Afghanistan

Canada should threaten to withhold aid to Afghanistan unless women are fully included in the peace process and push for more women in the country's security forces, a new Senate report says.

Canada should also put resources into helping build the justice system, particularly in remote communities, and provide gender sensitivity training for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, as well as their Canadian trainers.

Nine years after religiously conservative Taliban fighters forced women into hiding, many have emerged from the shadows.

Today, women are visible everywhere on Kabul's dusty roads, on their way to work and school, striding past donkey carts loaded with key limes and pomegranates, making their way past Toyotas and SUVs.

A new Senate committee urges the government to put women's rights in Afghanistan at the top of its priority list for the post-2011 mission.

At 4am, Abdul Malek and his pregnant wife were in a rented car heading to Boost Hospital in Lashkargah, capital of southern Helmand Province.

The couple decided to leave their home in the Sangeen District as early as possible to avoid roadblocks by pro-government forces or being seen by anti-government forces.

Shukria Barakzai is a prominent Afghan lawmaker and journalist who has campaigned for media freedom and women's rights in Afghanistan in recent decades. As a journalist, she launched Aina-e-Zan, a newspaper for women's rights, and founded the Afghan Women Journalists Association. During the 1990s, Barakzai stood as a voice of dissent in Afghanistan against the fundamentalist policies of the Taliban regime.

The United Nations says traditional women's rights are being violated across Afghanistan, urging the country's leadership to enforce a recently enacted law aimed at protecting women. U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has released the finding of its report in Kabul on the eve of International Human Rights Day.

Twenty-five years ago an Afghan girl with green eyes haunted the cover of National Geographic. She became the iconic image of Afghanistan's plight, a young refugee fleeing the war between the Soviet-backed communists and the American-backed mujahideen. Today the iconic image of Afghanistan is again a young woman—Bibi Aisha, whose husband slashed off her nose and ears as punishment for running away from him and his family.

October 2010 marked the 10th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for women to be engaged in all phases of securing, building, and maintaining peace. Commemorative events have focused on the challenge of implementing resolutions that call for the protection of women and the transformative inclusion of women in conflict prevention, resolution, and recovery.

The Taliban movement is harassing, threatening and killing local women who are working as professionals for the Afghan government or as leaders of women's networks in the province of Helmand (teachers, headmasters, police, health workers and leaders of women's groups/centres). Sometimes threats and violence have been imposed on their husbands too.

Nine years after the overthrow of the Taliban, the women of Afghanistan continue to fight for basic human rights. Sima Samar, chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, knows exactly what the stakes are.