Despite constant dangers, Afghan women's poetry continues to flourish. One outlet for women's poetry is Mirman Baheer, Afghanistan's largest literary society for women. Mirman Baheer operates in Kabul with over 100 members. Its members are generally educated and employed; they are professors, parliamentarians, journalists, and scholars.
Women must be present! So said the parliamentary commission on banking standards, which has today called for a better gender balance at the heart of investment banks in order to prevent future economic crises caused by risk-obsessed male-dominated trading floors.
Women's rights are increasingly heralded as a useful propaganda device to further imperial designs.
Western heads of state, UN officials and military spokespersons will invariably praise the humanitarian dimension of the October 2001 US-NATO led invasion of Afghanistan, which allegedly was to fight religious fundamentalists, help little girls go to school, liberate women subjected to the yoke of the Taliban.
Sadaf Ahmadi*, 18, from the northern Afghan province of Badakshan, has arrived battered and bruised at a women's refuge centre in Faizabad. It is her fifth such visit.
Every time it is the same. Staff at the centre, run by Women for Women, an Afghan NGO, try to offer support, but every previous time local community leaders or the government courts send her back to her husband and the beatings continue.
It was winter when I interviewed Tahmina at a Kabul prison for girls. Six to eight girls lived in each room, and although I preferred to interview each of them privately, the girls all wanted to stay together and hear what everyone had to say. So together, we sat on the carpeted floor and listened to Tahmina's story.
Fawzia Koofi would like to be the next president of Afghanistan. But that is nearly inconceivable, because Koofi is a woman.
The Taliban has tried to kill her multiple times. When she travels for her work as a member of Afghanistan's parliament, she leaves goodbye letters for her two daughters, in the event that she does not return.
We write to ask you to take the lead in formulating a clear and public US strategy for promotion and protection of women's rights in Afghanistan, and to urge other countries to join in this effort.
During my first trip to Afghanistan as Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues, I was struck by something one woman said to me during a meeting with a group of female civil society actors in Kabul. She said, "Stop looking at us as victims, but rather as the leaders that we are."
