Afghan President Ashraf Gani is making a very welcome priority of encouraging economic development and social reform including empowering Afghan women and giving them a more permanent place in public life, in a country that has spent far too much time thinking solely about security. Any government in Afghanistan has to have a strong military and security strategy as they are still fighting the Taliban, but the mistake of the unlamented previous president Hamid Karzai was to make that his only priority, other than lining his pockets.
Gani wants to capitalise on Afghanistan’s strategic location and vast natural resources, but he has to face up the economic problems that more than 30 years of civil war have combined with the desperate fact that 68 percent of the country’s population is under the age of 25, most of whom are unemployed. “Without the economic empowerment of youth, women, and the poor, the three numerical majorities that are political economic minorities, you cannot have stability,” he said in Washington this week.
The ongoing empowerment of Afghan women has been important in driving a new sense of change, even if it has triggered a strong reaction from conservatives. It is a sign of Gani’s welcome ease with the world outside Afghanistan that he was able to joke that as he supported women to take a more active role in public life, a woman might even become Afghanistan’s first woman president before the Americans manage such a step, in a well timed dig at Hilary Clinton’s refusal to declare herself as a candidate.
