Taken at gathering in California of Afghans and friends from last fall. Burka converted to a dress!
I first went to Afghanistan in 2004 with a Global Exchange trip that enabled me to meet many Afghans and learn their feelings on our attack in 2001. I met with all sorts, from average women trying to make a living sewing items like table cloths and clothing, to the Minister of Information, Dean of the Law school at Kabul University, women of RAWA and a girls school that I ended up spending a lot of time as an unpaid volunteer.
Until 2010, I was a board member or President of the board of this Afghan NGO. I visited the country two more times and our group managed to run three schools, a clinic in under-served province, trained mid-wives, taught vocational skills to women and men and much more. Today it is a struggle for the NGO to send money and send food to those they have been serving, much less money to pay the staff.
And here we are with the Taliban trying to make women disappear.
Student in drawing class in 2004
From an Op-Ed in the Washington Post written by a gal who went to High School in the US as sort of an exchange student:
In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, women’s bodies, opportunities and futures are to be utterly controlled by men, and in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, this control must begin at home. It’s the last part of that sentence I hope you’ll pay attention to.
The Taliban will not likely beat the women in the street if they fail to comply like they did in the 1990’s, they will punish the man (“guardian”) in the household, father, brother or husband. They may even put the man in jail if a women in his household refuses to follow the rules. This is SO DANGEROUS, even worse than getting swatted by the Taliban in the street I fear. It will destroy any semblance of freedom of choice of any kind for every single woman in the country. Young boys will grow up learning they must have total control over women and their movements or dreams.
‘We are worse off’: Afghanistan further impoverished as women vanish from workforce
Though the Taliban’s acting prime minister, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, claimed that women would be allowed to continue working under sharia law, female government employees in Kabul were told to stay at home, and only women whose jobs cannot be done by men were allowed to work.
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Afghan women have made significant inroads into various sectors over the past 20 years, after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. According to World Bank data, women comprised nearly 22% of the Afghan workforce and numbers were steadily growing.
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Restricting women from participating in economic and public activities will have a dire impact on the economy, a UN report warned last December. It could, for example, shave half a billion dollars from household consumption alone.
While the entire nation is essentially living in poverty, the Taliban’s hardliners are insisting that women in Afghanistan disappear for all intent and purposes.
Talking with friends who are still with the NGO, everything is hard, is a huge problem. You cannot send money to Kabul like you could almost anywhere else, only way that works is the hawala system. But they are only able to withdraw like $200 a day! The organization is run by a remarkable young woman, but the Taliban are investigating every NGO to see who is doing what, and who the NGO is helping, so a man has to appear to be in charge. NGOs found to be run by or primarily staffed by women are often simply shut down, even if they train mid-wives! (Not a male job even in Taliban eyes).
Young Afghan women and men have lost hope for any future. They all want to leave, but to go to Iran would cost thousands, and even if less to go to Pakistan, most women and many men have either lost their jobs or had pay reduced or just in the rears. So saving up money to escape is impossible, and they have already sold off all their personal possessions that had them in the Afghan middle class until last summer when the Taliban returned. I cannot imagine living in a country where there is no hope, and no one will or can help. But this is today’s Afghanistan.
"In the past eight months the Taliban have done nothing for us except policing our dress, there is political and economic instability and the Taliban are not solving these issues first," says protester Maryam.
The Taliban went a step further on Thursday by specifically ordering female TV news anchors to cover their faces while on air.
The decree only affected a handful of women who work as television presenters in Afghanistan, but it triggered a large social media response.
That was perhaps because the decree dealt a powerful blow to a visible, symbolic mark of progress Afghans had made in two decades of Western-backed rule: women on television, authoritatively presenting information.
"In one of the poorest countries in the world, a country where children are regularly victims of explosive remains of war, a country still battling polio, not a campaign against hunger, explosives, disease, but one against women. Taliban priorities. #Afghanistan," tweeted Shaharzad Akbar. LINK
"If such decrees are issued and imposed on women, the women across Afghanistan will be eliminated," she added. "As we see now that women are being gradually eliminated."
I cannot believe we are not dispersing all the money we’ve frozen since last summer to Afghans, who are starving in huge numbers. If you agree, please call your representatives and ask them to use the cash to help the Afghan people.
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Please do not post comments if you only have something bad to say about Afghanistan or the war. I just wanted to share what I have learned about how so many are starving and how this nation is attempting to disappear half the population, and hoping you will witness how horrible this situation is for so many, and show some empathy for the Afghan people.
NOTE: I decided not to mention the name of the NGO here as I don’t want to make anything harder for them than it is already at this time.
