Official says 4 US soldiers killed by bomb in southern Afghanistan Associated Press 06 October 2013 KABUL, Afghanistan The U.S.-led international military coalition says four of its service members have been killed in southern Afghanistan and a military official confirms all were Americans killed by an improvised explosive device. NATO said in a statement that the four were killed Sunday during a partnered operation in the south, but did not provide any further details or their nationalities. A military official confirmed the four were from the United States and were killed by an IED. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly. No other details were available. IED’s have become one of the top killers of Afghan and foreign soldiers, as well as civilians. Back to Top -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Will courage be enough? Faced with rising violence in the run-up to the withdrawal of foreign troops, Afghan women’s rights activists fear for the future, Lynne O’Donnell reports from Kabul The World Today magazine of the Royal Institute of International Affairs By Lynne O’Donnell There is a lot of fear in Fawzia Koofi’s life. As a high-profile member of Afghanistan’s parliament with ambitions for the presi - dency, her safety is never assured. In the past year Taliban-affiliated thugs have made clear their views on female emanci - pation by murdering several women pur - suing careers in public office. On September 7, Koofi received a warn - ing: a group of 30 Taliban were planning to attack. Threats and attempts on her life are ‘normal’, she said that evening, but the intensity of this threat was chilling. ‘If there are 30 of them, no one can stop them’. Koofi is a survivor. On the day she was born her mother left her out in the sun to die, distraught that she had brought a daughter into the family. The mother chan- ged her mind, and so provided Afghani - stan with a strong voice for women’s rights. But as the country faces a double transi - tion – presidential elections in April and the departure of foreign troops by the end of next year – Koofi’s main fear is that the freedoms Afghans have won over the past decade, particularly in women’s rights but also in media, are being reversed. She sees a shift back to conservative values, and she links it with attempts by President Hamid Karzai to broker a peace deal with the Taliban. Women’s advocates are now faced with a choice: to prepare quietly to defend their gains and improve observance; or to go out and campaign to enshrine their rights in law. Not surprisingly, Koofi is in the latter camp. Her many critics say her approach is endangering the very progress that she claims she is desperate to protect. Women’s rights in Afghanistan are, like most of what goes on in the country, vul - nerable to whatever change comes when international forces leave by the end of 2014. Many people in Kabul cannot see beyond the allied withdrawal. Elections, due in April, are exacerbating fears of what is to come. President Karzai is constitutionally barred from a third term, though he is expected to remain an influential presence. As an unpopular pres - ident in need of a legacy, Karzai is pursuing a peace with the Taliban that could, if suc - cessful, lead to the insurgents taking a role in government. The dark undercurrent of Afghan poli - tics these days is Taliban appeasement; the currency of this bargain appears to be modern freedoms, most obviously legal protection for women. Women are already losing ground and Karzai has stopped pub - licly supporting women’s rights. From time to time news from Afghani - stan reveals shocking cases of young women tortured by their families. Twelve years after the Americans toppled the Taliban, with the declared aims of ending terrorism and emancipating Afghan women, it might seem as if not much has changed. But the truth is more complicated. These horrific cases of torture and abuse which shock the world come to light because Afghanistan has a law that protects women from such outrages. A decree on the Eradication of Violence against Women was signed by President Karzai before the 2009 elections, to secure the female vote. This is applied, often im - perfectly, across the country and is yielding visible improvements in the enforcement of anti-violence measures. In many areas women have benefited from 10 years of change, some of it pro - foundly impacting on their quality of life. Death in childbirth is down to one every two hours, from one every 25 minutes in recent memory. Only about one in 10 Afghan women can read today. But that is three times the figure of 2001. Attacks on women, largely unreported, take place every day, says Sima Samar, head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who in June escaped a suicide attack on her heavily for - tified office. Among other high-profile incidents, Fariba Ahmadi Kakar, one of 69 women in the 250-seat parliament, was kidnapped by the Taliban and held hostage for three weeks. In September, Sushmita Banerjee, an Indian diarist whose book on living in Afghanistan was made into a Bollywood film, was dragged from her home and shot by Taliban. In Helmand province, the most senior woman police officer was killed in July, and then her successor shot dead in September. With women prominent in public life under threat, in May Koofi set out to have the anti-violence decree enshrined in law by parliament. Her action caused uproar. Local and international rights groups, embassies and multilateral organizations lobbied her to stop. Koofi refused to budge. The debate went ahead, and for half an hour, conserv - ative MPs spoke of the law as un-Islamic. Debate was cancelled by the Speaker, who, one source said, had been primed by Karzai to ensure the vote did not take place. Karzai told a rights advocate that eradi - cation of violence against women was a goal that could only be pursued ‘quietly’, not before parliament. But many do not believe that Karzai still supports the anti- violence law and is in fact behind the con - servative push. People who remember life under the Taliban, and see the insur - gents’ influence in pre-election, pre-2014 politics, say that a repeal of the law is not an impossibility. Activists tend to agree that if Koofi had not raised the issue, Islamist MPs may have continued to ignore the decree. ‘It has had a very negative impact,’ said Zia Mob - allegh, the senior advocacy and research officer at the Open Society Foundation in Kabul. Conservatives, whose views are dominant, may feel obliged to gut the law, and then turn their attention to other leg - islation, including the draft Family Law supported by women MPs and civil society organizations, he said. ‘Outside the parliament,’ says Mob - allegh, conservative MPs ‘are sending out the message to judges, prosecutors, civil society and media that this law does not have the power of an enacted law because it has not been approved by parliament. So they are undermining the authority of the law [and] have been very successful in chal - lenging its implementation.’ Moballegh echoes the concerns of many Afghan and Western supporters of wom - en’s rights when he says that after 2014, there will be inadequate international oversight, militarily, politically, economi - cally and socially. ‘The army and police are not able to provide security. When there is no security, civil society cannot be active, and we are losing all the gains – this is a real fear,’ he says. But that is not the whole story. The pres - sure of time and politics appears to be turn - ing the many women’s groups – who often compete for foreign funding – into some - thing like an organized united front. Nader Nadery, the head of the Afghani - stan Research and Evaluation Unit, an independent think-tank in Kabul, says that women’s activists were as assiduous in their lobbying of Koofi as the international community. ‘She was pushed back strong - ly by Afghan women who are no longer too shy to tell her to her face, “you’ve got it wrong, so stop”. That’s a very good sign,’ Nadery said. ‘I cannot claim yet that they are a full- fledged women’s movement, but they are certainly a collective voice around major issues.’ In anticipation of further attacks on anti- violence legislation, advocacy groups appear to be coalescing organically to come up with counter-arguments, based on Sha - ria, to conservative campaigns against pro- women’s rights legislation. Perhaps with some exaggeration, Nad - ery proclaims: ‘The Afghan woman as vic - tim is an endangered species’. But so, too, it seems, is Koofi’s bid to be Afghanistan’s first female president. ‘If I don’t stand, if people like me don’t stand, then we automatically give space to the extremists,’ she says. ‘But it is so costly. I am not worried about gaining people’s sup - port, I have that. The only thing I don’t have is the financial resources that the oth - ers do. They spend $50 million on a cam - paign; I don’t even have zero-point-zero- zero per cent of that.’
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 19:39:50 +0000