Women's Rights

But USAID also sought to remedy another problem. In soliciting bids for the land program last March, the agency said that “women in Afghanistan have few rights to inherit, obtain or transfer land.” It said the initiative, called Land Reform in Afghanistan, was “expressly designed to enhance and improve land use and ownership rights of women.”

Women’s advocates say the restrictions on shelters, which have been embraced by religious conservatives sympathetic to the Taliban, are an early sign of the compromises the Karzai government is willing to make to reach a peace deal with insurgents. The advocates fear that reconciliation with the Taliban — a goal supported by the U.S. government — will result in a significant erosion of women’s rights.