The battle against trigger-happy religious conservatives is the same the world over
by David Atkins
The trigger-happy conservative theocrats in America organize themselves under the banner of the Republican Party. In Afghanistan they organize themselves under the banner of the Taliban.
Today in Afghanistan women and urban voters went to the polls to tell their own violent conservative theocrats to shove it where the sun don’t shine, in the nation’s first peaceful democratic transition of power. One picture is worth a thousand words:
And just like everywhere else in the world, life improves when conservative, misogynistic theocratic violence fetishists are routed out of power:
The education system in Afghanistan is regarded as one of the country’s biggest success stories since the Taliban were driven from power.
In 2001 no girls attended formal schools and there were only one million boys enrolled. By 2012 the World Bank says there were 7.8 million pupils attending school – including about 2.9 million girls.
The position of women in Afghanistan has begun to improve. Under the Taliban they were barred from attending school and going out to work. Latest figures from the World Bank say 36% girls are now enrolled in school – although many do not complete their secondary education and figures from 2007 suggest 52% of women were married by the age of 20.
Literacy among female adults is still very low – although official statistics are hard to come by. A report by the Central Statistsics Organisation/Unicef reported a literacy rate of 22.2% among women aged 15-24 in 2010/11.
Some women have begun to forge careers for themselves. More than a quarter of parliament and government employees are now women, according to charity Islamic Relief. A survey by the Central Statistics Oranisation (CSO) in 2009 found women were being employed by government at a much faster rate than men. If the female growth rate continued, the share of female employees would be more than 40% by 2020.
Women are now also employed in the police and army. British officers have helped to establish a military training academy that aims to train 100 female army officers per year…
There have been big improvements in the country’s health system.
Life expectancy has increased slightly from 56 to 60 years. But there have been big improvements in the under-five mortality rate and the maternal mortality rates.
According to the UN, access to safe drinking water improved from 4.8% of the population to 60.6% by 2011. Access to better sanitation, including private rather than shared toilets, has also improved to an average 37%. But the averages again mask big differences between urban and rural areas, with much less improvement in rural areas.
Vaccination campaigns continue to work towards the elimination of polio in Afghanistan, one of the last remaining countries where the disease remains endemic. In 2013 there were 14 reported cases, down from 37 in 2012.
There is a global battle between conservative economic royalist theocrats who want to disempower governments and urban liberals to revert all control to rich local religious patriarchs, and decent people who want a brighter and fairer future for everyone.
The names and religions change, but the battle is always the same.
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