Afghanistan Project CMS

<p>Girls, in Afghanistan, seem to be caught in middle of a war of ideas.</p> <p>Reformers believe an equal access to a good education is the path to civil society. But many families cannot afford for girls to be educated.&nbsp;In harrowing, and far too common, cases, Taliban extremists have bombed girls&rsquo; schools.&nbsp;Many girls wish for an education, but too often surrender their hopes to a somber reality.</p> <p>Many Afghans are happy to have girls get educated, to a point. But if that education leads girls to want to go off and have careers, that&rsquo;s a more dicey proposition.&nbsp;For a lot of, particularly rural, Afghans, who don&rsquo;t necessarily see the advantages of female education beyond what can allow girls as they become women and mothers, to better prepare their children for the world.</p> <p>But I think Afghans in general see the role of women to be mothers and to be the bulwark of the family. And within the family, women can have considerable amount of influence. One place that Afghans don&rsquo;t want outsiders telling them what to do or telling them how to organize their affairs, and that is in relation to their domestic life.</p> <p>And that&rsquo;s always been a problem, and it&rsquo;s been an issue between modernizers, people who want to change Afghanistan, and those who want Afghanistan to stay the same.</p> <p>So I think if Afghanistan, if modernizers will look at livelihoods, look at economic opportunities, look at education, and leave aside domestic life, and let that change with time. I think the way in which domestic affairs in Afghanistan and women&rsquo;s rights and women&rsquo;s role in the world will change ultimately is for the country to be educated.</p> <p>For men to be dissatisfied with having wives who are not as well educated as they are, and to see the limits of that. In that case, it&rsquo;s an internal process. But so long as that reform is identified with outsiders and with people interfering in their affairs, it&rsquo;s going to be a political issue. And the extent to which it is a political issue, it is not going to work. It has to become an internal matter for Afghans to work out for themselves.</p> <p>Some have argued that the brutal Taliban attacks on school have to do with fear of outside religious or political doctrines shaping young minds--especially the minds of those who will one day become the mothers of a new generation of Afghans.</p> <p>The literacy rate among Afghan women is 10%.</p>