AFGHAN WOMEN FEARFUL OF U.S. WITHDRAWAL

◼ "...most girls are doomed..."

“Tell Mr. Obama not to leave us alone,” said Marjan, a 28-year-old political science student in Kabul. She spent five years at home—from the age of 12 until the Taliban were toppled in 2001, when she was 17. Under Taliban rule, women were forbidden from leaving their homes without a male companion. When Marjan turned 12, she could no longer leave her house without being noticed, so to protect her from being harassed by the Taliban, her family forced her to stay home for five years. “I have fair skin and bright eyes. I don’t look like a lot of Afghans. A Mullah asked my family for my hand in marriage when I was 13. He was 50. My family was repulsed. But most girls are doomed.” She was homeschooled by her parents, an opportunity not available to her friends with illiterate parents....

Zina, a 24-year-old English language student in Kabul describes her fear clearly: “The Taliban will come back and I will have to stay home, or get married. My mother was beaten for talking to a man at the bakery. The Taliban will come back if the U.S. turns its back on us.”...

The United States is set to withdraw all forces, except trainers, from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. President Barack Obama has promised to bring the war in Afghanistan to a “responsible” end. The only responsible end to the war in Afghanistan is through a U.S. commitment to Afghan security by maintaining combat-ready forces inside Afghanistan and proactively combating and destroying fighters in the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other militant combatant organizations.

Afghanistan has come a long way in just a little over a decade. And it has a long way to go. To pull the plug on security in Afghanistan means destroying the hopes and dreams of many Marjans, Zinas, and Malalas. U.S. withdrawal without a strong Afghan military force in place means that millions of girls and women are doomed to stay at home, enter into forced marriages as children, and be treated as just another piece of property; it means the cycle of poverty, instability, violence, and illiteracy could return to its Taliban-era track. After all, it was President Obama who said, “The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it’s educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they’re going to fall behind.”