The government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. The situation is
getting so bad that one person in an editorial of the Times compared the
treatment of women there to the treatment of Jews in pre-Holocaust Poland.

Since the Taliban took power in 1996, women have had to wear burqua and have
been beaten and stoned in public for not having the proper attire, even if this
means simply not having the mesh covering in front of their eyes. One woman was
beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing her
arm while she was driving. Another was stoned to death for trying to leave the
country with a man that was not a relative.

Women are not allowed to work or even go out in public without a male
relative; professional women such as professors, translators, doctors, lawyers,
artists and writers have been forced from their jobs and stuffed into their
homes, so that depression is becoming so widespread that it has reached emergency
levels.

There is no way in such an extreme Islamic society to know the suicide rate
with certainty, but relief workers are estimating that the suicide rate among
women, who cannot find proper medication and treatment for severe depression and
would rather take their lives than live in such conditions, has increased
significantly. Homes where a woman is present must have their windows painted so
that she can never be seen by outsiders. They must wear silent shoes so that they
are never heard.

Women live in fear of their lives for the slightest misbehavior. Because they
cannot work, those without male relatives or husbands are either starving to
death or begging on the street, even if they hold Ph.D.’s. There are almost no
medical facilities available for women, and relief workers, in protest, have
mostly left the country, taking medicine and psychologists and other things
necessary to treat the sky-rocketing level of depression among women.

At one of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found still, nearly
lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds, wrapped in their burqua,
unwilling to speak, eat, or do anything, but slowly wasting away. Others have
gone mad and were seen crouched in corners, perpetually rocking or crying, most
of them in fear. One doctor is considering, when what little medication that is
left finally runs out, leaving these women in front of the president’s residence
as a form of peaceful protest. It is at the point where the term ‘human rights
violations’ has become an understatement. Husbands have the power of life and
death over their women relatives, especially their wives, but an angry mob has
just as much right to stone or beat a woman, often to death, for exposing an inch
of flesh or offending them in the slightest way.

David Cornwell has said that those in the West should not judge the Afghan
people for such treatment because it is a ‘cultural thing’, but this is not even
true. Women enjoyed relative freedom, to work, dress generally as they wanted,
and drive and appear in public alone until only 1996 — the rapidity of this
transition is the main reason, for the depression and suicide; women who were
once educators or doctors or simply used to basic human freedoms are now severely
restricted and treated as sub-human in the name of right-wing fundamentalist
Islam.

It is not their tradition or ‘culture’, but is alien to them, and it is
extreme even for those cultures where fundamentalism is the rule.

Besides, if we could excuse everything on cultural grounds, then we should
not be appalled that the Carthaginians sacrificed their infant children, that
little girls are circumcised in parts of Africa, that blacks in the deep south in
the 1930’s were lynched, prohibited from voting, and forced to submit to unjust
Jim Crow laws.

Everyone has a right to a tolerable human existence, even if they are women
in a Muslim country in a part of the world that Americans do not understand. If
we can threaten military force in Kosovo in the name of human rights for the sake
of ethnic Albanians, Americans can certainly express peaceful outrage at the
oppression, murder and injustice committed against women by the Taliban.