Indeed there are plenty of stories out there for the US media to cover, but as I've said before, Afghanistan doesn't seem to be one of them, especially the continuing plight of Afghan women. Hardly anyone has picked up The Boston Globe's unnerving story about some Afghan farmers paying off debts with their daughters because their opium-poppy crop was destroyed.
Giving a daughter to repay a debt is a rare but age-old practice among the rural tribesmen of Afghanistan. A payment of last resort, the daughter is almost always given as a bride to the money-lender or to his son, but is sometimes given as a servant, according to the International Organization for Migration. There are no statistics about how many girls have fallen victim to this practice, but human rights groups and the International Organization for Migration have documented cases, and interviews with more than a dozen indebted farmers and tribal elders from four districts of Nangarhar described witnessing or participating in such transactions.
The problem is that sharecroppers have to borrow money to be able to plant their crop, and since opium poppies are the most lucrative, that's the crop they plant. Since the US ousted the Taliban, Afghanistan's opium trade has boomed, so the US has been working with the new Afghan government to re-reverse the traffic.
A report last month by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that the eradication program -- a combination of crop destruction and persuading farmers not to plant -- reduced Afghan poppy cultivation by 21 percent this year. In Nangarhar, the reduction was 96 percent. The US and Afghan governments have billed the campaign, which began in November of 2004, as the most significant victory in the battle against narcotics in Afghanistan, the world's largest producer of opium poppies. But the dark side of that success has cast a shadow across the remote villages of this province, where sharecroppers are reeling under the crackdown.
Some of the Globe's anecdotes are hearsay, and thus tempting to dismiss, but the story also includes quotes from a man whose wife was indeed a debt payment. As Globe writer Farah Stockman notes, "It was not possible to interview the victims, who live in households associated with traffickers." And although the story may largely be ignored in the US, it's not going away:
The practice of giving away a daughter to pay a debt is expected to increase sharply following the campaign against poppies, especially if farmers feel they have no alternative but to continue to plant in areas that could be hit hard by the eradication programs, and thus risk not having enough income to repay loans they took out to finance their crops.
Lal Gul, an indebted father of five whose crop was destroyed this year, recalled that the Taliban cracked down on poppy-growing one year when they were in power and ''we witnessed plenty of cases" of paying debts with daughters. ''This year, I'm sure the number of such cases will increase because there is no source of income to pay back the loans."