“Tell Mr. Obama not to leave us alone,” said Marjan, a 28-year-old political science student in Kabul. She spent five years at home—from the age of 12 until the Taliban were toppled in 2001, when she was 17. Under Taliban rule, women were forbidden from leaving their homes without a male companion. When Marjan turned 12, she could no longer leave her house without being noticed, so to protect her from being harassed by the Taliban, her family forced her to stay home for five years. “I have fair skin and bright eyes. I don’t look like a lot of Afghans. A Mullah asked my family for my hand in marriage when I was 13. He was 50. My family was repulsed. But most girls are doomed.” She was homeschooled by her parents, an opportunity not available to her friends with illiterate parents.
Marjan’s story is not unique. A large number of middle class Afghan women, who were teenagers during the Taliban era, are now attending universities in Kabul and other cities, taking advantage of the improved—albeit still much troubled—situation for women in Afghanistan. Regardless of their political learnings, their misgivings for the government of President Hamid Karzai, or their views on the use of drones in targeted killings in Afghanistan, the women with whom I have spoken could not hide their fear of a post-2014, post-ISAF withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Zina, a 24-year-old English language student in Kabul describes her fear clearly: “The Taliban will come back and I will have to stay home, or get married. My mother was beaten for talking to a man at the bakery. The Taliban will come back if the U.S. turns its back on us.”
Afghanistan has one of the oldest centers of education in the region. Kabul University, founded in 1931, catered to students from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and other countries, and became a center for scholarship in the region. However, years of war and turmoil have made education in Afghanistan a priority. Today, only a decade after the removal of the Taliban by U.S. forces and coalition forces, it is impossible to drive around Kabul and fail to notice the mushroom-like growth of higher education centers. There is an advertisement on every billboard at almost every major intersection in the city boasting the opening of a new university or school. A country that has been plagued by illiteracy (the literacy rate in Afghanistan is at a staggering 28.1 percent, yet only 12.6 percent among women specifically) as a result of almost a century of instability, coups, and warfare, is now thirsty for education. And to many, especially to women, the opportunity to attend primary and secondary schools is a direct result of efforts to combat the Taliban and maintain a degree of relative security.
It is no mystery that the Taliban, enforcing a harsh version of Islam, are vehemently opposed to the presence of women in the public sphere. And what else could catapult the strong presence of women in society more than education? The Taliban’s fear of educated women, much like that of their radical Islamsist counterparts in Pakistan, the Maghreb, and the Middle East, has lead them to use terror against women. Girls are stopped on their way to school and mutilated with acid thrown in their faces. Girls as young as 7 have been targeted by poison gas for the crime of learning how to read and write. Women have been held at gunpoint on their way to colleges. Schools have been forced to shut down in provinces following Taliban threats of violence. And, although it occurred in Pakistan's Swat Province, who could forget the case of Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl who was shot by the Taliban because of her activism for girls’ education. Almost all these incidents take place where the central government has little presence, and in Afghanistan, where the U.S. and ISAF forces cannot deliver security due to cuts in the number of their troops.
The United States is set to withdraw all forces, except trainers, from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. President Barack Obama has promised to bring the war in Afghanistan to a “responsible” end. The only responsible end to the war in Afghanistan is through a U.S. commitment to Afghan security by maintaining combat-ready forces inside Afghanistan and proactively combating and destroying fighters in the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other militant combatant organizations.
Afghanistan has come a long way in just a little over a decade. And it has a long way to go. To pull the plug on security in Afghanistan means destroying the hopes and dreams of many Marjans, Zinas, and Malalas. U.S. withdrawal without a strong Afghan military force in place means that millions of girls and women are doomed to stay at home, enter into forced marriages as children, and be treated as just another piece of property; it means the cycle of poverty, instability, violence, and illiteracy could return to its Taliban-era track. After all, it was President Obama who said, “The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it’s educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they’re going to fall behind.”
Arash Aramesh is a national security analyst and Juris Doctor candidate at Standford Law School. He has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times online, the Huffington Post, and the Majalla, among others. He appears frequently on BBC, AlJazeera, and Sky World News. His can be found on Twitter at @ArameshArash.
Photo: Asian Development Bank (cc).
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Afghan Women Fearful of U.S. Withdrawal
April 30, 2013
“Tell Mr. Obama not to leave us alone,” said Marjan, a 28-year-old political science student in Kabul. She spent five years at home—from the age of 12 until the Taliban were toppled in 2001, when she was 17. Under Taliban rule, women were forbidden from leaving their homes without a male companion. When Marjan turned 12, she could no longer leave her house without being noticed, so to protect her from being harassed by the Taliban, her family forced her to stay home for five years. “I have fair skin and bright eyes. I don’t look like a lot of Afghans. A Mullah asked my family for my hand in marriage when I was 13. He was 50. My family was repulsed. But most girls are doomed.” She was homeschooled by her parents, an opportunity not available to her friends with illiterate parents.
Marjan’s story is not unique. A large number of middle class Afghan women, who were teenagers during the Taliban era, are now attending universities in Kabul and other cities, taking advantage of the improved—albeit still much troubled—situation for women in Afghanistan. Regardless of their political learnings, their misgivings for the government of President Hamid Karzai, or their views on the use of drones in targeted killings in Afghanistan, the women with whom I have spoken could not hide their fear of a post-2014, post-ISAF withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Zina, a 24-year-old English language student in Kabul describes her fear clearly: “The Taliban will come back and I will have to stay home, or get married. My mother was beaten for talking to a man at the bakery. The Taliban will come back if the U.S. turns its back on us.”
Afghanistan has one of the oldest centers of education in the region. Kabul University, founded in 1931, catered to students from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and other countries, and became a center for scholarship in the region. However, years of war and turmoil have made education in Afghanistan a priority. Today, only a decade after the removal of the Taliban by U.S. forces and coalition forces, it is impossible to drive around Kabul and fail to notice the mushroom-like growth of higher education centers. There is an advertisement on every billboard at almost every major intersection in the city boasting the opening of a new university or school. A country that has been plagued by illiteracy (the literacy rate in Afghanistan is at a staggering 28.1 percent, yet only 12.6 percent among women specifically) as a result of almost a century of instability, coups, and warfare, is now thirsty for education. And to many, especially to women, the opportunity to attend primary and secondary schools is a direct result of efforts to combat the Taliban and maintain a degree of relative security.
It is no mystery that the Taliban, enforcing a harsh version of Islam, are vehemently opposed to the presence of women in the public sphere. And what else could catapult the strong presence of women in society more than education? The Taliban’s fear of educated women, much like that of their radical Islamsist counterparts in Pakistan, the Maghreb, and the Middle East, has lead them to use terror against women. Girls are stopped on their way to school and mutilated with acid thrown in their faces. Girls as young as 7 have been targeted by poison gas for the crime of learning how to read and write. Women have been held at gunpoint on their way to colleges. Schools have been forced to shut down in provinces following Taliban threats of violence. And, although it occurred in Pakistan's Swat Province, who could forget the case of Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl who was shot by the Taliban because of her activism for girls’ education. Almost all these incidents take place where the central government has little presence, and in Afghanistan, where the U.S. and ISAF forces cannot deliver security due to cuts in the number of their troops.
The United States is set to withdraw all forces, except trainers, from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. President Barack Obama has promised to bring the war in Afghanistan to a “responsible” end. The only responsible end to the war in Afghanistan is through a U.S. commitment to Afghan security by maintaining combat-ready forces inside Afghanistan and proactively combating and destroying fighters in the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other militant combatant organizations.
Afghanistan has come a long way in just a little over a decade. And it has a long way to go. To pull the plug on security in Afghanistan means destroying the hopes and dreams of many Marjans, Zinas, and Malalas. U.S. withdrawal without a strong Afghan military force in place means that millions of girls and women are doomed to stay at home, enter into forced marriages as children, and be treated as just another piece of property; it means the cycle of poverty, instability, violence, and illiteracy could return to its Taliban-era track. After all, it was President Obama who said, “The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it’s educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they’re going to fall behind.”
Arash Aramesh is a national security analyst and Juris Doctor candidate at Standford Law School. He has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times online, the Huffington Post, and the Majalla, among others. He appears frequently on BBC, AlJazeera, and Sky World News. His can be found on Twitter at @ArameshArash.
Photo: Asian Development Bank (cc).
