Tweet
These days, the photo-ops from newly opened girls' schools and women-empowering handicraft collectives that filled Afghanistan coverage in the first post-invasion years feel like dispatches from another century. Equal rights for Afghan women may exist on paper -- they're in Afghanistan's 2004 constitution -- but they hardly seem like a priority for Hamid Karzai's government and a U.S.-led coalition with decidedly diminished expectations.
Into the chasm between promise and reality steps Maria Bashir, the crusading chief prosecutor of Afghanistan's western Herat province. Ousted from her criminal-investigator job by the Taliban in 1995 -- after which she ran an underground girls' school -- and named to her current post in 2006, Bashir established herself early as both an idealist and a check on Panglossian hopes for Afghanistan's post-Taliban future, warning that a woman-friendly constitution wasn't enough in a country where judges often still rule by tribally infused sharia law.
The survivor of a 2007 bomb attack and the target of innumerable death threats, Bashir now lives under de facto house arrest, protected by an entourage of (U.S.-paid) bodyguards. But she has become if anything more driven in her work, prosecuting families that sell their daughters into marriage and pursuing 87 domestic-abuse cases last year alone. "I hope that Afghanistan will have a better future," she told Mother Jones, "but I know it won't come soon. It may take another generation. Or two. Maybe my daughter's daughter will have a good life."
The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers | Foreign Policy
Into the chasm between promise and reality steps Maria Bashir, the crusading chief prosecutor of Afghanistan's western Herat province. Ousted from her criminal-investigator job by the Taliban in 1995 -- after which she ran an underground girls' school -- and named to her current post in 2006, Bashir established herself early as both an idealist and a check on Panglossian hopes for Afghanistan's post-Taliban future, warning that a woman-friendly constitution wasn't enough in a country where judges often still rule by tribally infused sharia law.
The survivor of a 2007 bomb attack and the target of innumerable death threats, Bashir now lives under de facto house arrest, protected by an entourage of (U.S.-paid) bodyguards. But she has become if anything more driven in her work, prosecuting families that sell their daughters into marriage and pursuing 87 domestic-abuse cases last year alone. "I hope that Afghanistan will have a better future," she told Mother Jones, "but I know it won't come soon. It may take another generation. Or two. Maybe my daughter's daughter will have a good life."
The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers | Foreign Policy
Comment