On August 16, 2021, one day after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the beginning of the precipitous US withdrawal, journalist Zahra Joya woke up desperate.
Joya, then 28, a woman to be reckoned with. Eight months earlier, with cash from her government salary, she founded Rukhshana Media, a newsroom committed to listening to women and telling their stories. By 2021, it had already produced articlesthat have gained foreign recognition. Now the Taliban have threatened to dismantle everything she had built.
Now, 18 months later, its newsroom is a fraction of what it once was, and most of its staff works in secret. But they persist, anonymously, shining with a burst of light in the ever-darkening world of Afghan women.
On August 16, 2021, one day after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the beginning of the precipitous US withdrawal, journalist Zahra Joya woke up desperate.
Joya, then 28, a woman to be reckoned with. Eight months earlier, with cash from her government salary, she founded Rukhshana Media, a newsroom committed to listening to women and telling their stories. By 2021, it had already produced articlesthat have gained foreign recognition. Now the Taliban have threatened to dismantle everything she had built.
Now, 18 months later, its newsroom is a fraction of what it once was, and most of its staff works in secret. But they persist, anonymously, shining with a burst of light in the ever-darkening world of Afghan women.
The United States and other Western governments take note. The women of Afghanistan, after 20 years of relative freedom, will not be content to go into the shadows. Their continued protest and struggle is a critical lever of strength for America and all others. countries that have an interest in selling recovery and, eventually, peace and security in Afghanistan.
How a geographic region empowers or disempowers women is a key indicator of their behavior within the network of nations. More than two decades of studies have affirmed that women are for safety, and that their well-being and empowerment play a critical role in prevention. war and ensure peace. We also know that women have a central role to play in selling democratic freedom.
Simply put, it is in America’s strategic interest to create and maintain a foreign policy that puts women first. To do so, he will first have to perceive what was so extraordinary in Afghanistan.
Regardless of the progress that has been made in Afghanistan over the past two decades, most of them have disappeared in the last 18 months. In 2021, he held 27% of the seats in the Afghan National Assembly, worked in government positions, and attended university. Afghanistan and the foreign network have funded the education and deployment of thousands of midwives, reducing the maternal mortality ratio from 1600 consisting of 100,000 births in 2002 to 638 consistent with 100,000 births in 2017.
Today, a stable rollback of onerous restrictions ensures that women stay at home, unable to access employment, physical care and education. This year, the Taliban ordered all gym staff to wear a full hijab and cover their faces. In late December 2022, Taliban leaders issued a decree banning Afghan women from running for non-governmental organizations. According to the United Nations, the loss of a source of income due to the exclusion of women from the labour market could cost Afghanistan up to 5% of its GDP. or about $1 billion, plunging the country further into poverty, exacerbating lack of food confidence and threatening stability.
The United States and its allies in the war on terror have invested billions of dollars in the prestige of women in Afghanistan, pushing systems to improve critical physical care, include women in government, and promote educational opportunities. Many of them have failed.
For example, the Afghan Ministry of Interior, with the UN-funded Trust Fund for Law and Order in Afghanistan, funded and administered worldwide, has set a goal of hiring 5,000 female police officers by June 2014, but has not planned or built toilets and conversion rooms to accommodate them. Afghanistan has never achieved its goal. This, in turn, has created a counterinsurgency security breach. In a segregated society, female police officers are essential to register women at checkpoints. Today, some suicide bombers disguise themselves as women to escape the search.
We already know in many cases that the systems created to promote women’s inclusion lacked one key element: the voices of Afghan women on the ground, the only other people who actually perceive how to navigate the constraints of the male-controlled society in Afghanistan. The U. S. Women, Peace and Security Actof 2017 affirms that women’s rights should be in the middle of peace and security planning. However, in the truth of the war bureaucracy, women are an afterthought. and the National Defence Strategy, two key documents that consult the country’s peace and security posture, contained few references to gender issues, unless they involved gender-based violence.
Participating in the war and the upcoming stability operation without this key intelligence has genuine consequences. The United States “has struggled to perceive or mitigate cultural and social barriers to support women and girls,” leading U. S. agencies to set ingenuine goals, wrote John Sopko, special inspector. General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, in its August 2021 report, “Lessons Learned from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction. “if the United States had done more to empower women and done better, Afghanistan could have replaced it today. “it will definitely be that we have not fully ensured the meaningful participation of women in Afghanistan,” Verveer said.
These deficiencies deserve careful consideration, either for reasons of duty and for the opportunity to be informed of such errors. From the beginning, George W. Bush’s leadership used women’s rights and empowerment to justify its war in Afghanistan. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for women’s rights and dignity,” then-first woman Laura Bush said in the management’s weekly radio interview on Nov. 17, 2001, just over a month after U. S. troops began their attack. women and youth under the brutal Taliban regime. In the administration of Obama, then American. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Taliban that women’s rights were non-negotiable and led efforts to advance understanding of the nexus between gender and security in government.
However, 20 years of war and more than 2 trillion dollars later, the Taliban are back in force and women are once again veiled, locked in their homes and excluded from civic life. Given the magnitude of the goals beyond gender equality and the extent of America’s failure, American taxpayers deserve to be held accountable. The U. S. reaction The fall of Kabul raises serious questions about whether women’s rights are valued, especially in the midst of a crisis. When the Taliban took Kabul, officials rushed in, took them by surprise, and turned to civil society. to help evacuate and unload visas for women leaders, who faced imminent danger.
If the United States needs to keep the peace, stabilize rebellious nations, and make sure its next military attempt succeeds, it will need to read about how its policies and practices of support and empowerment of women have proved so extraordinary in Afghanistan. We want to know what went right so we can reproduce it and what went wrong so we can fix it.
The bipartisan Commission on the War in Afghanistan is tasked through Congress with conducting a review of U. S. military, intelligence, foreign aid, and diplomatic engagement. The 16 commissioners come with just two women, a composition that barely lives up to the U. S. Women, Peace and Security Act. The U. S. Department of Health and Prevention affirms the importance of women having a full seat at the table. If this commission is tasked with reviewing 20 years of engagement in Afghanistan and collecting lessons learned regarding women’s rights, then it turns out to be a bad start.
Afghanistan, the enduring unrest and the progress made, offers some of the most important forward-looking political categories in recent history, such as applying a gender attitude to foreign policy, categories that threaten to be lost if not fully taken into account through this commission. Gender issues make such a huge contribution to America’s unrest at home that one can argue that they deserve to be in the middle of this effort, if not as an autonomous commission.
We don’t know, and possibly never will, whether another technique for women’s rights and empowerment in Afghanistan would have replaced the outcome, yet we want to ask the questions. Findings Indicate U. S. Security Strategyin the future.
Until we have better answers, we will have to do what we can to prevent what little America has built for women in Afghanistan from collapsing further and for Afghan women leaders, both inside and outside the country, who have made progress. to others, even if the effort takes decades. The Taliban are erasing women from public life in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, the U. N. special rapporteur on Afghanistan, wrote in a recent report. The women said they felt attacked and at risk, but “continue to resist violations of their human rights. “wrote. ” We know that what happened to us is not fair. Some of us may have left the country, but we didn’t. We made the decision to stay and fight for the position of women in Afghan society,” the women said. Bennett.
Afghan women have no chance to escape the consequences of the damaged promises that now govern their daily lives. Neither does the U. S. government. U. S. The United States cannot hide in the shadows of its mistakes and expect to evade its responsibilities. The scenario is terrible and the world is watching.
The arc of history is long. If the U. S. UU. se give up vigorously incentivizing women, they will ultimately pay the value. Failure to invest in women’s well-being is a military failure. If the U. S. If the U. S. and its allies want to have some chance of keeping up with stability and security in the region, so they will have women leaders at all levels, whether inside and outside Afghanistan, to advertise fast, long-term jobs and motivate other countries to do the same. Most importantly, they will have to pay attention to Afghan women. That’s why at Project Fuller we continue to engage Afghan bloodhound women by publishing their stories and amplifying their voices: women like Joya.
Joya’s life in Afghanistan reflects the triumphs and struggles of the women and women of Afghanistan. He began his life under Taliban rule, dressing as a child to attend school number one. In 2001, after the U. S. After the U. S. military expelled the Taliban from the country, Joya gave up his disguise, finished his studies and embarked on his career as a journalist. She was the only woman in the newsroom. The lack of female voices motivated her to create Rukhshana Media, named after a young woman stoned by the Taliban. .
Joya belongs to a generation that has lived through an Afghan society liberated from the Taliban. She is accustomed to freedom and deeply feels its absence. He feels, he says, that he has traveled in time.
These days, Joya is running into exile after Taliban threats against bloodhounds forced her to flee Kabul. She edits the stories of her remaining colleagues in Afghanistan. When the Taliban took hold in August 2021, 2490 were running like bloodhounds. the number had dropped to 410, according to Reporters Without Borders.
“It’s very painful and sad,” Joya told actress Angelina Jolie in an interview for Time magazine’s Woman of the Year. “Honestly, we only do journalism on those days; We try to write for our freedom.
It is in a position to do its part to push Afghanistan back. He needs to hire more journalists, tell more stories and the freedom of expression he considers his birthright.
It is that of a democracy worthy of investment.
Xanthe Scharff is executive director and co-founder of The Fuller Project, the global newsroom committed to innovative journalism that catalyzes the replacement of women.
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