Author: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Fellow and Deputy Director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program
June 16, 2011
Daily Beast
On a sunny Washington afternoon this week, a group of Afghan women crowded around a wooden conference table in a bare room on the State Department's ground floor. They were there to talk about the high stakes of the troop drawdown from their country, scheduled to begin in July.
“The fear is that with withdrawal, all U.S. troops will be out of Afghanistan,” said Samira Hamidi, head of the Afghan Women's Network, a nationwide umbrella organization of women's groups. “People are afraid, and they don't want history to be repeated,” she said, referring to the power vacuum left in 1989 following the Soviets' pullout from Afghanistan.
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