But, but, but, I thought we won in Afghanistan! Remember? We went in and we liberated all those burqa-wearing women, because feminist goals are laudable when we can use them as an excuse to bomb the hell out of countries we dislike. We liberated them, didn’t we?
Well, not exactly. And now that we’re waist-deep in our little Iraqi quagmire, the rights of women in Afghanistan aren’t exactly priority numero uno.
Summer vacation has only begun, but as far as 12-year-old Nooria is concerned, the best thing is knowing she has a school to go back to in the fall. She couldn’t be sure the place would stay open four months ago, after the Taliban tried to burn it down. Late one February night, more than a dozen masked gunmen burst into the 10-room girls’ school in Nooria’s village, Mandrawar, about 100 miles east of Kabul. They tied up and beat the night watchman, soaked the principal’s office and the library with gasoline, set it on fire and escaped into the darkness. The townspeople, who doused the blaze before it could spread, later found written messages from the gunmen promising to cut off the nose and ears of any teacher or student who dared to return.
Many of the students and teachers were brave enough to return despite the threats.
Nooria, who dreams of becoming a teacher herself, expressed her determination to finish school. “I’m not afraid of getting my nose and ears cut off,” she said, all dressed up in a long purple dress and headscarf. “I want to keep studying.”
Schoolgirls need that kind of courage in Afghanistan. Unable to win on the battlefield, the Taliban are trying to discredit the Kabul government by blocking its efforts to raise Afghanistan out of its long dark age. They particularly want to undo one of the biggest changes of the past four years: the resumption of education for girls, which the Taliban outlawed soon after taking power in 1996. “The extremists want to show the people that the government and the international community cannot keep their promises,” says Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). Today the Ministry of Education says the country has 1,350 girls’ schools, along with 2,900 other institutions that hold split sessions, with girls-only classes in the afternoon. (Coeducation is still forbidden.) More than a third of Afghanistan’s 5 million schoolchildren are now girls, compared with practically none in early 1992. In the last six months, however, Taliban attacks and threats of attacks have disrupted or shut down more than 300 of those schools.
That’s great progess, but now that Afghanistan is generally off the radar screen, there’s a major backlash from conversative forces in that country. And the regression could very well be ignored.
The girls’ school in Haider Khani village, just up the main road from Mandrawar, has suffered a sharp drop in attendance since January, when masked gunmen forced their way in and torched the place. Before the attack, up to 80 percent of the families in Haider Khani were sending their daughters to school, according to the principal, Fazal Rabi. An American military Provincial Reconstruction Team quickly repaired the damage and reopened the school. Even so, the principal reckons that only 40 percent of the village’s preteen girls came back, and only 10 percent of the teenagers. Parents dread what might happen on the walk to school. Teachers get scared, too. Since the Mandrawar attack, Nooria’s teacher, Farida, has traveled to and from school every day wearing a burqa and escorted by a male relative. “Otherwise I fear my nose and hair will be cut off,” she told NEWSWEEK.
Two steps forward, one step back.