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https://theconversation.com/one-year-into-taliban-control-afghans-face-poverty-and-repression-australia-cannot-turn-a-blind-eye-188727>
"One year after the fall of Kabul, life is difficult and precarious for almost
everyone in Afghanistan. More than half of the 40 million people of this
troubled country are facing severe malnutrition and grinding poverty, and 90%
struggle with food insecurity.
In a land of widows and orphans, disaster has struck the many households where
women were the breadwinners. Now most women are blocked from returning to their
places of employment and business, with only 15% of women able to work. They
risk beatings, and worse, if they leave the house without a male guardian, and
even then must be covered from head to foot in traditional dress.
A harsh drought has crippled crops and forced many to acts of desperation
merely to survive. Young girls are sold into marriage to ward off starvation.
Almost all girls are stopped from attending high school, and opportunities to
study further are dwindling.
Meanwhile, the Taliban in government are celebrating. Their exhilaration is
understandable. For decades they have struggled to end the occupation of
Afghanistan by foreign troops and break the rule of a cosmopolitan society of
educated Afghan men and women whose ways were foreign to them.
They won. But now they have to govern, and they are struggling. The Afghanistan
they ruled in the 1990s has changed profoundly. Urbanisation and education have
transformed the cities and affected even remote villages. The population has
doubled, and the education of girls and women has transformed expectations and
outlooks. Afghan society is one of the most youthful in the world, with the
median age a little over 18. And it naturally looks forwards, not backwards.
The hardliners who dominate the new Taliban government are mostly old men who
have known little but fighting. Cloaked in the moral righteousness of a narrow,
reactionary, revolutionary, and savagely misogynistic understanding of
religion, they are bent on turning back time. For the moment they appear to be
succeeding, and are celebrating their achievement of an Islamic state that
looks set to be more enduring than the caliphate created by Islamic State (IS).
But the story is far from over. For all the failures of the past two decades,
one of Afghanistan’s greatest successes came through women’s education. Even
many of the supporters of the new regime recognise the importance of educating
women and girls and that the vital contributions made by women professionals
will be sorely missed."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
