Post A9LeIpgrbbIQ0680ky by RadfemLeah@spinster.xyz
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(DIR) Post #A9LeF905rvbujQMdRA by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2021-07-16T13:24:26.095202Z
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-times-view-on-the-bleak-future-for-women-in-afghanistan-dark-age-again-0cq3xq3mcEven the gloomiest forecasts about Nato’s withdrawal from Afghanistan failed to predict the speed and the scale of the Taliban’s takeover or the Afghan army’s collapse. And in the half of the country’s districts that the Islamists now control, no progress has been rolled back quicker than the rights of women and girls. Despite promises that lives would continue as before, the Taliban have moved swiftly to reimpose the strictures of their repressive theocracy, banning girls from attending school, forcing widows and teenage girls to marry fighters and ordering women to stay at home unless escorted by a male guardian. Girls’ schools are shutting down while families flee Taliban- controlled districts to save their daughters from forced marriage. “We are in a dark age again,” one young woman, Sojod, told The Times.Transforming Afghanistan into a paradise of equality was always far-fetched. It remains a deeply conservative nation. Yet thanks to freedoms fostered after the Taliban were toppled in 2001, the lives of Afghan women measurably improved. Before the withdrawal girls accounted for 3.8 million of the country’s nine million schoolchildren and 100,000 of its 300,000 university students. Women make up 28 per cent of the parliament. In 2019 female participation in the workforce reached a historic if modest high of 22 per cent, greater than Iraq or Jordan.Those advances now look almost impossible to sustain. Even in the cities still under the Afghan government’s control hundreds of women in prominent positions have been murdered by shadowy assassins in the past six months. According to intelligence estimates, in another six months the Taliban will have fought their way out of the shadows and back to power. George W Bush, the former US president who ordered the initial invasion and occupation, spoke poignantly this week of his fears about what lies ahead. Branding the western withdrawal a mistake, he said he feared Afghan women and girls would “suffer unspeakable harm . . . It breaks my heart.”President Biden is more reluctant to dwell on such bleak developments. “I want to talk about happy things, man,” he sighed when asked about the withdrawal. Shahrzad Akbar, head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, shot back: “As an Afghan woman I don’t have that option. I have to worry about a looming gender apartheid.” The reality is that despite promises to intervene if the Taliban renege on promises made ahead of the American withdrawal, the United States has little leverage now that its troops have almost all gone. The choice appears to lie between Taliban control or all-out civil war. In Ghor province, home to the Hazara minority, women who face persecution on two fronts have taken up arms, vowing to die rather than live under the Taliban.The best hope lies in some form of power-sharing that can maintain the peace and preserve some rights. Senior Taliban and Afghan representatives are due in Qatar to revive stalled talks. The prospects look dim, though. The Taliban, with more than half the country under their control, are making ever more extravagant demands. It is hard to see what external pressure could force them to honour their pledge to let women’s lives continue unchanged. Afghanistan may have left the West with no good outcomes but this one could hardly be worse.
(DIR) Post #A9LeIpgrbbIQ0680ky by RadfemLeah@spinster.xyz
2021-07-16T13:45:49.984706Z
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@HebrideanHecate My friend in Khost the number one law student in his class is a woman. What will her hard work pay off for her? My other friend is in Jalalabad we were in a video call today with her 6 month niece clinging to her side laughing and smiling. We always joke and make plans for women’s cricket team. She only sent me a video the other day of her old shelled village in Laghman. I just had one friend get their refugee application rejected as it deemed safe for him to return to Kabul. The same place his father was a targeted kill. He wants to tell his mother but doesn’t want to ruin her Eid. I just feel like shit thinking about it all. I’m lucky I can turn it off as I’m not living it. What can we do? Nothing and that hurts the most.
(DIR) Post #A9LgLc8GfbUWjDOsiG by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2021-07-16T13:34:57.532258Z
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“All we can now do is wring our hands in shame. Will there be protest marches in London for the fate of women there? I doubt it.”one of the comments, and spot on it is, too.
(DIR) Post #A9LlF3AuEAxOLKK8Dw by AnneBevan@spinster.xyz
2021-07-16T14:10:21.655655Z
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@HebrideanHecate Isn’t this exactly what happened when Russia withdrew from Afghanistan? To the cheers of western powers who had armed the savages intent on enslaving women.