WASHINGTON – A group of 10 Afghan women were in the U.S. this week to learn more about how to negotiate the often-confusing world of diplomacy. The State Department brought the Afghan diplomats here in an effort to reach out to the war-torn nation’s under-represented female population.
“It was very interesting for us,” said Fawzia Habib, who works on human rights and women’s affairs at the Afghan Foreign Ministry, through an interpreter. “We learned a lot. We had a foundation, but we had the opportunity to learn more.”
Jessica Binsch/MNS
Madina Qasimi (left) and Fawzia Habib were among the women who visited Washington for a training program. “The trip to the U.S. was very, very beneficial,” Habib said.
The program included sessions on negotiating, working with refugees and cooperating with international organizations and the military stationed in the country.
Steven Steiner, a senior adviser with the Office of Global Women’s Issues at the State Department, said this sort of training was “pretty unique.”
“These are our colleagues, so we want to help [them] be good, effective diplomats for Afghanistan,” he said, adding that the reason for the focus on women is that Afghanistan “needs some help and support in fostering gender equality.”
Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Afghan women have seen some improvement. A quarter of the members of the Afghan parliament are female, a constitutional requirement, and two million girls attend school, said Rachel Reid, Afghanistan researcher with Human Rights Watch, in a testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee in February. But challenges remain: Only four percent of schoolgirls reach the 10th grade.
“We have success, but women are half the population of Afghanistan,” said Madina Qasimi a 36-year-old Afghan official who participated in the training program. “We need more achievement, we need to improve more.”
For her and her female colleagues, the lack of security can be dangerous.
“Attacks on women in public life and intimidations of women in public life have increased as the insurgency has increased,” Reid of Human Rights Watch said in a telephone interview from her London office.
“In areas where there’s a lack of stability and security, yes, women are threatened,” said Qasimi, adding that circumstances vary between regions.
In addition to violence, women face hurdles of patronage and corruption. “Professional civil service, where people are promoted based on merit, is still quite a new idea,” Reid said. Training programs such as this one are important, she said.
“The more capable women go through civil service, the more impact they will have. They may not have as much impact now but we also have to think about where they will be 10 years from now.”
To support women’s economic progress, the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan has recently launched a program to grant money to Afghan-led organizations that promote gender equality. Over the next three years, $27 million is available for small organizations that may not otherwise qualify for financial assistance, an embassy official wrote in a blog post on the State Department Web site. Among the first recipients are groups that teach women sewing and English, as well as another that plans to buy livestock that will help women support their families.
But the focus of U.S. investments in Afghanistan remains on establishing security.
From 2002 to 2009, the government spent approximately $38.6 billion on reconstruction, more than half of which was invested in the Afghan army, police and other security programs, according to a 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office. Human rights issues ranked last in funding, receiving about $2.5 billion over the seven-year period, six percent of total spending on reconstruction.