[News] Afghanistan's Not-So-Giant Leap for Womankind

Credit: Yuri Cortez/Getty Images (from the Chronicle)

After reading Gayle Tzemach Lemmon's article in the Huffington Post about the recent ABC News poll in Afghanistan, I'm not left amazed or flabbergasted. I'm just scratching my head.

See, I had read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle in September, and I find it hard to believe that the ABC News poll reflects any substantial change in the way women are treated in certain areas and by certain groups in the Middle East. Maybe people think women have a chance at equality, but that means very little will ever be done about it.



The poll basically "demonstrated" that 69% of those in Afghanistan want women to have the right to work outside the home and that 64% say that they want women to have the right to work in the government. It made no mention of what section of the population had these ideas or what region they came from.

I understand the desire to grab onto whatever hope there may be for women's rights in Afghanistan, but this is not enough. A culture that masks women from the outside world and believes they are spiritually "unclean" and unequal has no chance of fighting the good fight for women's equality.

Take, for instance, this snippet from the Chronicle article:

"A favored Afghan expression goes: 'Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.' Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are 'unclean' and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team 'how his wife could become pregnant,' her report said. When that was explained, he 'reacted with disgust' and asked, 'How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?'

I must ask what Lemmon's article asks, "Will [women's] rights become collateral damage as the world rushes to find a way out of Afghanistan?" It's a question we all must ask ourselves, even as we stand by helpless to change an entire cultural perspective on half their population. 


Do you think America has any right or obligation to push women's equality on Afghanistan? Or is this one we should leave up to them to inevitably ignore. I mean, why shift power equally within a nation? It's so much easier to keep things the way they are -- if you're a man, anyway. 


I hate to be so pessimistic, but it seems hopeless that I will see these changes in my lifetime.