Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. One of the challenges of how much aid is going into Afghanistan is that there are a lot of action plans. There are a lot of strategic plans. There is a beautifully written 87-page paper by the Afghan Ministry of Education, funded by UNESCO, on improving literacy. It's just t

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Well, I'm no longer there, but my old program was funded by USAID.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you very much for your time. I appreciated the opportunity.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. The Australians are still there. My understanding is that the larger NGOs that get this kind of work, like the IRC or the IRG, are all still working there.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm a little hesitant to speak to other programs. I know that even I initially got a bit of pushback when hiring women in my own program. I think there is this tendency to be overly cautious in terms of this being against the culture, when instead there are plenty of women who

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Kind of, I do, but I also think context changes over time with enforcement. In many western countries, in Canada, in the U.S., we've had some horrible beliefs and some horrible things that changed through legislation. People might grouse about it, but they don't want to suffer th

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No. It's just from the people in the villages who talk about it. All my staff is from the area. They have checkpoints.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, after a year.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Not to my knowledge, but that doesn't mean they haven't. My last information was that they were released after a year and that people were complaining but nothing was happening. Again, it doesn't mean that nothing has happened. To my knowledge, nothing more has happened. That's m

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In outlying areas. I think Kabul is very strongly in the control of the government. In other areas of Afghanistan, it changes. There are some areas of Afghanistan that are still completely controlled by the Taliban, where they are the people in charge. It is something that is a

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'll start with the second part first. In terms of the context and what they are teaching, I don't know. To be very clear, I think one of the mistakes that sometimes happens in aid is we get too into those details. What I wanted was them to find something they wanted to happen a

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I think that would be a fantastic thing. As I said, I didn't do this in Afghanistan, necessarily, but one of the things I did do was to work on a women's program in Iraq. One thing I did was that I actually brought police chiefs to groups of women to explain what they would do

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  My understanding is that women's rights activists are generally pretty scared. They feel, as I said before, that the gains.... There have been gains made, and there is a fear that there will be a rollback once the west basically pulls out, because right now a lot of what's holdin

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I think it's both. I think that if there are no consequences for abusers, then they will continue to abuse. A key component of creating consequences is doing a better job of both educating, and quite frankly, forcing the police and the judiciary to play their role. Abusers are be