Women's Rights @ Afghanistan

The study unit on Afghanistan in World Conflicts Today includes reference to the events of September 11, 2001. Included is this quote: "brought horror of a magnitude that, a day earlier, few Americans could have imagined."

The al-Qa'ida attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. and the downing of a plane in Pennsylvania killed about three thousand people and triggered a series of actions in which hundreds of thousands more people have died. Although the human costs of the war in Afghanistan have been extremely high, so, in some cases, have been the benefits to the people of Afghanistan.

Late in 2001, after a U.S.-led coalition toppled the Taliban, women saw a return to the kinds of rights they had not enjoyed since the Soviet occupation. Female education--banned by the Taliban until fully-segregated facilities could be erected--was restored, and wearing the burka became a matter of choice rather than compulsion.

While the resurgence of the Taliban has since rolled back many of these freedoms in Afghan villages, women in the Afghan capital of Kabul are now free to act in ways that would have invited severe punishment during Taliban rule.

Using the following two images of Kabuli women--the first, just weeks after the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, and the second, just days after the Taliban fled Kabul in 2001--design a poster that makes a statement about women's rights.


AFGHAN WOMEN WAIT FOR RELIEF OUTSIDE AN AID AGENCY
Kabul, November 1996
© Getty Images, Inc.


A YOUNG WOMAN REMOVES HER VEIL
SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF THE TALIBAN
Kabul, November 2001
© Getty Images, Inc.

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