Magnoliaapples here's an article on Women and Afghanistan:
A woman's fingertips are cut off because she is wearing nail polish. A group of men circle around another woman and stone her to death for appearing outside without an appropriate escort. Still others are traded to men in other tribes.
This is Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban, something award-winning journalist, activist, author and filmmaker Sally Armstrong wrote about in her book, Veiled Threat.
"Women were raped, beaten, starved, married off and used as pawns," Armstrong told a packed First United Church last Thursday evening. "I wrote Veiled Threat because if nobody recorded what happened, later people would not believe it. I tried to explain why the world looked away."
Armstrong, who has visited Afghanistan many times, first during the Taliban regime and as recently as this past June, said that in the absence of international protest, the Taliban imposed brutal, self-serving edicts.
"Here's a gang of thugs who have hijacked a religion to suit their own ends," she said. "The thing that haunts me when I am on assignment is that it reminds me of The Scream, (evocative painting by Norwegian Edvard Munch). If nothing else, I hope my book lets the scream out."
Armstrong maintains Canada must remain in Afghanistan because this country signed an agreement in Bonn, Germany in 2001, promising to help restore the country's infrastructure and government. Secondly, she added, "in the aftermath of 9-11, in order to protect ourselves, we have to work things out over there."
While some progress has been made in the reconstruction process, a frustrated Armstrong said many programs begun after the Bonn Agreement have derailed and women and girls are only marginally better off than they were under the Taliban.
"World studies have shown that if you give a girl child some education, things change quickly, she said, praising Canadian military efforts in Afghanistan. "The way forward, I can tell you absolutely, is through education, but you can't do that without security."
On her latest trip to Afghanistan, Armstrong traveled for 10 hours to reach a remote village, wearing a shawl-like burka and kneeling in the back of a truck. She made the trek, despite a warning that foreigners might be killed, to see how Canadian- funded educational programs are working in "the boondocks."
Arriving at the school at 7 a.m., Armstrong was told children walked as much as two hours to get to their classrooms.
"I will never forget the sight," she says, describing how, as dawn turned to day, children dressed in black dresses and white scarves came down into the valley from the surrounding mountains. "It was the most joyful sight I'd seen since I've been covering Afghanistan, the future of the country, 1,950 kids. And that was the morning shift."
Armstrong told how children have taken ownership of their schools, their education and their dreams - this despite the fact that, schools are regularly fire-bombed and teachers are threatened and killed.
The schools are rebuilt and teachers and children continue to attend.
"The program is working and Canadians are doing that," she said. "They're (Afghans) in a hurry to learn, in a hurry to be somebody."
But 85 per cent of women and girls in Afghanistan are illiterate, something one woman compared to as being blind, said Armstrong.
Shuswap and Daybreak Rotary Clubs and the Salmon Arm Campus of Okanagan College sponsored Armstrong's visit and are hoping individuals and groups will help them raise enough funds to pay the $750 annual salary for 10 teachers.
Through Rotary International, the world's first service club, Shuswap and Daybreak Rotary Clubs plan to support Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan toward funding the Fatima Tul Zahra School.
Located in Maimana City in the northern Afghan province of Faryab, the school has 100 students, many of them orphans, who live at the school.
Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan supports projects that empower women in that country and in refugee camps in Pakistan. The group also raises awareness in Canada to the need to protect human rights for Afghan women. One hundred per cent of the funds go to women-centered projects in Afghanistan. To help raise funds for teachers, call Doug or Joanne Leatherdale at or Jim Kimmerly at
You see this has nothing to do with the US and Bush, there are those who pound this theroy down others' thoats but it's lies made up by people who'd rather hate than help Ahghans.
