Four years have passed since the Taliban returned to power, ending two decades of international efforts in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021. While the Taliban celebrated the day as the “conquest of Kabul,” non-Taliban groups, including members of Afghanistan’s diaspora around the world, marked the anniversary with events to reflect on yet another traumatic and regressive turn in the country’s tumultuous history.
During a recent conference in Melbourne on the Taliban’s deepening human rights repression, I found myself in conversations about how the past four years passed so quickly.
Those conversations left me with lingering questions about whether people under the Taliban’s rule could have experienced the lapse of the past four years with the same speed. In a stable, developed and Western context, time is compressed between the busy routines of personal and professional lives, marked by regular events, including holidays and work deadlines, as well as major global conflicts and crises. Therefore, it is easy to let Afghanistan and its people recede from individual and collective consciousness.
Yet, I cannot imagine that the people of Afghanistan, particularly women and girls, experienced the past four years as similarly fleeting moments. It is more likely that this period passed at a painfully slower pace for them, as their experience with time was not defined by a sense of agency and progress, but by the systematic dismantling of hope under the crushing weight of the Taliban’s repressive emirate.
While time is broken down into units of years, months and days, and is universally and objectively measured in the same way, humans will not experience it in the same objective manner. It is a subjective perception that is profoundly shaped by humanity’s circumstances and expectations, as well as a sense of agency to shape our individual futures. Studies have shown that people in positions of power perceive they have more available time and, in contrast, with powerlessness comes a reduced sense of control, making it seem as if there is less available time.
Similarly, our emotions affect our experience of the pace of time. Positive emotions associated with the pursuit of goals and even more mundane experiences can shorten the perception of the pace of time. Negative emotions such as fear and uncertainty are more likely to make people perceive the pace of time at a slower rate.
Life Under Repression
Therefore, tyranny and repression can fundamentally alter the perception of time by creating a climate of fear. Since 2021, the Taliban has created an environment in Afghanistan that has rendered the people powerless, taking away the basic freedoms and rights that are essential for maintaining a sense of control and agency over their lives. The Taliban’s so-called “Vice and Virtue” law not only aims to control how people think and express themselves politically, but also dictates their dress, hairstyles and the size of their beards.
Music, art, and other cultural expressions have been obliterated from public and media spaces. In their place, the Taliban conducts public floggings in parks and displays the bodies of individuals extrajudicially killed in city roundabouts. These gruesome, regular spectacles are designed to instill and deepen fear.
The most visceral example of the Taliban’s tyranny is its treatment of women and girls. In what can only be described as gender apartheid, the Taliban’s edicts, policies and practices negatively affect every aspect of the lives of women and girls in the country.
The ban on education for girls beyond the sixth grade has likely changed the pace and perception of time for women and girls. Many of the tens of thousands of girls who found the gates of high schools shut against them in March 2022 would have graduated with degrees from universities this year or in the near future. Similarly, many more who were in primary schools would now be planning to prepare for what had become, under the Republic, a highly competitive national entrance exam for Afghanistan’s expanding higher education.
The Taliban’s systematic gender discrimination has left women and girls with no hope of completing secondary and higher education or pursuing a professional career. Young girls who aspired to become politicians, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and artists before 2021 are now forced to live within the confines of their family homes with no educational or career prospects. As a result, the predictable, hopeful timeline of a young person’s life —progressing through school, university and then pursuing a career — has been obliterated.
Thus, the Taliban has hollowed out time for millions of girls by extinguishing their aspirations and hopes for a future. Confined largely to the domestic sphere, women are cut off from the social interactions, professional activities, and novel experiences that mark and give meaning to the experience of time. In the absence of hope and an agency to learn, grow and aspire, time may feel monotonous, agonizingly slow and dull.
The Taliban’s climate of fear has generated a state of hypervigilance in the wider population. Between 2001 and 2021, the Hazaras, an ethnic community subjected to decades of persecution, found hope under the Western-backed republican government. They are now subjected to systematic oppression and marginalization, including land grabs and mass displacements.
The Taliban has also suppressed free expression and dismantled legal institutions that protected the citizens’ basic rights, giving rise to widespread self-censorship. Afghanistan’s nascent middle class — including journalists, activists, civil servants, and civil society leaders — aspired to grow and push professional and social boundaries under the Republic. For the past four years, they have had to either leave the country or remain with lower ambitions, limiting their expression or changing careers, often falling into total silence and obscurity.
The effects of the Taliban’s political and human rights repression are compounded by a dire humanitarian situation, which has only worsened after devastating earthquake left at least hundreds of people dead in recent days. In 2025, 22.9 million people, or nearly half of the country’s population, need humanitarian assistance to survive, with a third of the population estimated to be facing crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity. Yet, the very aid that is intended to save lives is frequently diverted, manipulated and directed by the Taliban away from those in need to the regime’s supporters. Groups such as the Hazaras, who are excluded from all institutions of power under the Taliban, are also systematically discriminated against in the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Therefore, it is no surprise that Afghanistan was ranked as the unhappiest country in the world in the 2024 World Happiness Report.
The Generational Costs of Lost Time
The slow, agonizing pace of time in Afghanistan is not just an individual experience. The Taliban is imposing a generational cost of lost time on a national scale. In other words, Taliban rule has not just caused a pause in Afghanistan’s progress equivalent to four calendar years; it has wrought a devastating regression across social, economic, and political domains that will cost the country years, if not generations, of lost time.
Women’s education and empowerment play a central role in a nation’s wider social, political and economic recovery from violent conflicts. The Taliban’s gender repression has closed all avenues for any contribution by half of the country’s population to the country’s development and recovery from decades of violence and instability. In 2021, when the Taliban’s gender policy was in its infancy, the United Nations estimated that the annual cost of bans on women’s employment could be as much as $1 billion per year. Since then, the Taliban’s repression of women and girls has only deepened. Thus, it is possible, if not likely, that the economic costs are even greater.
In addition, the Taliban regime is dramatically expanding its network of madrasas, while overhauling the school and university curricula to bring it in line with its rigid and fundamentalist world view. The Taliban’s “Vice and Virtue” policy actively controls not only how students and teachers behave and dress, but also what they teach and learn. The loss of human capital, as many flee the country or are barred from working, has long-term social and developmental costs. The Taliban’s policies are crippling Afghanistan’s already fragile human capital in a way that will take many more years to reverse.
Responding to the persistent humanitarian crisis requires aid for years to come. However, while humanitarian aid may prevent or reduce immediate hunger, it will not solve the country’s intersecting human rights and political crises.
Keeping the Watch
As an insurgent force, the Taliban “ha[d] the time,” a strategic advantage that meant they merely had to wait out the technologically superior U.S. and NATO forces. Despite their far greater resources, the Republic’s international allies were ultimately constrained by the ticking clock of elections and shifting political commitments in their national capitals. Four years since the Taliban took power, a reflection on the experience of time may show how its regime has agonizingly slowed the pace of life for the people of the country and how easily Afghanistan can slip from global awareness.
The devastating impact of the Taliban’s rule will outlast the number of years the group remains in power in Kabul. The harm done also extends beyond Afghanistan’s borders, as the Taliban is exposing a new generation to its extremist and violent ideology, which establishes a model for repressive rule — in violation of international human rights law and the most fundamental norms — for other extremist groups to emulate elsewhere. The group also continues to host and maintain ties with international jihadist groups. An appreciation of the depth and long-term impact of Taliban rule should galvanize, not discourage, a more sustained, long-term and principled engagement with other actors inside the country — efforts that should be centered on the people of Afghanistan and their rights.
In the absence of domestic or international legitimacy, the Taliban relies on repression to hold power. As a de facto regime that is unwilling and unable to transform itself into an inclusive government, one which would be responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people, the Taliban may find the clock is ticking against them.
To leverage time against tyranny, the international community must coordinate and increase sustained diplomatic pressure on the Taliban regime, use sanctions to hold its leaders accountable for human rights abuses, and find creative ways to support education and civil society.
The clock may seem to tick at the same rate for everyone, but its rhythm is felt differently under the weight of tyranny. And the world should not abandon the people of Afghanistan to the Taliban’s draconian rule.
