Women's situation worsen in Afghanistan....

This article makes my blood boil. Remember Bush allegedly championing women’s rights after the US invaded Afghanistan? Well, like so much of his hypocritical posturing, this stance too has proven to be completely disingenuous.

It’s a fact that Afghani women’s rights were a low priority before the invasion. I’ve been following this issue since the Taliban took over Kabul in September, 1996. If you remember, that was when the mullahs forced women from all workplaces because it was "immoral" for females to be labouring outside the home. This included nurses and caregivers, which left children abandoned in orphanages where, with little or no warning, 10 and 12-year-old children struggled to care for toddlers.

So much for Taliban morality!

And now—surprise! surprise!—according to this Guardian article, the US government is once again making a low priority of woman's rights. While the situation improved a bit for women in Kabul immediately after the American invasion, it is now worsening everywhere across the country. Women and girls are facing such horrors and despair that they’re committing suicide at appalling rates.

.… "Afghan women are killing themselves now," she says, "there is no liberation for them." This is not just rhetoric: the Afghan Human Rights Commission recently began to document the numbers of Afghan women who are burning themselves to death because they cannot escape abuse in their families.

Women's troubles are part and parcel of a bleak picture of poverty, ignorance, prejudice, violence and suffering in Afghanistan that the NATO presence has done little to alleviate.

Everywhere I go, from the offices of big international organisations such as Oxfam, to government ministries, to little Afghan organisations, I hear anger and frustration. Anger at promised money that never arrived, even from blue-chip donors such as the World Bank. Anger at unaccountable donors who set up useful projects, but decided to move on after six months, leaving workers penniless and floundering. Anger at US aid that was tied to using US contractors with little knowledge of the country, so that, say, a vital health clinic in Badakhshan was built in a region where it would only be accessible by helicopter during the winter months. Anger at poor central planning and lack of transparency in the government.

These failures of development mean that people still do not have the clinics, schools, clean water and roads that they need to start rebuilding civil society after decades of war. Even in Kabul most areas are still desperately poor, with no functioning sewage system and just a few hours of electricity a night.

But because Afghani women are often treated no better than chattel, women and girls suffer much more than anyone else amid this horrendous situation.

Go. Read this story. And for more, check out RAWA's website.