I agree with you on that last point, Antipeptic, that social change has to come from within. I hope you can take your idea a bit further along the lines of your last post.

But it also 'comes' from a bit of pushing from outside, so I'm happy for the Coalition to stay as long as it takes, in order to do both - protect the rights and growing influence of women, AND thereby to bring about social change.

That doesn't have to cost a single life, certainly not those of innocent women and girls. So I don't understand your earlier post.

My point is that there is nothing sacred about 'culture', especially if its continued existence is predicated on the submission and crippling of a section of the population - women in peasant societies, African-Americans in the US slave societies, slave-holding 'culture' if you like.

As for change in Afghanistan: if I read it right, the population - and presumably employment opportunities - of Kabul has risen many times since 2001, to around a million. I'm betting that population in other cities, Kandahar, Mazar i Sharif, Herat, have also risen rapidly, suggesting that urban employment opportunities are booming. And it may be that gradual shift from rural to urban life which will bring many of the social changes that you and I look forward to.

Joe

Joe,

Why do you think that changing from a rural life to an urban life has positive consequences in a third world country?

It's more likely to produce a situation whereby a families are deprived of any autonomy or ability to provide for themselves through subsistence family or crafting.

Often, and this is widespread in Africa, India and South America, people are forced to migrate to urban areas because their native environment has been despoiled by development such as dams, etc. They end up in shanty towns on the outskirts of urban conglomerations with no means to support themselves or grow their own food. The structure of their former communities is destroyed and they are left psychologically wafting around in the breeze.

Guess who endures the greatest hardships in that situation.

Women and their children.

That should be subsistence "farming".

Steps on the road, Poirot. Would those urban populations prefer to go back to the villages ? I don't think so.

Perhaps you're onto something though, that if a hunter-gatherer's children or grandchildren can become accountants or surveyors or mineralogists, they will be deprived of a hunter-gatherer existence.

You win some, you lose some.

Joe

Not in this case, Jot, it's all lose.

But I live in hope, Antipeptic, that progress is, sooner or later, inevitable.

Joe