How to promote Women's Rights in Afghanistan and Around the World
Article/Op-Ed in Foreign Policy
June 3, 2015
His story speaks to a critical lesson learned after 14 years of engagement in Afghanistan: Supporting and advancing the rights of women and girls must involve men.
That’s a salient lesson not only in Afghanistan, but around the world. And this is a year when the international policymakers and women’s rights advocates are hungry for lessons: 2015 marks Beijing + 20 (the anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s famed “women’s rights are human rights” speech in China), the expiration of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (intended to accomplish development benchmarks, like halving poverty and ramping up girls’ education), and the U.S. troop drawdown in Afghanistan. It’s been a time, too, of taking stock of the status of women in Afghanistan and globally. Women have made progress in the past few decades. And yet, in most countries — especially those besieged by extremist violence — women are still not gaining access to political, educational, and economic opportunities as freely as men.