This is a very interesting piece from the Toronto Star, about a teenaged girl who was sponsored to come to Canada to go to school.
Rather than be inspired by it, it made me upset, thinking about the seemingly incidental things that we enjoy here in Canada that are beyond the hope of women in Afghanistan. In her first two months here, she has experienced more freedom than a woman in Afghanistan can expect to experience in a lifetime. The picture there does not look particularly hopeful.
So what are we fighting for? For women to still live in a place where they are attacked for wanting to learn, for wanting not to be illiterate? Where cars are rare, but women drivers are non-existent. For the existence of a place where the burqa is still donned and where girls can be firebombed or acid-attacked on their way to school?
For the right to live in a place where a corrupt tribal, kleptocrat, wearing ugly scarves, spits on Western soldiers and exists solely through the largess of the Western troops that are positioned in Afghanistan?
There were at least a dozen things in this article that made me hope she is never sent back, and that we cut our losses in Afghanistan-let them rot there. Their culture and their treatment of women is despicable and, at this juncture, I am not at all convinced it is reformable or redeemable.
