t’s easy to forget about Afghanistan. Eclipsed by the disastrous war in Iraq and the seven-year American occupation of the country, and nestled between Iran and Pakistan, Afghanistan has seemed more like an afterthought—a project began but never quite finished. With the recent news that President Obama will increase troop deployment in Afghanistan, we have a grim reminder that the situation on the ground is, at best, volatile.
Aside from the ground war, human rights abuses continue to be an ever-present concern in Afghanistan. Most recently, the government introduced a legal change that essentially condones rape within marriage, thrusting Afghan women’s rights into the forefront of the media’s focus. This law would affect the 20% Shia minority that has lived in Afghanistan for centuries, and if passed, would forbid a woman from leaving the house without permission from a male relative, condone child marriage, and, most egregiously, allow married men to have sex with their wives without consent.
The prospect of this step back for women’s rights in Afghanistan mobilized hundreds of mostly female protestors, who remember the Taliban regime all too well. Under the Taliban, women were also forbidden to leave their homes without male escorts and were required to wear blue burqas in public. The outraged and defiant demonstrators staged a march in Kabul, where they at one point were pelted with gravel and forced to endure obscenities yelled by students.
The law has also provoked an outcry from the international community. Recently, President Obama described it as “abhorrent,” arguing that, “We think that it is very important for us to be sensitive to local culture but we also think that there are certain basic principles that all nations should uphold. Respect for women and respect for their freedom and integrity is an important principle.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel also called for the withdrawal of the bill.
Due in large part to domestic protests and global opposition, Afghani president Hamid Karzai has recalled the bill—though how the legislation will be changed remains to be seen. It is no doubt a good sign that such a law was not signed into action, and is a testament to the power of international scrutiny. By keeping tabs, so to speak, we can help local groups defeat proposed laws that violate human rights.
Despite this small victory, Afghanistan continues to be a far less than ideal place to be a woman. For obvious reasons, the country’s less-than-stable political climate and flirtation with Islamic fundamentalism have posed a threat to women’s rights, evidenced by the 70-80% of women forced into marriage and the 87% illiteracy rate among women. Less obvious, though just as ominous, is the current crisis involving women’s health and childbirth. Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world; there are approximately 1,600 deaths for every 100,000 births, compared with 450 in developing countries and 9 in developed countries. According to UNICEF, “…the proportion of women who died of maternal causes ranged from 16 percent in Kabul, where at least one maternity hospital was functional, to 64 percent in Badakshan, where healthcare access was profoundly limited…[Afghanistan has] the highest proportion of deaths due to maternal mortality reported in the world.”
No doubt both religious and cultural standards contribute to this staggering figure. Women in Afghanistan, as in many countries, are relegated to tasks that involve tending to the home, giving birth, and raising children. It comes as no surprise, then, that a core aspect of a woman’s worth in such environments lies in her ability to give birth repeatedly. While this archaic view of women may continue to be common the world over, the set of restrictions that govern everything from everyday life to health care pose an especially severe problem in Afghanistan. It is common for husbands to forbid their wives from seeing gynecologists, given that the overwhelming majority of such physicians are male and are therefore “unfit” to interact with women in such intimate circumstances; during the Taliban regime, there were only 1,000 female health care workers in the country working at female-only hospitals. Just as troubling, in rural areas it is custom for women to give birth at home even though trained midwives are few and far between. Should a women in this situation encounter any complications, it is unlikely she will survive the trip to the nearest hospital. Compounding this problem is the fact that girls as young as 13 often marry in Afghanistan. Because their pelvic bones are neither fully developed nor wide enough to pass an infant, these girls often die in childbirth. Additionally, many Afghani women are malnourished and therefore anemic, a condition that leads to excessive hemorrhaging when complications arise during birth.
A woman dies of childbirth every 27 minutes in Afghanistan. In a stunted attempt to come to terms with this fact, the government now plans to distribute misoprostol to women, a drug that prevents hemorrhaging. It also hopes to increase the number of midwives by financing midwifery schools. But unfortunately, as of 2008, 8,000 midwives were estimated to be needed in Afghanistan by 2010 to meet its childbirth needs. This is a lofty goal in a country that presently has only 2,000 midwifes and that strongly discourages women’s education.
In light of Karzai’s recent decision to rescind Afghanistan’s rape law, it seems all the more appropriate to focus on the fact that Afghan women’s rights, as is the case in far too many developing countries, border on non-existent. To the extent that our relationship with Afghanistan continues to be tumultuous and murky, it makes sense to be more attentive to Afghani human rights issues. Lasting goodwill, the kind we so desperately need to build in countries like Afghanistan, is a function of doing good—objective good, humane and absent of cynical political calculations. We may be able to achieve temporary geopolitical goals by allowing these sorts of violations—but to truly win the hearts and minds of the people in this part of the world, we need to do more than simply create a new Taliban-in-all-but-name in Afghanistan. There are some rights that we simply cannot give up.
