If I were a woman in Afghanistan, I would try to move to another country. I wouldn't journey with even one adult male Afghani as a companion. It is difficult for women to escape because they are expected to stay at home. The men, who have no wombs and don't like housework, need them. This quaintly cruel restriction is an article of religious faith. The Prophet said so. Allah said so.
Militarily Afghanistan is a lost cause. No foreign army has ever prevailed there for long. The British couldn't do it and neither could the Russians. Even Alexander the Great decided not to halt in the Khyber Pass. He knew it would be easier and more profitable to conquer India instead.
If there is to be peace in that suffering country, it can only come through diplomacy.
Whoever has the authority there must negotiate an accord with the Taliban and al-Qaeda
Then the destruction and killing will stop - mostly. The women will suffer even more than they are suffering now. After a negotiated peace comes, as it must, there will still be corruption, rebellious warlords and opium poppies waving in the fields. The only difference will be in the more severe way women are treated. In a society where the most stringent religious restrictions apply to women, they will be the uneducated slaves of their men, unable to think and do as every free human being should.
The index of primitiveness in any society is the degree to which men and women are valued equally. Afghanistan is at the bottom of the pile. Even the most enlightened nations are not free of the evils of male dominance. It is ingrained.
Normally, women have smaller frames and weaker muscles. In every other way, they are equal or superior to men. They are equal or superior in intellect and the arts, and in their performance of in the workplace. They have more concern for the future. They don't endure the pain of childbirth in order to see a son or daughter die in a male leader's insane war. They don't want their grandchildren to become the unfortunate denizens of a planet poisoned by greedy men. By whatever measure Canadian women are made less valuable than men., Canada is a primitive society,
In the Republican presidential debates, it becomes more and more apparent that the real problems of the country and the world are being neglected, while the presidential hopefuls court what seems to be a Christian Taliban. It is far more important for aspiring leaders to concern themselves with the real and desperate problems of nations than to make political points by arguing about the ways in which officials of church and state can intrude in personal male-female relationships.
Afghanistan ranks as one of the worst nations on the primitive scale. Our powerful neighbour to the south is not among the countries in the top echelon of the least primitive.
