Hasht-e Subh: Issue of Afghan Women Not Just Women's Issue but Societal One on International Women's Day

Hasht-e Subh published a commentary on International Women's Day stating that Afghan women have spent over four years protesting, documenting abuses, and raising awareness through street actions, people's courts, and reports, but the international community sees and hears without taking action.

The piece criticizes the global response to human rights in Afghanistan as dualistic: documenting abuses as routine work without commitment to change. It notes that human rights groups issue reports and hold sessions but fail to bridge the gap to actual intervention. Meanwhile, daily suffering intensifies, with claims of increasing suicides among girls, women in deprivation, and people facing torture, imprisonment, humiliation, and death. These are said to become mere archived files without impacting lives.

The commentary argues these years have eroded mental health, social fabric, and lives irreversibly. It calls for shifting energy from international reliance to internal awareness and pressure. Early protests saw women and men united, but Taliban force with guns and whips scattered them, silencing voices inside through threats and arrests. Women's plight was reduced to a 'women's issue,' with men showing indifference or mockery, widening divides between genders and between inside and outside Afghanistan.

It urges the Afghan diaspora to build networks of awareness, trust, and resistance, connecting with people inside to multiply education, motivation, and support. Diaspora should foster shared understanding of suffering to spark sustainable social movements. Resistance is defined broadly as any act against suppression and indifference. Changes driven by Afghans themselves would endure, with diaspora as a lever to break internal apathy. Freedom, it concludes, must emerge from within the nation through unity of women and men inside and outside.