While the Taliban said women’s rights are going to be respected, Priti Patel told the BBC it had been hard to believe “the PR operation that we’re currently seeing”.
The UK government will work with other nations and pledged to resettle 5,000 Afghans within the UK within the first year.
However, some MPs have criticised the scheme for not going far enough.
Thousands of Afghans are trying to escape the country after the Taliban seized control of the capital Kabul.
The government has committed to resettling up to twenty ,000 Afghan refugees within the UK within the future – and Ms Patel said she wanted the bulk of these to be women and girls and persecuted minorities.
The Taliban have promised the rights of girls in Afghanistan are going to be respected “within the framework of Islamic law”.
But the house secretary said the group had a history of oppressing women and “that’s not getting to change overnight”.
“I genuinely don’t think that we should always be in the least believing the spokespeople or the PR operation that we’re currently seeing,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
VOICES: Uncertain times ahead for Afghan women EXPLAINER: Ten days that shook Afghanistan AT THE SCENE: Kabul hotel – Taliban guards, no women Appearing on BBC Breakfast, Ms Patel refused to offer a timescale for a way long it might deem the 20,000 Afghans to be delivered to the united kingdom .
However, she compared the new scheme to at least one introduced for Syrian refugees, which saw an identical number of individuals resettled over a period of seven years.
