Women’s Rights in Afghanistan “Before And After” America’s Criminal Military Agenda
Women received the right to vote in the 1920s; & in the 1960s the Afghan constitution provided for equality for women. The oppression & misery inflicted on Afghan females is due to US funded terrorism
By Dangerous Minds and Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, March 08, 2023
Dangerous Minds 17 January 2014
Region: Middle East & North Africa
Theme: History, Women's Rights
In-depth Report: AFGHANISTAN
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Women’s rights in the Middle East and Central Asia are intimately related to U.S. led “humanitarian wars”.
The derogation of women’s rights in Afghanistan was the direct result of Washington’s diabolical military and intelligence agenda, the intent of which was to transform Afghanistan into an Islamic proxy state.
What the images presented below suggest is that US interventionism was largely geared towards destroying the secular state and at the same token undermining the rights of women.
This was instrumented by closing down public schools and replacing them with koranic schools.
Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. The number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
USAID generously financed the process of religious indoctrination, largely to secure the demise of secular institutions. Confirmed by the Washington Post:
Women’s Rights and the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
… AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.
“It’s not AID’s policy to support religious instruction,” Stratos said. “But we went ahead with this project because the primary purpose . . . is to educate children, which is predominantly a secular activity.”
… Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtun, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska -Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $ 51 million on the university’s education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.” (Washington Post, 23 March 2002, emphasis added)
Michel Chossudovsky, GR Editor, March 8, 2023
Women’s Rights and the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
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Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria have been attacked by the US Empire and its allies.
These countries had something very important in common: They all had secular nationalist sovereign governments with long established ties with the former Soviet Union, which is one of the reasons why the US has long planned to destroy them and turn them into client states.
They had an all inclusive society that respected and protected religious and ethnic minorities and women’s rights. Their economies were necessarily state controlled in order to protect against predatory western corporations that have destroyed and still are destroying national economies around the world in the name of the so-called free trade and open market policies.
After nearly four decades of war, death and destruction, it is now difficult to imagine Afghanistan before its tragic recent history. Up until the so-called “Soviet-Afghan war” which commenced in 1979, the country was indeed a secular country with a nationalist government and long proud history, where people lived their normal lives in peace. Contrary to current perception, women then had access to university education and pursued varied professional careers like their counterparts in any other twentieth century modern country.
Women in Afghanistan were not always under house arrest and forbidden by law to leave their homes unchaperoned by a male relative. Once upon a time in pre-Taliban days Afghan women had access to professional careers, university-level education, shops selling non-traditional clothing, public transportation, and public spaces, all of which they happily navigated freely and without supervision.
According to a US State Department report from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 2001:
Prior to the rise of the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were protected under law and increasingly afforded rights in Afghan society. Women received the right to vote in the 1920s; and as early as the 1960s, the Afghan constitution provided for equality for women. There was a mood of tolerance and openness as the country began moving toward democracy.
Women were making important contributions to national development. In 1977, women comprised over 15% of Afghanistan’s highest legislative body. It is estimated that by the early 1990s, 70% of schoolteachers, 50% of government workers and university students, and 40% of doctors in Kabul were women.
Afghan women had been active in humanitarian relief organizations until the Taliban imposed severe restrictions on their ability to work. These professional women provide a pool of talent and expertise that will be needed in the reconstruction of post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Even under Hamid Karzai’s government, with the recently approved Code of Conduct for women, all of the women shown in these photographs, taken in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s, could not be faulted with improper behavior, according to clerics and government officials.
A record store in Kabul
A co-ed biology class at Kabul University
Afghan university students, 1967. Photo credit: Dr. Bill Podlich, Retronaut
Public transporation in Kabul
University students, early 1970s
Women working in one of the labs at the Vaccine Research Center
Mothers and children playing at a city park—without male chaperones
Queen Soraya reigned in Afghanistan with her husband King Amanullah Khan from 1919 to 1929. She would be slut-shamed or worse for wearing this dress in modern Afghanistan.
The original source of this article is Dangerous Minds
Copyright © Dangerous Minds and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Dangerous Minds, 2023
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Letter responding to The Canberra Times Editorial (14/10/23):
The Canberra Times Editorial (14/10/23, p, 50) says Western governments have punished the impoverished people of Afghanistan for far too long. The education of women and girls is important. But isn’t having access to heat, to shelter and food even more so?
The implication is that it was/is appropriate to PUNISH the people of Afghanistan. WHY? The Editorial hints that ‘Western’ collective punishment of the population of Afghanistan was/is justified because women and girls are denied “education” by the Afghan government.
What the Editorial doesn’t say though, is that the US funded the Mujaheddein proxy army of terrorists that attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government of Afghanistan in 1979-80; AND provided the anti-female and anti democratic propaganda materials that the Mujaheddein subsequently implemented. Moreover the US did that while organising, funding, training and arming the terrorists to depose the democratic Afghan government. The result has been some 42 years of bloody internal conflict, civil war, destruction and impoverishment of the nation and oppression of women and girls.
In 1979 Afghanistan had an all inclusive society that respected and protected religious and ethnic minorities and women’s rights. Its economy was necessarily state controlled to protect against predatory western corporations that were destroying its economy in the name of ‘free trade’ and open market policies.
The BRICS nations implement similar policies to protect their populations from similar US and Western corporate financial and economic predation today.
Afghani women were protected under law; having received the right to vote in the 1920s. In the 1960s the Afghan constitution provided for equality for women. There was a mood of tolerance and openness as the country moved toward full democracy.
Women contributed to national development. In 1977, women comprised over 15% of Afghanistan’s highest legislative body. By the early 1990s (i.e. just after the Russian military left Afghanistan having built civilian infrastructure like roads and schools; which the US hasn’t done in the 20 years that its military occupied Afghanistan) an estimated 70% of schoolteachers, 50% of government workers and university students, and 40% of doctors in Kabul were women.
In mid 1979 the US organised, funded, armed and trained a proxy army of Mujaheddein terrorists to overthrow Afghanistan’s democratically elected government. NOTICE that the US did this before the democratically elected Afghan government asked the Soviet Union for military assistance to fight the US organised Mujaheddein terrorists. The result was 42 years of war, strife, societal impoverishment and abuse of ALL Afghanis and especially of girls and women whose human rights have been diabolically abused throughout that period: https://www.globalresearch.ca/womens-rights-and-us-hegemony-from-afghanistan-to-syria/5572196?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles
US interventionism successfully sought to destroy the Afghan secular state and undermine women’s rights; and was instrumental in closing public schools and replacing them with koranic schools. Textbooks, with primers filled with jihadi terrorist rhetoric, were developed at the University of Nebraska and used in Afghanistan’s school system's core curriculum by the US and its proxies.
Zbigniew Brzezinsk said publicly that on 3 July 1979 'president Carter signed the first directive for the secret support of the opposition against the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.'
He also said: 'on the same day I wrote a note, in which I explained to the president that ‘this support would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets.'
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/29/zbig-m29.html
The Soviet Union didn’t INVADE Afghanistan. It was invited by Afghanistan’s government to INTERVENE to fight against a PRIOR covert US proxy terrorist invasion of Afghanistan.
The US has subsequently organised, funded, armed and trained similar proxy terrorist armies in Central and South America and in Somalia, Serbia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Sudan and other places.
More recently, in 2014, the US not only organised the putsch that overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine, but it also organised, funded, armed and trained a military force bigger than any national NATO military force other than that of the US, designed with the intention to make war on Russians in the independant Russian republics in the Donbas; AND then to invade Russia.
But I digress.
In 1992, after the Russian military left Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin overthrew the Afghan government but were removed in turn by nationalist Taliban forces in 1996. As its Mujaheddin proxy had failed and the Taliban had virtually eliminated the CIA’s drug crops in Afghanistan and was not amenable to US pressure to allow the installation of an oil pipeline across Afghanistan, the US used the ridiculous pretext that Osama Bin Lardin was responsible for the 911 False Flag event in New York, to justify invading Afghanistan directly in 2002.
The US invasion evicted the Taliban government and the US military spent 20 years occupying and exploiting Afghanistan and enabling the CIA to recreate its drug crop production and distribution networks.
Attacks against women and girls increased at a frightening pace under the US occupation. In 2012, female casualties increased by 20 percent over the previous year, and then by 61 percent in 2013.
ANY implication that Afghanistan’s current Taliban government is responsible for the oppression of Afghani females is disinformation. The US bears that responsibility.
Moreover, any suggestion that the people of Afghanistan deserved ANY “punishment”, let alone COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT, for ANY reason is false and disgusting, though typical of USans and their proxies in Australia and elsewhere as recent and previous coverage of Israel's periodic bombing of Gaza attests.
As the Canberra Times says it “Serves The National City and Through it The Nation” it must know these historical facts and shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Sincerely
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