If activists within Afghan society can gain acceptance of the Xun Zi rule, also called “the social contract” by Enlightenment figures (and not to be equated with what appears to be the current American view of it, “The government will take care of you), then the idea of one human being owning another cannot stand. Cultures from China to Southern Europe had the idea of a bride price. (I don't know about Southern Asia or Africa and places where Semitic religions did not take hold.) Northern Europe, especially Scandinavia, had the idea of sex and pregnancy first, to help predict compatibility and procreation potentials, and then marriage.

If parents do not own their children, then they can't sell their daughters for a bride price.

If husbands do not own their wives, then they cannot lord it over them. Think of the plight of the young woman in the movie Red Sorghum. There was a major awareness in the 1920s that something was drastically wrong with Chinese society. Reactions were recorded already in Dream of the Red Chamber and sharpened greatly in Ba Jin's Family. It looks like more and more young people just decided, “You can't treat my sister that way,” or “You can't treat me that way.”

There was one very moving series of reports on public television in the USA, back much nearer to the beginning of American exploits in Afghanistan and Iraq. A female reporter for PBS got onto. the story of a young couple who had defied the young woman's parents and got married for love. The reporter interviewed her father and her older brother. It was chilling how absolutely pleased with himself the father was that he and his son would track this young woman down and do an “honor killing.” If and when Afghanistan gains its own covert publishing industry and starts making novels, movies, and maybe even TV dramas (if the Taliban even permits TV and/or video players to be owned), then I think many people's hearts will be softened when they have vicarious experience of the life of a vibrant young woman made to give up romantic hopes and love for some young man and be sold off to some abusive old lout.

One thing that Afghans living outside the country can do is to produce such materials. I'm pretty sure that there are smugglers who will be willing to take some home on the way back from selling unique botanicals to the drug markets of the world.

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