KABUL, Afghanistan: A news presenter on Afghanistan’s TOLO TV wept as he read the announcement. Images of girls crying after being turned back from school flooded social media. Aid groups and many others remained baffled.
The Taliban have so far refused to explain their sudden decision to renege on the pledge to allow girls to go to school beyond sixth grade. Schools were supposed to reopen to older girls on Wednesday, the start of the new school year.
The ban caught even the Taliban-appointed Education Ministry unprepared. In many places across Afghanistan, some girls in higher grades returned to schools, only to be told to go home.
The move may have been designed to appease the Taliban’s hard-line base but it came at the expense of further alienating the international community, which has been reluctant to officially recognize Afghanistan’s new rulers, concerned the Taliban would impose similar harsh measures and restrictions — particularly limiting women’s rights to education and work — as when they previously ruled the country in the late 1990s.
The United Nations children’s agency told The Associated Press on Thursday they were blindsided by the announcement.
“I think that yesterday was a very confusing day for all of us,” said Jeannette Vogelaar, UNICEF’s chief of education in Afghanistan.
“We were blindsided,” said Sam Mort, UNICEF’s communications chief in Afghanistan. “All the messages, all the actions that had been taking place led us to believe that schools were opening, and as we understand it, that’s what our counterparts in the Ministry of Education believed as well.”
Ahead of the planned reopening, in remote and deeply conservative villages — where women teachers may not have been available to educate girls — arrangements were made for older male teachers, who were considered acceptable, to step in and teach all-girls classes beyond sixth grade.
Coincidentally or not, the Taliban leadership was summoned on Wednesday to southern Kandahar province amid rumors of a Cabinet shuffle, which was later denied. Still, reports have persisted of declining health of the elderly, Taliban-appointed Prime Minister Hasan Akhund, a hard-liner.
Since the Taliban seized power in mid-August during the last weeks of the chaotic withdrawal of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan, there have been reports of divisions among Taliban leaders, with lines drawn between the hard-liners and pragmatists.
It’s unclear whether a tussle among the Taliban on how to rule the country could have contributed to Wednesday’s ban but Torek Farhadi, an analyst who has advised past Afghan governments, called it a misfire.
“They really messed up by not keeping their word,” he said of the Taliban.
Afghanistan’s PenPath Volunteers, a group that works to promote education programs for all in rural areas, is planning to launch demonstrations against the Taliban ban, said Matiullah Wesa, the organization’s founder.
Started in 2009 by two brothers from the Taliban heartland of southern Kandahar, the organization has secret schools and thousands of volunteers distributing schools supplies across the country.
In Kabul on Wednesday, sisters Raihana Mirzakhail, 18, and Suria Mirzakhail, 17, showed up at their Mawlana Jalaluddin Mohammad Balkhi School. Their teacher started taking down attendance for the eleventh grade, when another teacher came into the classroom and told all the girls to go home.
“We were told this is not our school anymore,” said Suria. “We became so hopeless.” She and her sister had dreams to go to university.
“They broke our hearts ... we have nothing else to do at home,” Raihana said. “Other Islamic countries allow their boys and girls to be educated and that is why they are able to progress.”
On TOLO TV, announcer Sebghat Sepehr broke down Wednesday as he interviewed Soraya Paikin, a former deputy higher education minister, and rights activist Mahboba Siraj about the ban.
His voice broke, he started to cry and struggled to finish his question.
Many baffled by Taliban reneging pledge on girls’ education
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Many baffled by Taliban reneging pledge on girls’ education
- The Taliban have so far refused to explain their sudden decision to renege on the pledge to allow girls to go to school beyond sixth grade
- Schools were supposed to reopen to older girls on Wednesday, the start of the new school year
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
