The following summary incorporates the perspectives and recommendations of Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director at UNIFEM and Ambassador Donald Steinberg, Principal Deputy Director of Policy Planning for the Department of State.
If anyone still doubted, or hadn't noticed, that misogyny is the fundamental pillar on which radical Islam is based, the news that poison gas was pumped into girls' schools in Afghanistan, likely by the Taliban, ought to confirm it.
In mid-August in the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, the Taliban carried out a horrific sentence against two young Afghan lovers who had eloped against their families' wishes. The punishment was death by stoning. Deemed by Islamic extremists to be justified under sharia law, the process involves partially burying the accused, after which a male crowd hurls stones at the victims' exposed heads until they die.
At the same time the United States is scaling back its goals for Afghanistan, women in the country are scaling up their own ambitions. In arenas ranging from medicine to the military, from small business to civil society, women are speaking up for themselves and tackling ever-larger aspirations.
The Taliban care, if the rest of the world does not. For years they have been assiduously attempting to undermine the education of Afghan children, and girls in particular. So far this year alone, 60 schools have been burned or otherwise destroyed in Afghanistan, largely by insurgents, according to the Afghan Ministry of Education.
The security alerts, planning memos and latest news had arrived overnight from colleagues in Kabul, those working in the Afghan women's movement and their expat supporters. I started to sift through the pile and then stopped, frozen.
The July 20, 2010, Kabul Conference, hosted by the Government of Afghanistan and co-chaired by the United Nations, brought more than 70 officials from governments and international organizations around the world together in Kabul for the first time in thirty years.
