David Cortight, author of “Ending Obama’s War: Responsible Military Withdrawal from Afghanistan” gave a Clinton School lecture Thursday in which he discussed the advances for women in Afghani society as well as the extreme obstacles facing the U.S.-Afghanistan collaboration in building democracy in the region.
A guest of the Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND), Cortight spoke about the demand for procuring human rights in order to build sustainable peace in conflicted areas.
Women have made gains in human rights and autonomy in Afghanistan, Cortight said, noting that the country’s new constitution grants women full voting rights and women now hold 25 percent of the seats in parliament. The country has also created a Ministry of Women’s Affairs, he said.
Additional gains have been made under this new government as the number of children attending school rose dramatically from 900,000 in 2002 to 9.7 million in 2010, with girls representing 37 percent of those gains, Cortight said.
While the new government has made great steps in moving towards sustaining peace for Afghanistan, the overall progress of U.S. involvement in the country has struggled, Cortight said.
The United States spends close to $10 billion each month in Afghanistan, yet high levels of corruption, citizen distrust of foreign forces and the influence of the Taliban are mounting threats to peace and democracy in the region, Cortight said.
With more “Poppy Palaces” – mansions built from drug trafficking monies and grafted government allowances – and more than 4,000 complaints filed with a government election fraud watchdog group, the challenge of corruption in Afghanistan is an imminent threat to peace building, he said.
U.S military intervention is predominately viewed negatively by Afghanis as an occupying force, Cortight said. Like in most conflict areas, the more troops the United States sends to Afghanistan, the more emboldened the resistance forces become, Cortight said. To illustrate this point, he cited a 2011 Pew Research Center report that found support for armed intervention in the region has declined from 53 percent in 2009 to 37 percent in 2011.
Cortight presented a five-step plan for improving peace building strategies in Afghanistan, including disengaging foreign military and fostering power-sharing within Afghanistan.
Video of Cortight’s lecture will be posted soon at www.clintonschoolspeakers.com.
This post was written by Clinton School student Trish Flanagan (’13).