Half of all Afghans are utterly terrified, understandably so.

At least 33,000 American troops are scheduled to leave Afghanistan this year. And after all the justified fury over the burning of those Korans and the shooting deaths of those 17 women and children, talk is rife in Washington right now about accelerating the withdrawal.

That leaves Afghan women scared to death. A nationwide survey of 1,000 of them by ActionAid, a nongovernmental organization, concludes: “A massive 86 percent are worried about a return to a Taliban-style government, with one in five citing their daughter’s education as the main concern. And with good reason.”

“There really is good reason to be afraid,” said Anita Haidary, co-founder of the Afghan group Young Women for Change. “You can’t go to school, you can’t work. Nothing.” When the Taliban fell from power in 2001, 5,000 girls were attending school. Today, the number is 2.5 million.

At the same time, a new report from the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization is entitled: “Afghan Women after the Taliban: Will History Repeat Itself?” It concludes: “Most of women’s important achievements over the last decade are likely to reversed” because most everyone believes that, once foreign forces leave, the Taliban will almost certainly return to power.

What’s to stop them? The feckless Afghan army ― riddled with quislings and illiterate drug addicts? Only once in several thousand years of recorded history has an Afghan army ever repelled an invading force, and that one time occurred 300 years ago.

But the truth is, Afghan women have good reason to be afraid, even if the Taliban don’t return. As that human-rights report noted, the government’s embrace of women’s rights over the last decade has been nothing more than a cynical deception perpetrated so Afghan leaders can continue enriching themselves.

The “Afghan political leadership’s espousal of women’s rights,” the report says, “is more subject to the logic of attracting financial support from the international community than a credible expression” of “genuine and wholehearted support for Afghan women.” And you know where most of that “financial support” goes ― into cash-stuffed suitcases flown daily to banks in Switzerland and Dubai.

Now, with foreign forces about to leave, President Hamid Karzai and his crooked colleagues are already whittling away at half the population’s rights ― with complete impunity. This month the Ulema Council of religious bigots issued a ruling that permits men to beat their wives, forbids women to travel alone or mingle with men in public while also ordering them to respect polygamy. It flatly states that women are worth less than men.

A few weeks earlier, this esteemed council forbade women appearing on television to wear heavy makeup. The rulings hold no force of law, but amazingly Karzai endorsed them, offering a fatuous non-explanation: “The clerics’ council of Afghanistan did not put any limitations on women.”

The human-rights report recalled how the West more or less forced the Karzai government to create a Ministry of Women’s Affairs, allocate a certain number of parliamentary seats for women and pass a law in 2009 called Elimination of Violence Against Women. All of that, it said, was intended to “create a trickle down effect that will eventually benefit all female citizens.” That hasn’t happened.

In fact, just before International Women’s Day early this month, the United Nations office in Kabul urged the state to finally begin enforcing that law because “violence against women remains pervasive.”

Young girls are still self-immolating to escape forced marriages to octogenarian men. Families caught in disputes are still giving their daughters away to settle the problem. Women who are raped are still jailed with the rapist because they are assumed to have tempted him. Women are still killed to settle a grievance between two men. And last weekend, in a typical incident, a man beat and tortured his wife with electric shock because she refused to enter prostitution to provide him with more income.

There’s more, so much more. And what those retrograde Afghan leaders fail to realize is that women, suddenly invigorated by new freedoms, can actually bring fresh ideas, new energy, to one of the world’s most primitive nations ― probably more than Afghanistan’s calcified males.

Haidary, co-founder of the young women’s group, is actually a college student, a sophomore at Mount Holyoke. In Afghanistan, college graduates are quite rare, and despite the odds, she holds out hope.

“It’s not easy to change things,” she acknowledged in an interview. “But women have to remain positive ― and think about how they can bring change.”

By Joel Brinkley

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. ― Ed.

(Tribune Media Services)