposes the limits of fragmented responses. International actors often address women’s rights and environmental protection as separate issues, which are handled by different institutions, budgets, and advocacy frameworks. In Afghanistan, this separation obscures the real problem.
The oppression of women and the destruction of nature are mutually reinforcing outcomes of the same governing logic. A system that fears women’s agency will also reject environmental stewardship. A system that suppresses the participation of women in society will exploit land without consent. A system built on obedience cannot sustain life —either human or ecological.
In Afghanistan, ecofeminism is not an abstract academic theory. It is a tool for political clarity. It helps us see that either defending women’s rights without addressing environmental collapse or protecting the environment without confronting gender apartheid are destined to fail. They must be addressed together.
Afghanistan’s crises will deepen until women are recognized as full social actors and nature is perceived as a shared, living system rather than a resource to be consumed
Any vision for Afghanistan’s future that ignores this interconnection between women and nature is destined to fail. Any lasting change requires challenging the logic of domination itself by replacing control with participation, extraction with care, and silence with agency.
Qayum Sabur is the pen name of an environmental activist in Afghanistan.
