As the United States convenes the NATO summit in Chicago this weekend, the fate of Afghanistan's women is on my mind. This spring marks the 10th anniversary of the return of Afghanistan's girls to the classroom. During the Taliban era, women were denied education. Women could not work, even when they were the sole providers for their families. Under the Taliban dictatorship, it was decreed that women should be neither seen nor heard.
By 2002, the consequences of such deliberate human cruelty were abundantly clear. Afghanistan faced a humanitarian crisis. Seventy percent of its people were malnourished, and 25 percent of children died before age 5. A decade ago, after years of war with the Soviet Union followed by the rise of the Taliban, basic infrastructure, such as roads and schools, lay in ruins. In rural areas, clean water and electricity are still luxury goods rather than the norm.
But the Afghan story is changing. Over the past 10 years, there has been remarkable progress. Four thousand schools have been built, and more than 100,000 new teachers have entered the classroom. Today, girls make up 37 percent of the 7 million Afghan students in primary and secondary schools. During Taliban rule, only 900,000 children, all male, attended school.
Adult learning has also accelerated. More than 62,000 Afghans attend universities. The co-educational American University of Afghanistan, which opened in 2006 with 50 students, has more than 1,700 full and part-time students and offers Afghanistan's leading MBA program. This fall, a record 52 Afghans will come to the United States as Fulbright scholars. A basic literacy and math education program that I visited in 2008 is reaching more than 300,000 Afghan adults, 60 percent of them women. I assume the Talibunnies don't need no steekin' skool.
But if this progress is to last, these business and educational investments must be protected and expanded. And, every bit as important, the Afghan government cannot negotiate away women's rights. At their gathering, NATO officials have an opportunity to communicate that aid, investment and alliances are not guaranteed if women are simply to be treated as a bargaining chip.
Having already seen the terrible cost of denying the most basic of human freedoms, do we dare risk the consequences now of abandoning the women of Afghanistan?
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/19/2012 13:20 ||
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...the central thesis of the book is convincingly demonstrated: The decline of Greco-Roman civilization seems to coincide with the rise of Islam. That is hardly coincidental.The historical pattern is very clear: Where Islam enters, civilization soon exits.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/19/2012 9:31 Comments ||
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Many thanks Tipper.
The Mohammadian cult of death set directly against the Jew and the western infidel continues, supported by polygomy, large families, and strategic migration. Meanwhile, the myth of Moderate Islam, tollerance, and Zero Population Growth sanctioned through various popular schemes to inclue the "Right to Choose" set the stage for the extinction of Christiandom and a feckless western civilization.
#3
huess that explains the dark ages after romans fell!
Posted by: chris ||
05/19/2012 11:22 Comments ||
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Islam was just opportunistic taking advantage of something already in terminal decline. The Vandals had already sacked Rome by 455 signaling that Roman 'rule' [and centralized government] was already a thing of the past in the West. Islam was given an opening by the Eastern Roman Empire [the Byzantines] which exhausted itself trying to reclaim (parts) of the Western Roman Empire from the Germanic invasion and occupation while also engaging in territorial wars with a revived Sassanid Persian Empire to the east. While the Germans to the West tried to imitate the Greco-Roman model they were hampered by their own innate tribalism and lacked the administrative acumen to make it happen, which in the end devolved upon the only surviving institution that could provide the administrative infrastructure and some semblance of unifying means, the church. The church had its own agenda which was not necessarily the sustainment or revival of the Greco-Roman world. With the Islamic Conquests overrunning Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch, that left only Rome and Constantinople to devolve into conflict on what that agenda would be as each claimed seniority over the other. That became the Latin vs Greek schism the 'West' still lives with today. While the Islamics weren't directly responsible, their actions feed the Christian theological/political friction of the time.
#5
Given how they have stagnated for the last half millennium or so, Islam seems to have done a bang-up job of killing off Islamic civilization. Pick any metric you want - social, scientific, cultural - the only thing novel to come out of the Islamic world is fatwas and piles of corpses.
#6
I just wish they were more successful internally. Allan wills it
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/19/2012 17:20 Comments ||
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Allan wills it
It is my belief that Allan has chosen the Crusaders and the Juices to lead his people into the modern world, kicking and screaming though they may go. Hey, we did it with the Japanese - and only had to nuke 'em twice.
Tyler Durbin at ZeroHedge hosts John Aziz of Azizonomics, who takes on Finnish writer Pentti Linkola. Mr. Linkola wants to reduce the number of people on the planet to 500 million, says that it's wrong to organize society around desires and freedom, and says that only 1 in 10,000 people know how to organize society, so they should be in charge.
Naturally he's one of them. And it goes without saying that he, his family and his cousins would be among the 500 million lucky people who are too essential to murder.
If you've read Mark Levin's Ameritopia this will be familiar to you: Mr. Linkola is a 'master-mind'.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/19/2012 00:00 ||
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The real problem with centrally-planned Malthusian population reduction programs is that they greatly underestimate the value of human beings.
Who needs Malthusianism? We already have "A Woman's Right to Choose!"
#2
Nice pic. He live in a dumpster?
Plus the eyes? A little too close together. Hmmmmm...that indicates...sumthin. Pentii, why don't you move to the front of the line. Don't know if we can take the chance of you maybe contaminating the gene pool. I'm sure you understand...
The revolution is successful. But survival depends on drastic measures. Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony. Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered, signed Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV.
--Kodos the Executioner, from the Star Trek: TOS episode The Conscience of the King. Murdered half the colonists, maybe including an elderly Hoshi Sato, because he'd deceived himself into thinking it was the only way to ease a famine. Based on his own eugenic theories, natch.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
