While Western-style shopping malls, bars and French restaurants are opening their doors for foreign aid workers and wealthy Afghan expatriates, the hidden face of modern Kabul as the widows’ capital of the world is surfacing.
Across the capital, many women, mostly widows who lost their husbands in the civil war and the 2001 US invasion, are begging on the streets. There are two million war widows in Afghanistan .
Invading the Asian country after the 9/11 attacks, Washington promised a rosy life and putting the Afghan people “on the path of progress”. Unemployment rates are hitting a towering 40 percent while many of Afghans are underemployed — working only a few hours a week or seasonally. Afghanistan has per-capital incomes of 125 a year, one of the lowest in the world.
There are as many as 50,000 Afghan women beggars in the streets of Kabul . Many of them live in horrific conditions in the abandoned buildings in the suburbs, which receive electricity only a few hours every other night, assuming that they are wired at all.
The government offers no pensions or housing or any safety net for widows to fall back on.