Women lose in deal made with devil
(18) Eight a.m. in Kabul looks and feels a lot like 8 a.m. in Toronto, mothers accompanying their children to the school gates, older siblings clutching the hands of small brothers and sisters.
Even the capital's chaotic traffic slows down to take care around youngsters.
Other kids, as young as 7 and 8, push wheelbarrows full of produce or pedal along with ancient samovars attached to their bikes, serving glasses of tea to pedestrians.
Pressed early into labour as family wage-earners, they can only look longingly at students so visibly and busily engaged in the process of learning.
Nobody knows what kind of future is in store for Afghanistan's children, what the country will be like by the time they're grown.
Maybe it's all a false premise – no jobs, no opportunities and, if some form of Taliban regime forces itself back into power, certainly no education for females. They'll be shoved back into their homes – even though women have become since 2002 the primary income earners in many households – with only widows clad in ragged burqas allowed onto the streets in order to beg.
The pathologically misogynistic Taliban did allow that much during their wretched reign.
Unfortunately, girls attending school is an increasingly rare sight in the volatile southern provinces where the Taliban is snatching back terrain and imposing martial authority. Schools have been built by donor countries and burned to the ground by insurgents. And while the central government boasts of new learning institutions opening all the time, many of these "academies" are open-air facilities, with lessons taught under a canvas awning.
How very brave teachers are in Kandahar and Helmand and Uruzgan, threatened with night letters, shot, throats slit, yet many still defying the risks. We can all take a lesson in courage from them.
But it is understandable that fewer parents will expose their daughters to the dangers of a walk to school. An insurgency that squirts acid into the faces of schoolgirls – 15 students and female teachers dreadfully scarred in such incidents over the past month – has lost any veneer of legitimacy. They terrorize and brutalize, striking at the softest of targets.
There may be such a thing as a "moderate Taliban" but this is largely the fantasy notion of Westerners suffering from Afghan-fatigue, naively hopeful of an exit resolution. Experts on the ground interviewed by the Star in recent days say the Taliban is more than ever – more even than pre-2001 – intertwined with and answerable to Al Qaeda, converging again in Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ejected from Iraq by American troops and Sunni tribal leaders.
We are back at the beginning, making the same mistakes, with an Afghan government that thinks it can hang onto power by negotiating with the Taliban. This is folly.
With presidential elections scheduled for next year and his domestic popularity plunging, Hamid Karzai is desperate for Pashtun support. He seems now willing to make any deal with the devil to retain the power invested in him by America and secured – insofar as it is – by the blood of Western troops. This week, hosting a UN Security Council delegation, Karzai even called for a timeline to end the war. "If there is no deadline, we have the right to find another solution for peace and security, which is negotiations."
Karzai is a desperate man with no daughters.
We all know what a made-in-Afghanistan solution looks like. Females aren't part of it.
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