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The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan has immediate implications beyond Kabul: rights and safety for women across the region are at renewed risk. In an interview, Dr. Rubina Greenwood — chair of the World Sindhi Congress and founder of the International Sindhi Women Organization — lays out how that victory reverberates in Pakistan, amplifying threats to minorities and complicating efforts to protect women’s freedoms.
Greenwood traces her activism to living through Pakistan’s authoritarian Islamization in the 1980s, when state policies and social shifts began to squeeze secular and multi‑religious communities in Sindh. From university student protests to organizing on behalf of vulnerable women, her work has focused on the intersections of gender, minority status and political power.
Her organizations — the World Sindhi Congress (WSC) and the International Sindhi Women Organization (ISWO) — have long documented human rights abuses in Sindh and taken cases to international forums. Greenwood says those efforts were born out of repeated, everyday violations: restricted access to education for girls, attacks on religious minorities, and institutional indifference from police and courts.
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How the Taliban victory amplifies risks in Pakistan
Greenwood argues the Taliban’s success strengthens a regional current of militant religio‑political influence that Pakistan’s military has historically cultivated. That relationship, she says, is not merely ideological: it feeds a system that leverages religious networks, madrassas and cross‑border ties to sustain influence at home and abroad.
The immediate consequences, according to Greenwood, include a greater likelihood of radicalization among migrants and communities exposed to an expanded network of missionary schools, reduced appetite in Parliament for women‑friendly legislation, and heightened pressure on minorities who already face targeted violence.
For girls and women in Sindh, Greenwood warns the danger is concrete and ongoing. She and human rights groups estimate that a large number of minority girls — widely reported at roughly a thousand a year in Sindh alone — are abducted and forcibly converted, often ending up in forced marriages. Greenwood attributes these patterns to an alignment of local actors with extremist religious forces and to a lack of meaningful state protection.
Forced conversions, she says, are not isolated criminal acts but part of a broader campaign that weakens the Sindhi community’s cohesion by targeting its most vulnerable members.
What role does the state play?
Greenwood levels sharp criticism at Pakistani institutions. She describes a system in which certain state actors tolerate or even enable campaigns against minorities — whether through insufficient policing, judicial bias, or indirect support for the religious networks that carry out these abuses. That, she says, leaves affected families with little recourse.
International attention has focused on high‑profile cases from Pakistan and elsewhere, but Greenwood says the specific plight of Sindhi Hindus and indigenous tribes has been marginalized. Mainstream NGOs and political actors, she contends, have often prioritized other causes or lacked the political will to bring sustained pressure to bear.
- International monitoring: Independent, international oversight of human‑rights conditions, with specific benchmarks tied to treatment of women and minorities.
- Conditional assistance: Make aid, trade access and diplomatic support contingent on verifiable protection measures and prosecutions of crimes against women and minorities.
- Support civil society: Fund and protect grassroots groups that represent Sindhi, Baloch and other marginalized communities so survivors can seek help locally.
- Judicial reform: Pressure Pakistan to ensure impartial policing and judicial processes for abduction and conversion cases.
- Safe pathways: Create emergency relocation and legal assistance channels for victims and their families.
When asked about the United States’ options, Greenwood recommends treating the Taliban’s resurgence not as an isolated Afghan problem but as part of a transnational network linked to Pakistani institutions. She says greater diplomatic pressure on Islamabad — combined with targeted support for progressive and minority groups inside Pakistan — would be more effective than ignoring the political roots of radicalization.
She also advises the international community to use financial and political levers: make development assistance and trade agreements conditional on demonstrable human‑rights improvements and establish independent mechanisms to monitor compliance.
Greenwood does not call for military intervention. Her emphasis is on structural measures and long‑term accountability: weaken the political and economic incentives that let militant networks flourish, bolster victims’ legal protections, and give space to domestic voices that oppose the militarization of civic life.
The stakes are immediate. If the regional environment for militant Islamism grows less constrained, legal and social gains for women can be eroded quickly — and minorities already subject to coercion may face deeper marginalization. Greenwood’s warning is a call for focused international action now, she says, before these patterns become further entrenched.
