The fear of Afghan women

I've been listening to a lecture via Coursera on International Global Women's Health, recently, and yesterday, I came across a startling statistic -that 80 percent of Afghan women are domestically abused in their Lifetime (one in three women experience gender-based violence globally). And this former statistic broke my heart. The jarring nature of this statistic mirrored the violence and chaos we've seen in the news the past two weeks or so since President Biden made an announcement on in May 2021, in alignment with the Trump administration, to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021 after 20 years of its War on Terrorism on the Taliban since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. This foreign policy decision will most likely have significant and long-lasting repercussion on preventing gender-based violence and access to education and leadership for women we have seen under the U.S. backed "War on Terror" and the U.S.-backed Afghan government we have become familiar with in the last two decades.

I am a woman. Yet, due to fortuitous circumstances and the privileges of my parents choices to immigrate to the U.S. in 1990, I have the luxury of enjoying rights that are so hard-won for Afghan women. This past week, we have witnessed headline after headline in the New York Times and other news outlets about the sense of urgency and perils felt so viscerally by Afghan women and how they have felt like they have to gone into hiding, possibly yet again (The Taliban, before the U.S.-backed war, were ruthlessly oppressive to women, restricting access to education and human rights for women, imposing fundamentalist Islamic-law polices that maintained women's place to their homes and to the private sphere). I came across one headline in CNN that informed me that the sale of burqas has been on the rise since Taliban resumed its seat of power after President Biden's widely-contested announcement.

Education, according to Professor Ann Firth Murray and Stanford University, is the silver bullet when it comes to increasing access to justice and rights for women and reducing a swath of perils - reducing maternal mortality, combatting violence, reducing HIV/AIDS prevalence, delaying and preventing child marriages, etc. - yet those of us in the West have heard time and again of Taliban's oppressive efforts in the past to restrict and prevent education for women and to dole out punishments. This heartbreaking development, I can't help but to opine, foreshadows possibly another grim era for women's rights and progress in civil war-stricken Afghanistan, one betrayed by anonymous efforts of women to speak out about their fears despite32222 Taliban's return and the non-inclusive peace process between the Trump administration and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar in 2019 that showed the Taliban's empty promise of maintaining human and women's rights if they return to power (the Afghan women's voices were hardly included in these peace talks). The veil of fear and urgency that have marked the voices of Afghan women since the Taliban's return to power have re-surfaced, only be to be challenged by activists like Malala Yousafzai (see "Malala: I Survived the Taliban. I Fear for My Afghan Sisters" in the NYT on 8/17/2021), who risked her very life to have her voice heard on the right of women to receive education, when the Taliban targeted her life in an assassination attempt when she was 15. It is harrowing and the sense of anxiety is palpable for Afghan women right now, to say the least.

So how are we, especially in the U.S., supposed to maintain a sense of hope for this chaotic and possibly catastrophic situation, if not rectified? Right now, the prospects seem grim. As I mentioned before, some Afghan women even have felt the need to go into hiding in fear of retribution or setbacks just based on their gender since enjoying the progress hard-won with America's support the last two decades--"millions of Afghan women have been able to receive an education" according to Malala. And the denial of visas and the reality of what we've seen on Afghan grounds as the U.S. has prepared its evacuation of U.S. personnel and allies and the chaotic scene on Kabul flight runways only underscore the the grim sense that has been building up since the withdrawal announcement. Rina Ansari, a former official for the State Department and the United Nations, stated to the NYT on 8/18/2021 (See "Desperate Afghan Women Wait for U.S. Protection, as Promised" by Lara Jakes) that “it’s just damning that the United States and the international community have put these women in the position of having to risk not only their lives, but that of their children and families, in order to leave and save themselves and their families.”

However, the headlines splashing across the news over and over can jar us into action. I believe that we should partner with civil society organizations, ones that are based in Afghanistan or have worked with Afghan women in the past to lend solidarity, to denounce setbacks for human rights and women's rights progress in Afghanistan and to continue to support education for women in Afghanistan. According to Malala, "one child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world." Additionally, governments in Europe, the U.S. and in China can help shoulder the burden of accepting refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) and evacuating high-risk Afghan women as the number of Afghan refugees will undoubtably continue to rise in the next few weeks and months. And better informed aid, one shaped by public-private partnerships, will only help the situation on the ground. We as the West, even with the Coronovirus raging on and other developments grabbing and vying for our attention, must not become complacent when we think of the Afghan situation and the plight of tens of thousands that assisted in the U.S.-backed war in Afghanistan by providing interpretation and other crucial services on the ground. We owe the Afghan people, and our Afghan women and sisters, this much at the very least.