Power not Pity: Afghan Women & Girls tell me, “We are unstoppable!”

by Charlotte Ponticelli

Conversations on how to advance the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda wind up in a kind of theoretical thicket full of jargon.  It’s easy to overlook the human faces behind our efforts, both past and present. So that is why, when asked to describe my own experience working with and for the women and girls of Afghanistan over the past 22 years, my mind immediately turns to a simple phrase: Faces of Change.

The fate of women and girls of Afghanistan is truly where the WPS rubber meets the road.   As the world’s attention turns toward other conflicts in other places, US sincerity about WPS will be measured by what happens to the women we left behind there. I cannot help but recall the faces of change I’ve had the honor to encounter through our US-Afghan partnerships throughout the past two decades.

I vividly remember my first trip to Afghanistan for the State Department when I met with a group of women at a literacy center funded by the US government.  Ages 16 to 60, these women took such great pride in learning to read and write for the first time. They were also proud of the skills they had taught themselves during the years of oppression, telling me, “See, each of us here knows how to do something!”  And my most vivid memory from my last trip to Afghanistan is the face of the wonderful woman, then serving as deputy minister of health, who pulled me aside and said several times, “Promise you won’t forget us.”

And I recall so many faces in-between:

Ansia Rasooli an Afghan Judge who met Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Photo Credit- Washington Post)

--The women judges who met with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during a visit to the US Supreme Court. Justice O’Connor told them, “I had to be a pioneer, and now you have to be pioneers too!”. 

--The women who became educators and journalists, parliamentarians and government ministers, and those who succeeded in starting their own businesses, from making carpets to running construction firms. 

Female officers in the Afghan National Army (Photo Credit- The Medialine)

--The women who joined the Afghan police and the national security forces. 

--The midwives and healthcare workers who saved the lives of countless mothers and their babies.

--And of course the girls!  I will never forget -- the school girls who confided their dreams of one day becoming doctors, professional athletes, and maybe even pilots.

Afghan Women at a UNICEF clinic after the Taliban takeover. (Photo Credit- UN News)

These are the faces that come to mind whenever I recall the progress that was made after the fall of the first Taliban regime in October 2001 and the horror which emerged after the Taliban again seized power in August 2021.  Since the takeover, the Taliban have issued more than 80 decrees targeted directly to women and girls. To more fully understand the impact of these outrageous measures, I highly recommend the first-hand accounts collected by the Atlantic Council only a couple of months ago.

Recently I had the honor to respond to a letter from a young Afghan woman who calls herself Shining Sun.  In her letter, she explains that:

“Afghan girls and women are adaptable like water and fit into any vessel. We have a sense of calm, a sense of patience, and have ambitions and vision. We are the power, the ones who are responsible for our own lives. We exist as a group of courageous individuals who refuse to succumb to the negativity that surrounds us. We welcome these challenges as opportunities to create lasting change.”

Toward the end of her letter, Shining Sun describes how she and young women like her are determined to keep working toward their dream of inclusivity, equality, and peace in Afghanistan and elsewhere across the globe.  As she puts it. “We are unstoppable...so please join hands with us to end this heartbreaking chapter of human suffering and injustice.”

For our part, it is most heartening to see how organizations like the US-Afghan Women’s Council, the US Institute of Peace, and the American Council on Women, Peace, and Security remain determined to answer this rallying cry, to keep our promise, and to join hands in every way we can with the brave women of Afghanistan and the men who support them.  Together, we will continue to prove that we too are unstoppable!

Charlotte (Charlie) Ponticelli is a Senior Fellow at the American Council on Women, Peace, and Security, a member of the US-Afghan Women’s Council, and a member of the Civil Society Working Group at the US Institute of Peace. Mrs. Ponticelli served in several senior US government leadership positions, including State Department’s Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues.