Afghan Women.

Sonali Kolhatkar and Neesha Mirchandani work with the U.S.-based Afghan Women's Mission, which aims to support the efforts of the decades-old Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an underground group of about 2,000 people working to improve the status of women in Afghanistan.

Worldwatch (WW): How has life changed for Afghan women in the past few months?

Sonali Kolhatkar: Afghan women had been dying a slow death under the Taliban. They were stripped of their rights to work, to study, to walk outside unhindered and with dignity. They had virtually no health care, little hygiene, and experienced unprecedented levels of illiteracy and mortality. [Ninety percent of Afghan girls are illiterate and infant mortality rates in the country are the highest in the world--a quarter of all children die before their fifth birthday.]

The Northern Alliance has replaced the Taliban and this is terrible news for Afghan women and Afghans in general. These were the same men who were fighting a terrible war for power in the early 1990s, during which rime they killed tens of thousands of innocent Afghans. These men are terrorists in their own right and their human rights abuses--torture, rape, forced marriages--have been very well documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

WW: What do you think Afghanistan has lost in the past decade by restricting the rights of women?

Neesha Mirchandani: Even if Afghanistan moves toward gender equality, thousands of women have been affected by the two decades of war in Afghanistan. A RAWA member said to me that it would rake a century to remove the 10 million plus landmines in Afghanistan--but that daunting task, she believes, will be easier than rebuilding the people of Afghanistan after all they have suffered. I believe we have a lot to learn from the women of Afghanistan, especially from the brave women of RAWA, who stand for what they believe in against unbelievable odds.

WW: The Bush administration has been quick to use the empowerment of women as a "reason" for bombing Afghanistan. Are women being used by the US. government and the media in the war against terrorism?

Kolhatkar: The issue of women's rights all over the world is an efficient political tool but especially in Afghanistan it has been manipulated for years. The Soviets used it to justify their invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s; the Mujahideen used it to justify themselves as an alternative to the Taliban; the Taliban used it to justify their rule in terms of protecting women from the Mujahideen; and now the United States is using it to justify its military operation in Afghanistan.

Mirchandani: According to estimates by Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, the United States has killed more than 3,500 innocent Afghans to find one man. Isn't that close to the number that the terrorists killed in the World Trade Center bombings? I guess an American life is more precious than an Afghan life.