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During the entire American occupation of Afghanistan, the percentage of our "foreign aid going into the military budget has been variously estimated at 75-90 percent. The practice seems likely to continue. Which means that we actually give very little aid to the Afghan government, or to the Afghan people. And that failure helps explain why so many Afghans see the American presence only as an army of occupation.
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I've proposed an alternative: that we give grants to Afghan-Americans and other hyphenated Afghans of the diaspora to return to their ancestral villages for a few months and spend the money on projects to benefit the communities. Afghan-Americans already do more for their homeland than American aid does. Why not subsidize them?
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What a creative yet simple idea. I wonder why nobody in the upper echelons came up with it. Can you talk about whether or not women are better off since the American invasion?
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Well, they are and they're not.
After what George W. Bush called the "liberation of Afghan women, women in the
cities were able to leave their homes unescorted, and many women in Kabul and a
few other cities went back to work. Women also seemed to make promising
gains on paper: a new constitution spoke of "equal rights and duties, and
Afghanistan signed the major international human rights agreements, including
CEDAW, the [UN] convention to eliminate all forms of discrimination against
women. Thanks to a quota system, women were elected (in 2005) to about 25
percent of the seats in the new parliament.
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But outside the cities, life
for the vast majority of Afghan women didn't change at all. And while
Bush spoke of liberation, no one in the administration seemed to notice that
the Afghan president we installed kept his own wife, a doctor with much needed
skills, at home.
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