In 2021, the Biden administration cut and ran in Afghanistan, leaving the country to the Taliban overlords we’d ostensibly saved the country from two decades earlier.
In return, the Taliban promised — albeit in vague terms — that it wouldn’t revert to the same kind of Bronze Age theocracy they presided over in the 1990s. You know, the same kind of theocracy that got thousands of Americans and an untold number of Afghanis killed, and necessitated our involvement there in the first place.
We now know what the new-look Taliban is all about. Now, they’re making sure that 45-year-old men can’t just marry six-year-old girls they buy from poor families. Instead, they have to wait until the girls are nine until the creep can take them home.
Progress!
While multiple outlets outside of Afghanistan picked up the story, it was initially reported by domestic outlet Amu.tv on June 28. The “wedding” — such as it is — apparently was due to take place in Helmand Province, a large but sparsely populated area in the south of the country.
However, authorities took note after the proposed union “sparked widespread condemnation after an image of the wedding circulated on social media.”
From Amu.tv:
The ceremony took place in Marjah District, where the child’s father reportedly arranged the marriage in exchange for money. The groom, according to local sources, already has two wives.
The union was set to be formalized on Friday with the girl’s transfer to her husband’s home. However, Taliban officials intervened and temporarily halted the process. The man was briefly detained but not prosecuted. Instead, sources said, the Taliban instructed him to wait until the girl turns nine before bringing her home. [Emphasis ours.]
Should anyone trying to marry a 6-year-old be mandatorily castrated?
Images from the ceremony, showing the man beside the visibly young girl, have provoked outrage online and among rights advocates, who say the case reflects a broader rise in child marriages in southern Afghanistan — particularly in provinces like Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabul, where the Taliban exert strong control.
Afghan man, Abdullah Mubarak, 45, Marries 6yr old infant as 3rd wife before Taliban intervene and insist he must wait until she is 9yrs. pic.twitter.com/ivgfwwS6kX
— Bayelsa Cruise Merchant (@KingErefitei) July 7, 2025
Words that can be printed in a family publication fail me. There isn’t a circle of Hell hot enough for this creature and all of his Taliban enablers.
But therein lies the problem: As the U.K. Daily Mail reported, this hasn’t been an outlier since the Taliban retook power:
UN Women reported last year that there has been a 25 per cent rise in child marriages in Afghanistan after the Taliban banned girls’ education in 2021. They also said there has been a 45 per cent increase in child bearing across the country.
In the same year as the Taliban came to power, after the US’ heavily criticised exit, a nine-year-old girl who was sold by her father to a 55-year-old man as a child bride was rescued by a charity.
Parwana Malik was sold for the equivalent of £1,600 in land, sheep and cash to a stranger named Qorban so her father Abdul Malik could pay for food.
The little girl had cried day and night before her sale, begging her father instead to go to school to become a doctor.
Parwana was freed by U.S.-based non-governmental organization Too Young to Wed and returned to her family; the mothers and children in Parwana’s family were transferred to a safe house, according to CNN.
“I am really happy,” Parwana told reporters. “The [charity] rid me from my husband and my husband is old.”
“This is a temporary solution,” Too Young to Wed founder Stephanie Sinclair said, adding that “really what we’re trying to do is prevent girls being sold into marriage.”
This is what a non-governmental organization did. As for the governmental organizations — such as the U.S. military, which abandoned the conditional withdrawal agreement structured by the Trump administration and left the teetering Afghan government to the wolves, or the new Taliban government, which believes in a version of Islam where women can’t be educated and the age of consent is nine, since that’s how old one of the prophet Muhammad’s wives was — they’ve done less than nothing, and it shows.
To blame this entirely on Islam would be unfair; these are cultural practices in a society that is and has been notoriously backward for virtually all of modernity. One is reminded of the late Christopher Hitchens’ epigram regarding anti-war activists who objected to the allied operation in the country after 9/11: “‘Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age was quite a favorite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.”
Any society whose moral infrastructure can be markedly improved by carpet-bombing doesn’t exactly have much of a claim to a rich, just cultural tapestry.
These are the abhorrent cultural folkways of poor rural peasants in certain societies — and, in most countries, Islamic or not, there are authorities to put a quick stop to these perversion.
But here’s the thing: Throughout history in every culture, poor rural peasantry has existed.
Sometimes it’s only relative; residents of Appalachia are hardly as poorly off as the people of Helmand Province, but heaven knows they have enough problems. And yet, throughout the history of the West, incidents such as this are infrequent and, even in antiquity, reviled. Why? The Christian framework that undergirds our collective moral compass.
We believe adultery and lying and fornication are wrong. We have a Lord and Savior who warned humanity that “anyone who causes these little ones to stumble, it would be better to have a millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Child marriage would almost certainly fall under the aegis of Matthew 18:6 in virtually any serious reading of the Good Book.
To the extent that countries with an Islamist moral framework forbid this and crack down upon it harshly, the impulse is utilitarian; they do it because the practice is universally reviled. There is no religious presupposition within either the Quran or the Hadith that forbids multiple marriage, including to girls well under the age of maturity. This isn’t to say that their attention to the matter isn’t justified or morally impingent upon the ruling authorities, or that they don’t act commendably, but it is simply to note that the laws they act upon do not derive from first principles.
In absolutist theocracies like the one run by the Taliban, they do pay attention to the first principles of the Islamic faith with loathsome zealotry. That’s why the “solution” here wasn’t jail or worse, but the admonition to wait until the girl was nine to take her in unholy matrimony. And this, let me remind you one last time, is a condition that has been aided and abetted by the cowardice and incompetence of the former administration.
May the shame of the world fall upon everyone who allowed this to occur. Heaven knows there’s no shortage to go around.
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