Our recent American Women’s Peace and Education Delegation to Afghanistan had its ups and downs.
As a diverse group of US women active in Afghanistan for decades, we had hoped to visit Kabul to bring attention to the opening of the school term for both boys and girls of all ages. Our intent to celebrate girls going back to school was partially thwarted when we arrived, however, when we learned that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has banned all high school aged girls from returning to school.
It was of some comfort, then, when officials we spoke with from three different ministries expressed their support for high school girls’ education and gave us their assurances that it would happen soon. But what did “soon” mean for a former national volleyball player trying to stave off an arranged marriage? What did “soon” mean for a high school girl needing to prepare for a university entrance exam?
No doubt the senior members of the IEA might eventually uncover the need for educated women like doctors and midwives to attend to births and the health of half the population, but what about the disruption right now?
More cause for hope appeared during our concluding press conference, when several members of our delegation introduced themselves by their faith, a stark contrast to my experience in Afghanistan 20 years ago, when I had come to help rebuild a bombed mosque and avoided advertising my faith for fear that it might endanger the schools and clinic workers simply by association.
And yet here we were, in 2022, offering through our introductions at a highly publicized press event that Ruth Messinger had been Director at American Jewish World Service, Sunita Viswanath was the founder of Hindus for Human Rights, and that I myself am a Christian minister from New York who serves as the Director of the Interfaith Center of New York.
Towards the end of the press conference, the representative of the Ministry of Commerce stood up to respond to female journalist who had bravely just asked a question that took the Taliban to task. Struggling to reply in English, the representative began by thanking our interfaith delegation for coming all the way from America. He then apologized for interrupting our press conference and turned to the woman who had asked the question and said, “I want to tell my sister we are Afghan people and we should work together.”
“Human rights is not only education”, he continued. “Human rights is food. And education needs money. Everything needs money. Even the ladies who have come here, they are paying money for this press conference. If we want education, we need money for salaries for teachers.”
Gesturing to us, he then said how “these women have come from so far away, a Jew, a Hindu, a Christian, and they are asking America to release our money, the money of our nation. And my own Afghan sister is placing conditions on that. Okay. If we want the government to (sic) provide education, and also your food, your security, we need money. It’s just common sense.”
I couldn’t believe it. Our religious diversity had been noted in public (by an official of the EIA, no less) not as a reason to discredit us or our message but instead to support one side of an internal argument about how the country should determine its future.
If there is good news to be found in that, it is that Afghanistan’s future is still an open book, and that some attention from the rest of the world–a graduated release of frozen funds, for example–can help Afghan men and women find their way forward.