Don’t forget us in Afghan transition, women plead

US: Afghan women activists are urging the global community to ensure hard-won progress in Afghanistan in the past decade is not lost amid fears that as US and NATO-led troops leave they will be forgotten.

“We do not want to go back on our gains. Whatever we have gained in the past 10-11 years, we do not want to give an inch of it,” said Mahbouba Seraj, founder and director of the Organization for Research in Peace and Solidarity.

“There is no going back, we don’t want to do that, so that’s why we want the support of the world,” she told AFP during a whirlwind trip to Washington.

Together with Hasina Safi, director of the Afghanistan Women’s Education Center, the two women pressed their message with top policy-makers in the US administration during their six-day trip which ended late Saturday.

As the international community enters a transition phase handing over control to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014, women activists are urging that they should have a place at the table in talks about the country’s future.

Since the Islamic Taliban leadership were ousted by a US-led coalition in 2001, women have slowly begun to emerge from under strict oppressive laws which forbade girls from going to school and banned women from working.

There have been “many gains, women are in the cabinet, women are in the parliament, women are in the civil society, women are in the different government and non-government organizations, now girls are going to school,” said Safi.

AFP