What You Should Know About Women's Rights in Afghanistan

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What You Should Know About Women's Rights in Afghanistan

Huffington Post

Anand Gopal /April 13

Just as the world's eyes are turning towards Afghanistan once again, a few conservative Afghan lawmakers are trying to pass a law that would, amongst other things, legalize marital rape, prohibit women from leaving the home without permission, deny them the right of inheritance, force a woman to "preen for her husband as and when he desires," and set the minimum female marital age to sixteen.

The draft proposal, which is aimed only at the country's Shia minority, recalls for many the harsh strictures of the Taliban era and has been roundly condemned in the international community: Hillary Clinton said that she is "deeply concerned" about the law, Obama found it "abhorrent", and others in the West have asked, "Is this what our soldiers are dying for?" The international condemnation has forced the Karzai administration to shelve the law for the time being, as the Afghan government pledges to look at the details of the bill more closely.

While the world buzzes about this latest setback for Afghan women, you might be wondering just what exactly the bill says about women's rights in Afghanistan.

What do Afghan women think about this law?

Most Afghan women have never heard of it. This is because the majority of Afghans are rural, living without electricity or a connection to the happenings in Kabul. Afghan women suffer from the lowest literacy rate in the world, at 13 percent. And the ones that are familiar with it mostly shrug their shoulders, because the conditions that the law imposes are no different than those that already exist in their everyday lives. The typical woman from the country's south or east, for example, cannot leave her home without a male guardian. She must wear the burqa in public at all times, and in some villages she must even don one in private. Marital rape is the norm in a society where sex is a man's right, not a woman's.

According to the UK-based NGO Womankind, anywhere between sixty and eighty percent of marriages are forced, 57 percent of brides are under the age of 16, and 87 percent complain of domestic violence. UNIFEM says that 65 percent of widows in Kabul see suicide as their only option to "get rid of their miseries and desolation." Thousands of women turn to self-immolation every year. There are no reliable stats on rape, as most women will never report it. This is because women can be convicted of zina, extramarital sex, if knowledge of the rape becomes public. In most of the country, even a woman just found outside of her home without the permission of her male guardian will be thrown in jail and tried as an adulterer.

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Can the West save Afghan women?

Many observers say that unless the rural, tribal structure of the society is changed, the patriarchal prison will continue. But that might be something only the Afghans themselves can accomplish. In the meantime, many Afghan women say that the West can help this process -- by dropping support for fundamentalists and misogynists.

It will be important to take such a step, they say, because the West has a credibility gap -- despite billions of dollars, thousands of lives lost, and scores of promises, Western intervention has not made the lives of Afghan women significantly better.

Anand Gopal is an Afghanistan-based journalist. To read more of his dispatches from the region, see his website: http://www.anandgopal.com.

Full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anand-gopal/what-you-should-know-abou_b_186225.html

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The War Within Islam

By Jim Hoagland

"Leave me for the moment -- you can beat me again later," a 17-year-old girl begs between sobs in a video airing on Pakistan's private television networks and circulating on the Internet. But the local Taliban commander continues to flog her without mercy as a group of village men watch in silence.

These images were described in a recent New York Times dispatch, which noted that the alleged transgressions of the girl could not be definitively established. The range of possible violations of the Taliban's version of Islamic law -- from stepping outside her house without a male escort to having an illicit affair -- is appallingly vast.

The video, apparently shot on a cellphone and given to a human rights activist, is not surprising in itself. The brutal subjugation of poor, uneducated women in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan is widely if incompletely known in the West. But the brief, blurry images are revealing.

The recent U.S. strategic review, as well as learned tomes and countless op-ed columns, depict the struggle in the desolate Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier as being rooted in fierce nationalism, the region's ancient warrior culture, the failures of nation-building and the rebirth of jihadist terrorism.

But this video reminds us of another driving force too often neglected or minimized in the analysis and commentary: the desire of Pakistani and Afghan men to be left in peace to deal with their womenfolk as they see fit. There may be no more important recruiting tool for the Taliban and other Islamic extremist organizations.

Continues: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041002607.html