By  Natiq Malikzada

    In a recent National Interest article entitled “Afghan Refugees Should Not Fear Repatriation,” Cheryl Benard urges the Trump administration to strip Afghans of their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation within the United States, compelling some 8,000 of them to return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

    In Benard’s telling, there is no longer a purpose to the refugees’ exile. Afghanistan is at peace; its economy is improving; whatever problems it faces are the result of dastardly international sanctions rather than poor domestic leadership; and the international condemnation of the Taliban government for its appalling treatment of women, ethnic minorities, and civil society is misplaced.

    But Benard’s rose-tinted vision of Afghanistan is fundamentally flawed. It is derived from a handful of personal anecdotes, rather than a serious examination of the human-rights situation on the ground inside Afghanistan. It seeks to present the Taliban—one of the world’s most brutal and repressive regimes—as simply a misunderstood government on the brink of coming to its senses on human rights, if only the West would engage with it. This is not analysis. It is geopolitical gaslighting.

    Of course, Benard has better reason than most to downplay the abuses of the Taliban government. Her husband, Zalmay Khalilzad, midwifed it into existence. Khalilzad served as the lead U.S. negotiator for the disastrous Doha Agreement in 2020, which released thousands of battle-hardened Taliban prisoners from jails across Afghanistan—bolstering the group’s ranks ahead of its lightning offensive the following year. Moreover, under Khalilzad’s leadership, the Doha Agreement did not contain any conditions for the Taliban, accountability for past crimes, or consultation with Afghanistan’s civil society. It did not even receive input from the internationally-recognized government—relegating the country’s people to observer status in their own future.

    Benard writes that “the Taliban are not stupid” and can be trusted not to harm returnees. Certainly she hopes this is the case. If the opposite were true—if refugees were harmed upon their return to Afghanistan—their blood would be on her husband’s hands. Naturally, this would be an unfortunate outcome, so she seeks to convince the world that it is not so.

    Benard claims that the US Department of Homeland Security is justified in repatriating Afghan TPS holders because Afghanistan has “improved” in security and economic terms. Of course, international organizations and NGOs disagree. But on a recent trip to Kabul, Benard walked the streets and saw women selling fruit from carts. She deems the country safe because she—a well-connected American woman traveling with diplomatic protection (and, one presumes, constant Taliban oversight)—was treated well. This is an absurd logical leap. 

    Benard’s invocation of feminist values to defend the Taliban government is particularly galling. She mentions seeing women working and moving freely as proof that the regime’s gender apartheid is overstated. In reality, these women can be seen in public precisely because they are disobeying the Taliban’s directives, not submitting to them. Every uncovered face and every solo journey is not evidence of Taliban tolerance, but of defiance. Had Benard visited Iran at the height of the 2022-2023 Mahsa Amini protests, would she have concluded from the presence of unveiled women on the streets that the clerical regime does not impose the veil on its people?

    This is merely a hypothetical. The Taliban’s institution of gender apartheid is a painful reality. Its 114-page formal “declaration of vice and virtue,” issued by its Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, explicitly criminalizes the behavior that Benard cheerfully describes as commonplace. Benard supposes that the Taliban’s laws go unenforced. Yet in the nearly four years since the group’s return to power, thousands of women have been detained, beaten, or disappeared—for the same actions Benard saw as proof of Afghanistan’s normalcy. To twist acts of civil resistance into evidence of progress and claim that the Taliban are liberalizing is offensive, morally perverse, and a betrayal of the feminist ethics she claims to defend.

    Nowhere is Benard’s analysis more ignorant than in her cultural characterization of Afghanistan as a “medieval society”—to which “modern” conceptions of women’s rights are fundamentally an alien imposition that could not be expected to persist without artificial Western support.

    This is severe misunderstanding at best and Orientalist reductionism at worst. Afghanistan is not a monolith, but a mosaic of ethnicities, languages, and lifestyles. Indeed, deeply conservative tribal norms exist in many areas—particularly in the majority-Pashtun south and east, where the Taliban draw their main base of support. But those norms do not represent Afghanistan’s society or heritage writ large. Hazaras, Tajiks, anti-Taliban Pashtuns, and other communities across the country have long upheld far more progressive norms regarding education, gender roles, and civic participation.

    To say that Afghanistan is “medieval” is historically lazy and politically dangerous. It legitimizes the Taliban’s regressive policies by painting them as culturally authentic, when in truth they are violently imposed and widely resisted. It erases decades of modern struggle—particularly by the women who have led civil society movements, built institutions, and served in the republican government. These women give lie to Benard’s puerile and condescending assertion that Afghan women are inherently predisposed to a “traditional lifestyle and village values.” Predictably, Benard never mentions them.

    Other claims are not mere misrepresentations of history, but factually false. For instance, Benard downplays the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education after grade six, claiming that private schools are still open and remain an option for girls in Afghanistan. This is simply not true. In August 2024, after rumors circulated that some private schools had reopened, the Taliban themselves reaffirmed that all girls’ high schools—explicitly including private institutions—would remain closed. Today, families across Afghanistan are forced to choose between secret education, exile, or surrender to the Taliban’s restrictions. Many girls and women decide to move to neighboring countries to provide their daughters with greater opportunities. Others within Afghanistan have pursued underground or online schooling—under the constant threat of a Taliban crackdown.

    Of course, Benard is correct that corruption plagued Afghanistan’s education system under the previous government: enrollment data was falsified, many teachers were incompetent, and many salaries were embezzled. Yet surely even she would admit that a corrupt and open school system can provide a better education than an honest and shuttered one.

    Benard lauds the Taliban for reducing violence in Afghanistan—declining to acknowledge that the Taliban were responsible for the same carnage she now credits them with ending. This is rather like praising an arsonist for putting out his own fire. And her plaudits ignore the targeted killings, the disappearances of journalists, and the persecution of minorities that have persisted under Taliban rule.

    Afghanistan’s so-called “peace” is no peace at all. The battle lines are still present; they have simply shifted from bomb-scarred roads and firefights to interrogation rooms and midnight raids. Under the Taliban administration, journalists vanish, women are dragged from their homes, and Tajiks and Hazara communities endure brutal collective punishment. UN reports have documented hundreds of extrajudicial killings and disappearances since the takeover. The extreme violence of the Taliban insurgency has shifted to a constant blanket of sweltering oppression. To brand this as an improvement on open war is to confuse enforced silence with genuine security.

    In short, Benard would have her readers conclude that the Taliban run a flawed but benign government that has set aside its own laws and committed to improving the lot of its people. This misty view cannot hide the truth. The Taliban have constructed a brutal regime that enforces cruel and arbitrary restrictions on its people, mercilessly crushes dissent, flouts the basic principles of the UN Charter, and abets international terrorism. Their Afghanistan is a place that no refugee should be forced to return to—and no government should seek any dealings with, let alone recognize.

    Finally, Benard breezily speculates that returning Afghan refugees will help shift the Taliban toward moderation. Through what mechanism will this supposed transformation take place? The Taliban’s leadership will not recruit the newly-returned refugees into its ranks, allowing them to moderate its program. It will not change its policies to accommodate them. Most chillingly, many of these refugees fled because they feared the Taliban’s wrath for their supposed offenses during the twenty-year war. Perhaps the regime is willing to forgive them, if they prostrate themselves before it. Then again, perhaps not.

    The repatriation of Afghan refugees is not only devastating and dangerous. It amounts to a betrayal of those who sought safety in the United States, and received promises of shelter for them and their families. Benard seeks to rationalize this betrayal. She offers apologia for authoritarianism, written from the safety of privilege and utterly deaf to the real voices of those who risk everything not to return.

    If Secretary Noem or Cheryl Benard truly want to understand Afghanistan, they should listen to the women who are fighting not for iPads in cafes, but for the right to learn, work, speak, and live with dignity. Until then, selective sightseeing does not qualify as policy expertise—but complicity in a terrible crime.