Afghan women worth the fight

Afghanistan
is emerging from 30 years of violent conflict, a period where it was
largely ignored by the West except to flood it with weapons and then
leave the fate of its citizens to the mercy of illiterate,
trigger-happy, fundamentalist men. That era, and our subsequent
inaction, is to our great shame. Now is our chance to make up for the
past and we must get it right. Abandonment is not the answer.

Today,
the girls of the Omid-e-mirmun Orphanage are enrolled in school. Many
had to work long and hard to make up for missed years of schooling
under the Taliban. They are excelling. One girl, aged 15, earned the
highest marks this semester in her class. She taught herself English
and sends me home with passionate letters to read on the long plane
ride back to Canada, describing her dreams for the future. Parentless
and poor, the world is nevertheless still wide open in her mind and her
goals are so ambitious. The future is very different for this young
woman than it was a decade ago. And that future desperately needs to be
protected.

It is difficult to describe a sight more compelling than watching the youngest girls spread about, lying on the floor, quietly reading simple picture books to learn to read. The images of animals or illustrated, cartoon-like children with which they engage were illegal under the Taliban, who banned all images of living things. One of the older girls is an avid poet. She writes of Kabul's springs, the blooming of orange blossoms and flowing rivers. The Taliban banned any non-religious literature during their regime. They closed museums, burned books, murdered intellectuals and kept women as prisoners in their homes. The Omid girls will become adults in a new Afghanistan -- one characterized by sweeping changes set against old habits that die hard. They will grow up governed by a president and parliament elected by the people, yet under a government marred by corruption. They will be able to go to university, but their high school teachers risk being murdered by the Taliban -- for being women who teach girls. Some of them may start small businesses, but they live in a country where many people live on less than $1 a day. They may choose to run for a seat in parliament, where they will contend with old mujahedeen deeply averse to their presence. It will be a windy road, but along which some seeds have been planted -- and they must be allowed to grow. As Nick Grono of the International Crisis Group stated, "we shouldn't give up on our strategy of institution building -- the fact is that it's not so much that it has failed, but that we have hardly tried."

(See the full Op-ed by CASC co-founder Lauryn Oates at the Calgary Herald site, Afghan Women Worth the Fight)