Afghan women admitted to US universities start graduating.
Sahar is one of three women graduating from Roger Williams University on Saturday who came to the United States as part of a scholarship program started after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following Sept. 11.
The program, called the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women, provides a free college education for Afghan women, who under the Taliban were not allowed to go to school after age 8.
Age 8. Remember that. Remember some other things about the Taliban: women weren’t allowed to work, and a lot of women died because male doctors weren’t allowed to touch their female patients. Men were killed if their beards weren’t long enough (barbers in Baghdad, which had long been as cosmopolitan as you can get under sanctions, were being killed once Saddam Hussein was deposed and the religious fundamentalists started coming to power).
Oh, and the Taliban is on the rise again. So think about that as you read the next few paragraphs.
Sahar, 20, a political science major, Arezo Kohistani, 24, a business management major, and Mahbooba Babrakzai, 21, a major in finance, are among the first women to graduate from the program, which requires them to return to Afghanistan after their studies.
“Coming here was a great experience,” Babrakzai said. “It just, I think, changed the future of all the girls in this program and will make a change in Afghanistan as well as we go back and work there and bring our experiences from here to Afghanistan.”
Babrakzai wants to become the country’s finance minister, and Kohistani hopes to become an ambassador. Sahar aspires to become Afghanistan’s first female president.
Karzai is called “The Mayor of Kabul” for good reason — his influence doesn’t extend far beyond the borders of Kabul, if even that. The rest of Afghanistan is a no-man’s-land where the Taliban can rise. And this is the conflict where the US has had international support for nearly five years.
I do hope that democratic institutions take strong enough root that these women, and the other Afghan women who made it to the US (and who were likely from the upper classes) get to use their talents.
Most other women in Afghanistan are going to wind up like Sharbat Gula, the famous “Afghan Girl” from the cover of National Geographic, who grew up in a refugee camp and is now a married woman afraid to show her face to strange men, even the photographer who made her image famous, though she didn’t know it.
