Mariam Sadat is one proud woman. She’s proud to be Afghan, proud of her country’s progress in the last decade, and proud of the famously good fruits and nuts that grow from Afghan soil.
That’s why she called her rapidly expanding company, the Afghan Pride Association. While it’s a profit-making enterprise, it’s also a network of 350 women across three provinces in Afghanistan. The women are farmers and they are using state-of-the-art solar technology that Mariam has acquired for them to process high quality dried fruits and nuts native to Afghanistan, like pistachios, almonds, raisins and walnuts. Mariam sells the packaged products to shops and hotels, and she regularly does the exhibitions circuits in Kabul.
Over lunch in a Kabul restaurant in February, her two daughters in tow, she tells me about how she got the idea for this line of business when she was employed with the Afghan Women’s Business Council as a trainer. Travelling around the country to train women farmers for the Council, she witnessed how women in agriculture toiled long hours but then...More >>
Earlier this week I wrote about the Afghan Government's plans to seize control of independently-founded and operated women's shelters for women and girls who have fled violence and family abuse. Now you can take action, by signing the petition that has been launched by our friends at Women for Afghan Women.
Please sign and spread the word by posting the petition link to your Facebook page, tweeting it, and asking your friends to sign.
President Karzai could sign the regulation into effect any day now, so loud international outcry is urgently needed. Thank you for signing!More >>
Nicholas Kristof gets it so very wrong, in his editorial in the NY Times on October 23rd, where he argues for a reduction of American troops in Afghanistan and for a peace deal with the Taliban. In seeking to convince himself that this turn of events will not be harmful to Afghan women, he optimistically provides some astoundingly slim anecdotal evidence to convince us that the Taliban are really not so bad. He promotes mosque-based “education” for girls that exclude western involvement, as an alternative to a real education system where girls and boys have full and equal rights to high quality education (and which, inevitably, requires outside funding. So far, I don’t see Saudi Arabia stepping forward to foot the bill).
He doesn’t venture very far into what the outcome of Taliban negotiations might look like, what will potentially be lost (women’s rights, democracy, economic growth, and all the advances in human development indicators made since 2003). Nor does he even pay lip service to what Afghans have to say on the matter, such as the findings of...More >>
In her book, “The Punishment of Virtue” Sarah Chayes wrote that, “Afghanistan is a place of too many layers to give itself up to the tactics of a rushed conformity. Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy. And intimacy takes time.”
Too few Canadians have attempted to peel back the layers of Afghanistan’s complexities; and have rather, swallowed whole the portrayal we are fed by our mainstream media of a dark, dangerous and backwards country. Or, many have unquestionably accepted the propaganda of the “anti-war” movement, or more often, not noticed what it is that the pacifists fail to mention, not least of which is what will happen when the international community turns its back on Afghanistan and there is more bloodshed, not less.
This situation of manipulation and misinformation has led to the viral spread and ultimate entrenchment of some persistent myths about Afghanistan and Afghans among the Canadian public. It’s hard to know where to start in attempting to debunk these myths, but I rub up most often against those regarding Afghan women. So I’ll start there, posting...More >>
This morning at 9:00am in Kabul, 46 girls and their teachers were poisoned in their classroom at the
Tuteya Girls' Primary School in the Karte Naw neighbourhood of Kabul. The girls have been hospitalized, and it appears that a chemical gas was sprayed in their class some time before their arrival. While the incident is still being investigated, this is a trademark tactic of the Taliban's, who remain fundamentally opposed to the education of girls and women. One might say they are simply opposed to girls and women, period. This evidently doesn't bother a lot of people in the West, as in James Fergusson's recent nod to Taliban misogyny.
But it really bothers me. Because for all the cultural relativism trumpeted in the west, Afghan girls still show up to school when their classmates end up poisoned in the hospital, their teachers end up dead, their principals beheaded, and their schools burned down. They want to go to school that badly. A 17-year-old student at the Mirwais Mena Girls School in Kandahar, Shamsia, suffered severe eye injuries in 2008 when Taliban threw acid on her and her classmates on their way to morning classes. Days after the attack,...More >>
As Amnesty International calls for the Taliban to be prosecuted for war crimes, in her latest article, Ann Jones has joined the critics of Time Magazine's cover of Aisha, the mutilated Afghan girl. She writes, "
the logic of those who use Aisha's story to convince us that the US military must stay in Afghanistan escapes me."
In my struggle to make sense of Jones' line of argument, I came up with a list of questions that I thought I would post here as an open letter to her. I hope she answers them.
1. It’s clear that Jones doesn’t like the US military or NATO, though she also acknowledges that “If we leave, the Taliban may seize power or allow themselves to be bought in exchange for a substantial share of the government, to the detriment of women.” What’s not clear is what she does like. What, in her opinion, should happen instead? And how?
2. Jones says she has a different story about Aisha than what Time reported. So in the purpoted ambiguity of the facts Jones outlines,...More >>
Margaret MacMillan, in "The Uses and Abuses of History" warns of how prone we are to manipulating stories of our past, in order to protect our interests in the present. In the case of the Canadian lens on Afghanistan, its the history of our own struggles for rights and freedoms that we ignore.
As we gaze upon the often deadly battle Afghan progressives wage to secure democracy, rights for women, and a more open society, we pretend those same battles never occurred here. It's as if it just were always so, not an incremental thing that occurred only as the culmination of a long, arduous struggle against the status quo. We deem the valuing of democracy, rights and personal freedoms is "ours" alone, inherent to western culture. This view makes it easier to dismiss the present-day ideological battle in Afghanistan, between the Taliban's death-cult and the masses who want the very same privileges we expect in our society: democracy, human rights, wealth, and the capacity to live a life of dignity and free of fear. As Adrian MacNair pointed out recently in...More >>
Mariam Sadat is one proud woman. She’s proud to be Afghan, proud of her country’s progress in the last decade, and proud of the famously good fruits and nuts that grow from Afghan soil.
Nicholas Kristof gets it so very wrong, in 
In her book, “The Punishment of Virtue” Sarah Chayes wrote that, “Afghanistan is a place of too many layers to give itself up to the tactics of a rushed conformity. Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy. And intimacy takes time.”
As Amnesty International calls for the Taliban to be prosecuted for war crimes, in her latest 
Margaret MacMillan, in "The Uses and Abuses of History" warns of how prone we are to manipulating stories of our past, in order to protect our interests in the present. In the case of the Canadian lens on Afghanistan, its the history of our own struggles for rights and freedoms that we ignore.
