The Challenges to Nation-Building

in Afghanistan continues...

Discourses on Afghan women in the post-Taleban period primarily focuse

on two different approaches for their empowerment. First, the international community calls the ‘gender-mainstreaming approach’

where all donors are in political dialogue with the government. The long term goal is to realize all human rights for the women of Afghanistan as enshrined in the “Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of  Discrimination against Women” (CEDAW) of 1979. The strategy to be used includes building new partnerships among women’s organizations, NGOs, governments, the UN system and the private sector to overcome  attitudinal barriers and other seemingly entrenched divisions.

The other approach questions the feasibility of these western—originated

approaches that seek to target or single-out women, in isolation from

their wider social, cultural and family context. It is argued that such

approaches have more to do with international politics and the agenda of

external agencies than they do with meeting the felt and expressed needs

of the majority of Afghan women and solutions should be predicated on a realistic assessment of what is feasible within Afghan culture.

The social costs of two decades of Civil War in Afghanistan have been

enormous and one of the worst affected social group have been the

women of Afghanistan. Women had rarely played an active part in

fighting, but have been targeted nonetheless. Alongside the general

hardships and suffering experienced, women in Afghanistan have been

subjected to a range of human rights abuses perpetrated against them by

different parties to the conflict. According to the UN, the socio-economic

conditions of the population are amongst the worst in the world. Healthcare is rudimentary and maternal mortality is one of the highest in the world.

To be continued...