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“Don’t abandon us!” That’s the message I’m getting from brave, educated Afghan women – as the Pentagon advances the date for the final troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to mid-July.
There is a last minute Pentagon scramble to plan for evacuating 18,000 translators who worked with the U.S. military, but it’s still unclear whether this will happen.
But little thought seems to have been given to the fate of thousands of Afghan women who have been educated and taken up jobs in the past two decades since the Taliban was defeated – or to the fate of millions of girl students. More than one third of Afghanistan’s nine million school children are female, but those numbers are shrinking as the Taliban shuts down girls’ education in rural areas. Meantime, hardline Islamists attack and bomb girls’ schools.