Glenn Sacks teaches social studies and represents United Teachers Los Angeles at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. His columns on education and politics have been published in dozens of America’s best-known publications.

After overrunning government troops and seizing dozens of districts, the Taliban claims to control 85% of Afghanistan. This claim reflects US intelligence’s conclusion that the Afghan government could collapse within six months.

The Taliban and the Afghan government are negotiating a power-sharing agreement, but making little progress. In negotiations, the government has pushed Taliban leader Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada for a promise on the treatment of women, but he has been willing to concede very little.

The government supporters’ biggest fear is the fate of Afghan women, should the Taliban again take control. This is entirely appropriate, and ironic, because women’s rights were what set off this long era of war and strife in Afghanistan 43 years ago.

In April 1978, the left-wing, reformist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in the Saur Revolution. More aptly described as a coup, the PDPA’s support primarily came from a thin layer of educated Afghans in major cities along with Afghan military officers.

Before the PDPA took power, in much of the country, women were forced to wear the stifling head-to-toe veil, and were not able to go to school, own property, or divorce. They were often considered non-persons in the eyes of the law, and the female literacy rate was just 1%.

The PDPA quickly took measures to begin to modernize Afghanistan, giving women the right to divorce and own property, reducing the bride price to a nominal fee, and, perhaps most controversial of all, promoting education for girls. It also distributed land to the impoverished peasants and restrained the power of the Muslim clergy.