Opinion: Remember Afghanistan's women

Under Islam, all depictions of the human form in art are blasphemous, according to Afghanistan's Taleban Islamic militia. For that reason it claimed a religious duty to destroy all of the centuries-old statues in the country.

For days the news was dominated by this story that provoked vocal international condemnation, particularly over the fate of two remarkable sandstone Buddhas, one 175 feet tall, the other 120 feet. They had been carved from a cliff sometime between the third and fifth centuries A.D. The U.N. General Assembly as well as the world's museums led the effort to negotiate protection for these historic heirlooms, but the Taleban had no interest in international pleas and set about reducing the world's tallest standing Buddhas to rubble.

The curious part of this story, though, is not that the Buddhas attracted so much sustained attention and outrage but that the plight of women under the Taleban regime has attracted so little. While international relief agencies and news organizations have occasionally drawn the world's gaze to the extreme repression of women in Afghanistan, the gender-apartheid that has swept the country since the Taleban took control in 1996 has not produced the kind of relentless attention it deserves.

Because it is a closed society, getting news out of Afghanistan can be difficult, but there have been enough reports of women having been stripped of their basic human rights to know that Afghan women are effectively an enslaved population. Women have been prohibited from working, and girls for the most part have been barred from attending school. Because women are seen as an enticement for men, they must cover themselves with a "burqa," a head-to-toe garment with mesh over the eyes. Any action by a woman that draws attention to herself, such as allowing her footsteps to make noise or laughing in public, is grounds for the mohtaseb, or religion police, to engage in summary beatings.

Women without male relatives are virtually prisoners in their own homes, prohibited from walking in public. Women with male relatives accompanying them may be allowed on the street but are banned from taking public transportation, riding in taxicabs or talking with men who are not from their family.

Medical care has also been a serious problem, since male doctors are not allowed to attend to unrelated women. Stories abound of women with easily treated problems such as diabetes and appendicitis dying because hospitals staffed entirely by males turned them away. Recently the Taleban has allowed some female health care professionals to attend to women patients, but since girls are not being educated, the pipeline of future women doctors has been cut off.

While the loss of important historic Buddhas is an international tragedy, it doesn't compare with the enslavement of an entire female population.

Why has the world been so blase over the plight of women in Afghanistan? Is it that their condition isn't all that much different from how women are treated in the rest of the developing world? Maybe that's why antiquities are valued throughout the world, but concern for women's freedom isn't anywhere near as universal.

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