Asia and the Pacific

On the eve of Diwali, I was walking around the inner circle of Connaught Place, a well-known shopping center in Delhi, with a journalist friend. The business arcade teemed with people. Suddenly loud, belligerent voices tore through the festive air. We stopped.

Two angry middle-aged women were seeking the help of a policeman and accusing two men hovering around them of making lewd remarks. “He called me a whore,” said one of them, pointing her fingers at one of the men. The accused man raised his hand to hit her.

While women remain under-represented in elections, an interesting new dimension has emerged from the first analysis of 50 years of Assembly election data. India’s backward States systematically put up more female candidates than the developed southern States. Yet, female candidates in developed States are more likely to win.

The women of Afghanistan today aren’t the same women of 2001. They’ve expanded their access to health care, education, justice, and political power. As Inclusive Security Action’s Michelle Barsa noted Tuesday in a congressional hearing, “Afghan women weren’t handed progress; they fought for it.”

As we approach the 2014 deadline for the security transition, organizations like ours that have worked in Afghanistan over the past decade share concerns about the erosion of gains that Afghan women have made.

Khadija Ghaznawi says she knows exactly how to end the long-simmering conflict in Afghanistan: build more factories. A logistics company owner by profession and peace activist on the side, Ghaznawi says that if the government had been diligent about creating more jobs for Afghans, militants would have laid down their arms already.

 We invite our users to read the complete article published October 24 2013