The other war in Afghanistan

By Malcolm Potts





Afghanistan is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, and -- as is the case everywhere women's rights are nonexistent or in decline -- the birthrate is high.

Afghan women have an average of about seven children, and the population has been doubling about every 20 years. Today it is 34 million. According to U.N. estimates, by 2050 it could reach a staggering 90 million.

That rapid population growth and the demographics that go with it drive most of Afghanistan's worst problems.

All too often, demography is overlooked in developing countries, as I experienced in 2002 when I wrote the budgets for a

U.N. agency working to rebuild Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.

So in a country where women have had their fingers cut off because they painted their fingernails, where the Taliban threw acid on girls trying to go to school, is there any possibility of improving the status of women? Yes.

When Afghanistan passed a law demeaning and controlling women, it was an ugly deal to buy the support of the very traditional Shiite minority in the west. But linguistically, culturally and religiously, this population is simply an extension of eastern Iran. And Iran happens to be a powerful example of how family planning can liberate women and change a society for the better.

In the 1980s, the typical Iranian woman had almost as many children as her counterpart in Afghanistan today. Even an oil-rich country could not support that rate of population growth.

The Quran mentions contraception in a positive light, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the religious leader and founder of Iran's Islamic Republic, endorsed family planning.

Iran began to offer a full range of contraceptive choices and even voluntary sterilization. Before young couples could marry, they were required to receive family-planning instruction.

The typical Iranian woman now has 2.1 children. The transition in Iran from high to low birthrates was as rapid as that in China, but without a one-child policy, and it has had similar social benefits.


This feudal, fundamentalist, warrior society will never join the 21st century -- or even the 16th century -- unless we win the war to liberate women.

Unless women are given the freedom to choose whether or when to have a child, by 2050 there will be millions more angry men ages 15 to 25 in Afghanistan.

If only a tiny percentage are potential insurgents or suicide bombers, no Western army, however large and however strongly backed at home, has the slightest chance of prevailing.

Malcolm Potts is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.