Women and girls in Afghanistan suffered the most. Because girls are forbidden to go to school, for example, they miss out on critical landmine awareness programs, putting them at risk for injury by the country's millions of landmines (males, however, still account for a majority of all landmine injuries, since they move about more freely). And women who are sick often can't even go to the doctor, since 21 percent of all women in Afghanistan and 64 percent of the female refugees in Pakistan have no access to healthcare at all -- either they can't afford it, don't have the required male escort to take them to a clinic or simply don't have a female doctor they can visit.
"The problem is that time is of the essence there," Amowitz says. "If you don't educate women, and if you require that women see women doctors, at some point there will be a huge void of physicians to treat women."
Since 1987, Physicians for Human Rights has been sending doctors to Third World countries to document health issues through the filter of human rights; the two, they say, are inextricably tied. In Afghanistan, Amowitz links women's human rights with the general well-being of the entire country. For example, widows who have no man to feed them and who cannot work are not only impoverished and unhealthy themselves, but usually have children who also are starving. Says Amowitz: "In traditional societies where women are still the caretakers of the household, it's a hardship on the family if the women is not either physically and mentally well."
But Amowitz also found some encouraging news. Women's access to healthcare has marginally improved during the last year, thanks mostly to the diligence of the nonprofit organizations and international aid groups that have dispensed food, medicine and shelter there. (Other groups have opened special bakeries for war widows, feeding the 20 percent of the female population that is forbidden to work and has no male support.) In fact, 70 percent of the country's healthcare system is now dependent on international aid -- meaning that 7.5 million people rely entirely on the beneficence of the global community.
The flip side of that news, though, is the hard truth of life after Sept. 11: Those international aid organizations have left Afghanistan, having been either forced to flee for their own safety or ejected by the Taliban. And even with the good intentions of the U.S. government, the promised millions in aid has so far consisted of little more than 275,000 airdropped meals of beans, rice and peanut butter, most of which appears to be going into the mouths of Taliban soldiers.
Only a few aid groups have managed to get supplies in to Afghanistan by truck, and those supplies also have fallen victim to the war: On Monday, the U.S. accidentally bombed a Red Cross building, destroying two depots full of wheat and other humanitarian aid, and on Tuesday the Taliban seized an additional 7,000 tons of U.N. food (roughly half of the available supplies for all of Afghanistan).
"I fail to see how this attacks the problem of feeding 7.5 million people for any sustained period of time," Amowitz says, and she's not alone in her concern: On Monday, the BBC reported that Unicef officials have predicted 100,000 Afghan children could die this winter unless food reaches them in the next month.
"It's pretty easy to see that without international aid, you've now got 7.5 million Afghans at critical risk for death -- by starvation or by exposure," Amowitz says. "It's a catastrophe that no one is able to understand or see. Without the international aid community in there, the longer this happens, the worse it's going to be."
Next page: Most women wear burqas, even when they aren't obligatory