The Viral ‘Permanent Ban’ Claim, and What Afghanistan’s Girls Actually Face
Giorgia Valente reports from a place the internet keeps trying to turn into a one-frame meme: Afghanistan, where the hard fact is unchanged—girls are still barred from secondary school and women from universities—yet the online story keeps mutating. In late January 2026, reels and short clips claimed the Taliban had issued a new “permanent ban” on girls’ education. The punchline, experts say, is that the most viral “proof” wasn’t new.
Kabul-based editor Ali M. Latifi says a widely shared snippet was sliced from a 2024 interview and stripped of its surrounding language about the issue being “under study” under Sharia. Afghanistan scholar Nassir Ul Haq Wani adds that what matters is not one announcement but how restrictions are enforced unevenly—often falling hardest on ordinary Afghans, while well-connected elites can find ways around rules.
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Researcher Muhammad Akram argues the information environment is tightly controlled, with local media constrained and everyday enforcement shaping women’s lives: travel without a male relative, access to services, and even informal neighborhood study circles that can draw punishment. Latifi counters that in parts of Kabul, women are still visible—taking taxis, working, attending private classes—while Wani stresses that Pashtun cultural norms and rural realities can make that visibility vanish outside the capital.
Valente also tracks a rising stream of foreign influencers. Some arrive chasing the “I went to Afghanistan” headline; others, Akram warns, may be shepherded toward curated scenes that skip the places where girls’ education truly ends. The result is a country flattened into content, and a central test for journalism: show complexity without whitewash, and keep Afghan women from being edited out. Read the dispatch from Giorgia Valente for the voices, contradictions, and the missing testimony.
