After the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, women in both countries seized their newfound freedom to claim their rights as equals. They enjoyed unparalleled international support to enter all arenas of public life. Despite death threats and assassinations, both Afghan and Iraqi women ran for political office, organized, held seats in local councils and advocated for the inclusion of women’s rights in their countries’ new constitutions.
Yet today, little media or governmental attention is being paid to the plight of these women. Their fate has become an afterthought in the larger war on terrorism. What the world has yet to grasp, however, is that no single policy is more effective in promoting development and political stability than ensuring women’s active participation in society. Despite this clear boon to many a country’s ills, more times than not women’s rights are the first to be compromised for political gain, despite short- and long-term consequences.
After the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, women in both countries seized their newfound freedom to claim their rights as equals. They enjoyed unparalleled international support to enter all arenas of public life. Despite death threats and assassinations, both Afghan and Iraqi women ran for political office, organized, held seats in local councils and advocated for the inclusion of women’s rights in their countries’ new constitutions.
Yet today, little media or governmental attention is being paid to the plight of these women. Their fate has become an afterthought in the larger war on terrorism. What the world has yet to grasp, however, is that no single policy is more effective in promoting development and political stability than ensuring women’s active participation in society. Despite this clear boon to many a country’s ills, more times than not women’s rights are the first to be compromised for political gain, despite short- and long-term consequences.
For example, under Hamid Karzai’s presidency, Afghanistan adopted a constitution that supposedly gives women full and equal rights to political participation. It sets a quota for 25 percent of women in the parliament. Women are government ministers, governors and local council members. Yet these numbers don’t reflect Afghan women’s daily reality.
Female candidates need approval from their husbands to vote or run for office. Warlords have targeted independent women for assassination. In rural areas where custom rules, both the constitution and international norms are useless and travesties such as forced and child marriages continue. Women suffering from domestic violence cannot escape because if they go to the police, they will be jailed for complaining about their families.
In 2006, in the city of Herat alone, there were 75 cases of female self-immolation. More than 80 percent of Afghan women are illiterate and one in six dies in childbirth. Farmers who lose their poppy crops are increasingly selling their daughters to human traffickers.
As in Afghanistan, women in Iraq voted and ran for office under the threat of death. In 2004, women fought against Resolution 137, which would have replaced Iraq’s fairly liberal 1959 Personal Status Code governing marriage, custody, guardianship and divorce with strict interpretations of Islamic law. Civil society groups had been nonexistent for decades, but more than 500 women’s groups had sprung up by 2004, supporting women’s rights to economic empowerment. At their insistence, Iraq’s permanent constitution guarantees a 25 percent quota for women in the Parliament.
Yet Article 41 of the Constitution and the imposition of strict Islamic law threaten to strip Iraqi women of many of their hard-earned rights. Worse, Iran’s proxies in southern Iraq have established a de facto Islamic theocracy that forbids women from traveling without a male guardian, making them virtual prisoners in their own homes. If they do venture outside, they face head-shaving, or even death, if they do not wear the head-to-toe hijab.
Since 2004, the United States has given tens of millions of dollars to promote Afghan and Iraqi women’s rights. Yet in the last two years, these resources have dwindled substantially even though resources are needed more than ever to ensure that courts charged with interpreting legislation protect women; that women and girls receive proper education and job training; and that women continue to have the means to change deeply seeded religious, social, and political structures that exclude them.
It has been said that “progress for women is progress for all.” It behooves the U.S. to remain firm and increase its financial commitment to women?s equality in both the public and private spheres-especially in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where the possibility of failure has such tremendous geopolitical ramifications.
This article was first published in The Washington Examiner.