Domestic violence in Afghanistan is becoming more dangerous, less visible, and harder to escape.

Someone is being paid for the maintenance of a system that renders half the population invisible. What service, precisely, does this payment purchase for the society that provides it? In the case of Afghanistan, the question is not merely one of political tyranny, but of economic function. The Taliban’s control over the nation’s resources and legal structures does not generate wealth; it extracts it. It does not build; it restricts. The wealth accumulated by those in power is functionless because it is derived not from the production of goods or the provision of services, but from the enforcement of a hierarchy that denies the economic agency of women.

To apply the test of functionless wealth here is to observe a profound inversion of economic logic. In a healthy society, property and income are the rewards for service rendered to the community. The farmer is paid for food; the teacher for knowledge; the engineer for stability. But when the state apparatus is organized around the suppression of women’s rights, the “service” it provides is the preservation of a status quo that benefits a narrow elite at the expense of the majority. The violence described - domestic, hidden, and inescapable - is not an aberration of this system; it is its mechanism. It is the cost of doing business in an economy where the primary commodity is control, not production.

The stakes are not only moral but deeply economic. When women are stripped of their rights and avenues for escape, they are removed from the sphere of economic function. They cannot work, they cannot own, they cannot contract. This is not merely a violation of human dignity; it is a massive inefficiency. It is the deliberate wasting of human capital. The poverty that deepens in Afghanistan is not an accident of geography or history; it is the direct result of an economic arrangement that treats half the population as non-persons. The wealth that remains in the hands of the ruling class is parasitic. It is extracted from the labor of men and the suppressed potential of women, without any corresponding contribution to the general welfare.

We must ask what function this arrangement serves. Does it promote the common good? Does it enhance the capacity of individuals to flourish? The answer is no. It serves only the acquisition and retention of power by a few. This is the essence of the acquisitive society taken to its most brutal extreme: the belief that the right to command is superior to the duty to serve. The Taliban’s rule is a stark reminder that when economic life is divorced from ethical function, it becomes a tool of oppression. The wealth generated under such a regime is illegitimate because it is built on the systematic denial of the equal worth of persons.

Equality of condition is not about making everyone identical; it is about ensuring that no one is so disadvantaged that their formal rights are meaningless. In Afghanistan, the formal rights of women have been erased, making their material condition one of extreme vulnerability. The violence they face is the physical manifestation of this economic exclusion. To escape it, they need not just charity, but a restructuring of the economic order that recognizes their function and their worth. Until then, the wealth of the few will remain functionless, a burden on the society rather than a benefit. The question remains: what service does this extraction provide? The silence of the victims is the only answer.