Afghan women’s movements in neighboring countries have issued statements calling her remarks “political propaganda and lobbying in the service of the Taliban.”
Cheryl Bernard, an American author and wife of the former US envoy to Afghanistan, recently claimed in an article that Afghanistan is now “in its safest state” and called concerns about Afghan refugees in the United States “unfounded.”
The comments have sparked widespread anger among Afghan women’s activists.
The Powerful Women of Afghanistan movement in Tehran called the remarks a distortion of the realities in Afghanistan and an insult to women protesters, migrants and victims of the Taliban regime.
The activists believe that Bernard is consciously seeking to normalize the face of a repressive regime;
This is while the slightest social, educational and economic activity of women inside Afghanistan is banned and the voice of protest is suppressed.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani Window of Hope movement issued a statement describing Khalilzad’s wife’s remarks as “baseless, inhuman and in complete contradiction with the realities on the ground.”
The group warned that such positions not only ignore the pain of the Afghan people, but also strengthen the discourse that gives legitimacy to the Taliban.
Afghan women activists say Afghanistan is not the private property of any former official and his family and history will never forget silence against tyranny.
