Imagine your girl child has just come home from school, wildly ecstatic. She has just been introduced to computer coding. She also dreams of becoming a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, or lawyer. Her voice now rides on a cloud of hope, strength and determination. She can do it all because that’s what you told her. She imagines a world where she is starting a business or ascending the heights of corporate Barbados or conjuring up a life-changing invention. She perhaps looks at the leader of her country and dreams aloud of the day when she will take her place.Now imagine the very next day: an armed cabal of men, without firing a shot, takes the reins of government, sends the leader scampering to safety abroad and declares that this and all other daughters’ dreams must be deferred, pending conformity with theocratic law.That which is unthinkable in our land is the new and immediate reality for the women and girls of Afghanistan. A generation ago when its theocratic government, the Taliban, reigned with terror and give aid and comfort to a sworn enemy of the West, its mullahs, invoking the name of Allah, decreed that a woman’s place was in a home, cloaked in a burqa, aside from and behind her spouse and even her male children. Females were condemned to a life of ignorance, early forced marriage, servility and subjugation to the will of men. School was closed to girls on pain of death.
