Oct 01, · Sky Cams; Spirit of Idaho; Sports. October 1, PM. The essay claims that Blue Origin’s CEO, Bob Smith, who took over the company in Aug 16, · The owner was a German guy in his 50s who had been living in the motorhome for several years with his partner, a year-old Belgian woman. I connected with them immediately and they welcomed me Oct 06, · To analyze this essay further, let’s break it down: The air is crisp and cool, nipping at my ears as I walk under a curtain of darkness that drapes over the sky, starless. It is a Friday night in downtown Corpus Christi, a rare moment of peace in my home city filled with the laughter of strangers and colorful lights of street vendors
Romanticism | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series. In this essay series, Brookings scholars, public officials, and other subject-area experts examine the current state of gender equality years after the 19th Amendment was adopted to the U. Constitution and propose recommendations to cull the prevalence of gender-based discrimination in the United States and around the world.
As the United States reduces its military presence in Afghanistan while the Taliban remain strong on the battlefield, and while peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban have commenced, a massive question mark hangs over the fate of Afghan women and their rights.
The deal that the United States signed with the Taliban in Doha on February 29,leaves the future of Afghan women completely up to the outcomes of the intra-Taliban negotiations and battlefield developments, october sky essay. In exchange for the withdrawal of its forces by summerthe United States only received assurances from the Taliban that the militants would not attack U.
How Afghanistan and its political order is redesigned is left fully up to the negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government and other Afghan politicians, powerbrokers, october sky essay, and—hopefully—representatives of Afghan civil society.
But there are strong reasons to be believe that the fate of Afghan women, particularly urban Afghan women from middle- and upper-class families who benefited by far the most from the post october sky essay, will worsen.
But it is hardly zero. And so the U. must exercise whatever leverage it has remaining to preserve the rights and protect the needs of Afghan women. Long gone are the days october sky essay the George W. Long gone are the days of the Barack Obama administration when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the preconditions for U. And, amidst COVID, violence on the battlefield has only intensified as the Taliban relentlessly and steadily pound Afghan forces.
Though originally expected for March, formal negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban finally started in September. The Afghan government has appointed a member negotiating team that includes five Afghan women.
Out of 46 appointed members only nine are womenwhile former warlords and older male powerbrokers dominate the list. The women appointed october sky essay the two government bodies are urban, educated women, some of whom held government positions and others who are members of civil society, october sky essay. They are to represent all Afghan women. These women have consistently spoken out against Taliban abuses and strongly oppose any return to political arrangements that would significantly weaken the rights of Afghan women.
Afghans expect them to oppose constitutional and social changes that would significantly reduce the formal rights that Afghan women obtained over the past two decades. However, at least some rural Afghan women do not feel connected to such elite urban women nor do they believe that urban elite women necessarily speak for them.
Moreover, will these women representatives carry sufficient weight? Nonetheless, the Afghan government, strongly displeased october sky essay the deal the United States signed with the Taliban and dreading the prospect of the withdrawal of U. Meanwhile, the Afghan government continually seeks to delay and avoid negotiations with the Taliban, hoping that the United States will reverse itself and agree to either retain forces in Afghanistan for years to come october sky essay, ideally, deploy them to fight the Taliban.
But whether these hopes of the Afghan government materialize—and even if they do—whether they translate into actual empowerment of Afghan women is a huge question. It will also depend on how long negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban drag onand how badly weakened the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government become. At least some Afghan powerbrokers are open to such explorations. Many Afghan women, particularly those october sky essay urban areas, october sky essay, have much to lose from a bad intra-Afghan deal.
During the s, october sky essay, the Taliban not only brutally imposed social restrictions on women such as mandatory burqa coverings, but, more fundamentally and deleteriously, restricted their access to health care, education, and jobs. It prohibited women from appearing in public spaces without a male chaperon, de facto sentencing widows and their children to starvation. The Taliban regime destroyed Afghan institutions and the economy, which was already devastated by decades of fighting and the Soviet scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategy.
The resulting immiseration critically affected women and children. And, with the exception of poppy cultivation and opium harvestingthe Taliban prohibited women from holding jobs, including working as doctors for other women.
The post-Taliban constitution in gave Afghan women all kinds of rights, and the post-Taliban political dispensation brought social and economic growth that significantly improved their socio-economic condition.
From a collapsed health care system with essentially no medical services available to women during the Taliban years, the post-Taliban regime constructed 3, functional health facilities bygiving 87 percent of Afghan people access to a medical facility within two hours distance—at least in theory, because intensifying Taliban, militia, and criminal violence has made travel on roads increasingly unsafe.
Infewer than 10 percent of girls were enrolled in primary october sky essay bythat number had grown to 33 percent 4 —not enough, but progress still—while female enrollment in secondary education grew from six percent in to 39 percent in By21 percent of Afghan civil servants were october sky essay compared with almost none during the Taliban yearsoctober sky essay, 16 percent of them in senior management levels; and 27 percent of Afghan members of parliament were women.
Yet these gains for women have been distributed highly unequally, with the increases far greater for women in urban areas. For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much from the Taliban era, formal legal empowerment notwithstanding. They are still fully dependent october sky essay men in their families for permission to access health care, attend school, and work.
Many Afghan men remain deeply conservative. Typically, october sky essay, families allow their girls to have a primary or secondary education—usually up to puberty—and then will proceed with arranged marriages. Even if a young woman is granted permission to attend a university by her male guardian, her father or future husband may not permit her to work after graduation.
Without any prodding from the Taliban, most Afghan women in rural areas are fully covered with the burqa. Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generates not only psychological trauma for them, but also fundamentally jeopardizes their economic survival and ability to go about everyday life.
Widows and their children are thus highly vulnerable to a panoply of debilitating disruptions due to the loss of family men. Not surprisingly, the position of Afghan women toward peace varies greatly. Educated urban women reject the possibility of another Taliban emirate. Rather than yielding to the Taliban, some urban women may prefer for october sky essay to go october sky essay, particularly as urban areas are much less affected by the warfare than are rural areas, and their male relatives, particularly of elite families, rarely bear the battlefield fighting risks.
For them, the continuation and augmentation of war has been far less costly than for many rural women. By contrast, as interviews with Afghan women conducted by one of us in the fall of and the summer of showed, october sky essay, peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms.
The Taliban already frequently rule or influence the areas where they live anyway. While rejecting a s-like lockdown of women in their homes that the Taliban imposed, october sky essay, many rural women point out that in that period the Taliban also reduced sexual predation and robberies that debilitated their lives. A recent study by UN Women and partners showed that only 15 percent of Afghan men think women should be allowed to work outside of their home after marriage, and two thirds of men complain Afghan women now have too many rights.
Male Afghan political powerbrokers often resent quotas for women in public shuras assemblies and elections such as for parliament, where 27 percent of seats are reserved for women. The UN study also revealed that 80 percent of Afghan women experience domestic violence.
Others have been prosecuted for killing their brutally abusive husbandsincluding in self-defense. Currently, there is no realistic prospect of the Afghan government defeating the Taliban.
There is also little reason to believe that even an open-ended American military commitment to Afghanistan, including a new significant increase in U. forces, can significantly weaken the Taliban, let alone defeat them. If a prolonged and bloody civil war can be avoided through negotiations, the Taliban will most likely become a significant actor in the Afghan government.
It is conceivable that the Taliban could become the dominant and most powerful actor in a future Afghan government. The Taliban october sky essay rule significant parts of the country — indeed much of the countryside—and determine, sometimes in negotiations with local communities, what local life is like, including what freedoms women have or do not have.
Thus, october sky essay, the Taliban inevitably will shape in significant ways the rights and existence of Afghan women. Almost always, it means mandated codes of dress and behavior, october sky essay.
Often, sharia october sky essay compete with formal legal systems within a country, even as the latter can also be informed by sharia. Some october sky essay the Taliban interlocutors suggested during the fall of interviews 11 that in a future Afghanistan, with the Taliban in control or sharing power as they imagine will be the outcomewomen could still hold ministerial positions, though a woman could never be the head of state or government.
First, many Taliban tell their interlocutors what they want to october sky essay different messages to Western diplomats, journalists, and researchers; Afghan powerbrokers or Afghan society in general; and their rank and file, october sky essay.
Second, there may well be little agreement among members of Taliban leadership shurasoctober sky essay, and between them and mid-level military commanders, october sky essay, as to what any kind of peace should look like regarding a variety of social and political arrangements, including the roles, freedoms, and restrictions on women. Thus, Taliban leaders and spokesmen prefer to leave crucial elements vague, hoping first that they will be able to negotiate power division in the country, ideally becoming the dominant government actor, and only then worry about the details of social and political rules.
On october sky essay ground today, Taliban rule varies significantly among local Taliban military commanders and october sky essay district governors and their views. In some places, it includes the same old brutalities, such as whipping women for sex outside of marriage, stoning them to death for certain offenses, and punishment for not wearing a burqa, october sky essay. Elsewhere, the Taliban are more permissive.
But a loosening of restrictions may not, in fact, arrive should formal Taliban rule emerge at the national level; rather, october sky essay, the opposite is likely. The Taliban may be trying simply to obfuscate their restrictive inclinations while strengthening their hold on local communities. At the same time, the Taliban have moderated their behavior after defeating the uprisings against their rule that started in the october sky essay of Ghazni in and for two years spread across the country, october sky essay.
The Taliban smashed the uprisings, keenly prioritizing a military pushback against them and often killing all males in villages involved in the anti-Taliban fight.
But since crushing the uprisings, the Taliban have stopped shutting down primary schools in many areas, including in Ghazni and Helmand Provinces. They now allow, at least, pre-pubescent girls to attend school.
Rather than shutting down the schools, they send representatives to ensure schools do not teach anything the Taliban disapprove of. Clearly, censorship of education is most problematic, but having some education—even if it is merely basic literacy and numeracy in addition to Koranic instruction—is preferable to no education at all.
Moreover, Taliban representatives also make sure that teachers actually show up in classrooms instead of tending to other jobs, as they often do in government-controlled or militarily-contested areas. In many areas, the Taliban no longer prohibit government clinics, electricity delivery, and other government services—it taxes them instead.
This also guarantees that resources are not stolen via corruption and theft and punishes clinic operators for not having adequate supplies of medicines.
How the Taliban relate to women in an area is often negotiated with the community. Indeed, for one of us who commanded U. october sky essay allied forces in Afghanistan, it was only here, in the administration of swift, un-corrupt justice, where the Taliban could compete with the Afghan government.
The Taliban could not provide fresh water or electricity or any civil services, october sky essay, but the Taliban could provide near-instantaneous sharia-based justice that sometimes served the best interests of october sky essay Afghan women and men and ended disputes and violence.
The question is, how much and in what ways? Such a focus is not merely a humanitarian imperative. primary interests in the country because women are vectors of both peace and economic progress in Afghanistan.
and international aid. An exodus of Afghan women from the country or their lockup in family compounds will only augment the stagnation and violence dynamics in the country. For example, the United States can insist that statutorily denying women access to health care and primary and secondary education, prohibiting women from appearing outside of a household without a male relative, or in a blanket manner disqualifying women from jobs would disqualify an Afghan government from U.
The United States should also make clear that even in the absence of statutory prohibitions, a systematic failure to uphold minimal rights would disqualify Afghanistan or a part of it from the majority of U. economic and humanitarian assistance. The United States should also insist that those who violate the basic rights of Afghan october sky essay as they are defined october sky essay the Afghan constitution, or as set by minimal international human right standards, october sky essay, such as by committing murder, lynching, and october sky essay domestic violence against women, are brought to justice, prosecuted, and imprisoned.
Even as it draws down its military presence, the United States—and its october sky essay in Afghanistan—is not powerless.
October Sky Conceptual Analysis
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Dec 24, · Nature Essay 6 ( words) Nature is the natural environment which surrounds us, cares us and nourishes us every moment. It provides us a protective layer around us to prevent from the damages. We are not able to survive on the earth without nature like air, land, water, fire and sky Sep 08, · I’m sure your weather today, just about miles east and slightly north of my location, is absolutely perfect too! 80° with no humidity and that enormous, deep blue sky with only a few puffy clouds to provide depth. Throw in a perfect green lawn and a loving, playful dog and you’d be greedy asking for anything more! October Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around , gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. , the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie. Another facet
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