 and in the women's delegation, who will be reporting back from Afghanistan tonight. We have a terrific lineup, including Medea. Also Sunita Viswana, co-founder of Women for Afghan Women. Also tonight, Sunita, excuse me, Daisy Kahn, executive director for Women Islamic Organization on Spirituality and Equality. Kelly Campbell, co-founder of September 11th, Families for Peaceful Tomorrow's, and Ruth Messenger, member of the World Bank's group working on extreme poverty. So before we begin, we're gonna start with some updates on what's happening. Then we'll go into our speaker's terrific lineup. Here, what's going on in Afghanistan. We'll take action. We have a code pink petition to unfreeze Afghanistan's assets. The US has a lot of control over the distribution of those funds. And we will also have a question and answer period. So Medea, you have an update for us, yeah? Oh, well, I wanted to update people on a bit on Cuba. I don't know how many people here watch democracy now, but the deputy foreign minister was on there today and he was very wonderful. He was called to Washington for the first talks they've had since 2018. And the reason is because a lot of Cubans are now trying to get in through the Mexico border. It's become a big flood of Cubans. And a lot of that is because of US policy, basically not giving out the 20,000 visas that they are committed to giving out so people can come legally, forcing them to come illegally and then granting them green cards when they get here unlike people coming from other countries. And on top of that, while the US says they want to get to the root of the migration crisis in Central America by helping with development, in the case of Cuba, they squeeze the country and the economy so that people really feel desperate and wanting to leave. So those talks went on this week and it is good that for the first time they were speaking but it doesn't look like the US is ready to make the kind of changes that needs to make in lifting a lot of the sanctions that hurt the Cuban people so much. So we will continue to work on that and we're gonna do a Code Pink Congress in the future on that issue. And then I also just wanted to mention that we have been scratching our heads wondering why people are not joining us in the call for action on May 7th to call for negotiations and a ceasefire in Ukraine. We understand that people have all sorts of different feelings about what's happening in Ukraine and certainly feel that Russia has an illegal, brutal invasion going on but it's all the more reason for people who want to stop the killing and support Ukraine to get out there and say we need a settlement, we need negotiations. So we've set up a separate website called peaceinukraine.org and we've asked people to do something simple, whatever it is in your town, go out with some friends and do flyering. We have petition that people could sign, do a small rally, anything to show that there is a peace movement in this country and we want peace. So we have had in the past when we've done these about 125 actions, right now I think we have only about 20 listed, if that. So we'll put it in the chat several times tonight, peaceinukraine.org, wherever you are, you must have two or three friends that care about this issue and can go out, download our flyer, go to your farmer's market or your city square or your post office or whatever it is and do some educational work about asking people, do you want this word to go on endlessly like years and years or do you want it to end? And if so, there has to be a global outcry calling for an end and we have to get the US administration to be pushing for serious negotiations. Thank you. Thank you, Medea and good luck on your trip to Cuba. You're leaving soon, yeah? Yes, leaving on Friday. You can't wait to hear about that when you return. There's no better place in the world to be on May day than in Cuba because you're out on the streets with about a million people marching. It's really fun. Terrific, well, okay, so on May 7th, I think that's a great idea just to download the code pink flyer at peaceinukraine.org. That's not a lot to ask of people that you know to join you at a farmer's market or wherever it may be where people congregate and just engage in conversation and if you can't do it in person, do it online. On the subject of Ukraine, here are some of the headlines I've checked right before this program began. So Germany says it will send heavy weapons to Ukraine for the first time. Moscow said the West was ignoring the risk of a nuclear conflict. Russia says it's going to cut off a major supply of natural gas to Poland and Bulgaria over their weapons to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Stockholm Institute is reporting that global military spending tops $2 trillion with the US outspending the next nine nations combined. At more than $800 billion, the US military budget remains by far the largest in the world, more than doubling that of China's. So we have a lot of work to cut out for us and I was just on a call this morning, a coalition call involving peace groups in which we discussed Biden's proposed military budget for 2023, which is over $800 billion. And we expect that Republicans will ask for a lot more than that, as much as $100 or $200 billion more. So we will be organizing Code Pink and other peace groups in the coming weeks asking you to contact members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. To reject calls for increases in the military budget. Apparently Biden's budget calls for scrapping some of these F-35s as well as scrapping the nuclear sea launch cruise missile and there's expected to be pushback on that. So stay tuned and we'll be talking more about the proposed Pentagon budget next week or the week after with Code Pink Congress. So with that, let's get started. Media is going to speak first about the delegations visit to Afghanistan, what you learned and what you want to see happen. Go forward, media. First, on these calls, we often have people introducing themselves in the chat. So please do that, where you're from, any group you might work with. And we find the chat a lively place to ask your questions or put your comments. And we had a fabulous delegation going to Afghanistan and I'll let our first speakers need to tell you more about it. But I just want to say it was amazing group of women. It was a risky thing to do. We didn't know how safe it would be to go there. But every one of these women thought that it was worthwhile to take that risk and we're really excited to be able to share our findings with you tonight. So this is not the whole delegation but this is a good number of us. And I'm really happy to introduce our first speaker, Sunita Visvandath is a co-founder and board member of the 21 year old women's organization, Women for Afghan Women. She is a progressive Hindu faith leader. She's an advisory member of the advocacy organization UNFREEZ Afghanistan. So Sunita, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Medea. Thank you everyone. So exciting to be here. So yes, I have worked on Afghan women's rights for the past 21 years. And I went on this women's peace and education delegation to Afghanistan to find out if I could continue that work. That's the reason that I went. Before August 15th, 2021, when the Taliban took over the country, Afghanistan was still an Islamic Republic where Sharia was the law of the land. Women who were raped could be arrested for committing the crime of Zinnah, which is basically adultery, sex outside of marriage. Men got automatic custody of kids, especially slightly older kids after divorce. The tradition of Baad where a girl child is given from one family to another as a restitution for a crime was rampant. But women's rights work was still possible before August 15th. I used to do it. My organization did it for 21 years and women's rights work is possible now. We must work for human rights no matter the political situation and no matter the government that's in power. And if things worsen, our efforts don't reduce. They need to redouble. So I went to Afghanistan to see with my own eyes the women's rights work taking place today in a Taliban-administered Afghanistan. And we visited many places, in particular for my interests, it was important that we visited two women's NGOs, a women's shelter and a girls' leadership program. Both organizations had made an arrangement with the interim government, the Taliban government and had permission to operate almost exactly as they had before August 15th. The girls' leadership program was a refuge for the girls currently being denied access to school because the Taliban government reneged on a promise to allow all children access to school and girls of grade seven and above are currently not being allowed. And in response to this ban, the girls of this program created love packets containing books to read, empty books for journaling and expressing one's feelings and art supplies. These girls were depressed about the lack of access to school for the older girls, but they still felt lucky to have this wonderful program and wanted to cheer up the girls in their neighborhoods. And the women's shelter that we visited, cared for women, who would be seen as immoral or fallen by this extremely conservative society because they have done things like elope, have relationships, run away from abusive households and so forth. However, rather than arrest or kill them, which is what I would have frankly predicted, the Taliban government has allowed the shelter to continue and they've even brought destitute women to the shelter for the shelter to care for. We had several meetings with government ministries and advocated openly for women's rights, particularly we advocated against this ban on girls of all ages attending school and the Taliban representatives that we met with, they agreed with us, all of them and everyone that we met with said that this ban would soon be reversed. Whether this is true or not, what we did prove is that engagement is possible and even welcome. My key takeaway from the trip is that women's rights work is indeed possible, but it needs to be reimagined, redesigned for this new moment. And to advance women's rights, it is imperative to engage the Taliban government and to push them towards progressive and liberative understandings of Islam. The work of experts in Islam and women's rights like Daisy Khan, who was on our delegation is critical. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sunita. I wanted to be clear to everybody that we went, we timed this delegation because the schools for girls were supposed to be opened and just found out right before leaving that the Taliban said that the secondary schools would not be open for girls. So girls can go to primary school, they can go to private schools, they can go to college, but they can't go to secondary school right now except in a few places. And our next speaker, we'll talk about the work that she does and did on this trip in talking about the rights of girls under Islam because she is a scholar. She's a Muslim campaigner, executive director of Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, which is a women-led organization committed to peace-building equality and justice for Muslims around the world. And I must say that everyone we met with, Daisy was just brilliant in giving the reasons why women need their rights and this is part of Islam. So Daisy, thank you so much for your work and for being with us tonight. Can you unmute yourself? You have to unmute Daisy. Daisy, we can't hear you. Okay, got it. We're gonna learn this one, Daisy, unmuting. Thank you all very much. And I'm so delighted to be here with you. I am just gonna show a few pictures along with so that you have an idea of what we experience visually, but I was part of this delegation primarily to convey to the new government that's being led by the Taliban that the rights of women must be honored because they are guaranteed in the Quran exemplified by the Prophet Muhammad. So when I got off the plane, we were greeted by an official from the foreign ministry and we immediately asked him the question about women's rights and he immediately said, oh, of course the girls are actually going back to school this week. He was so confident and we just chuckled but the schools never opened up because there are other issues going on besides the will of the people who are in governance right now. When we met with the education industry, he said that the rural areas don't want their girls to go to school because they are conservative. And when we told him that we would be willing to come and do an educational outreach program in rural areas, he threw his full support and welcomed us back because they really need people with the right kind of expertise and cultural sensitivity to be able to bring their people up, lift their people up to the level where they can see some progress. I had taken, I had prepared a universal declaration of Muslim women's rights to prove how Islam guarantees a full suite of 30 rights of Muslim women. I handed that to them. I met with the women Olimah religious leaders as well as Imams that we had been doing trainings with since 2008 and there are close to 6,000 Imams that we have trained on women's rights. And I met some of those Imams and I challenged them to be more vocal. I said, you know, in America, we only see women protesting and girls fighting for their rights but we never see men supporting them. And it's really important for men to support because they of course, you know, disagreed with some of these decrees and this ban on the, you know, high schools. So they were mobilized and they got very passionate about supporting women publicly that a week after we returned, they had done a very successful press conference. I'm just gonna show a few images for you before I do a quick takeaways. So here is our delegation. This is what we look like. Very happy delegation. You have to bring them up, the pictures up. We can only see little. Oh, can you see this now? Maybe you know, maybe double price on the picture. Can you see it now? No. Okay. So I am doing the screen share and it's not, these are PDFs in their photos and I don't know why it's not sharing. So I'm gonna do a quick stop share and share again. Sorry about that. No, you're not seeing this. Just the small ones. Okay, sorry. Maybe make sure that you have the right window that you're sharing. So it might work to stop sharing and then reselect the window. All right. Okay. How about this one? No? Yes, okay. Okay. All right, I think that I was. He disappeared. How about this one? No, whatever you did before was working, but not now. The problem with screen share is you have to always come back and get out again and again. So that's our image. Do you see that one? No. Okay. I'm gonna stop share because the more important thing is, I mean, it's too bad, but I also met with, we had taken a bunch of money with us so that we knew there was a humanitarian crisis and we wanted to help Afganza and we had taken a bunch of money with us. So we went out on the streets. I met with some people and we started giving donations, especially during Ramadan when people had been already starving. And the money just was pretty much used up right away because an entire village had been starving. And since my return, I get these WhatsApp messages every morning, already sitting in my phone, saying we've just taken care of this village. There are like 20 people knocking on our door again because there's word that some Americans came here with some money and more people are starving. So I've been collecting money from my own particular family and close friends and literally every day, I'm sending a chunk of $1,000 or 1500, whatever I can send. And I get these incredibly moving images and videos of food distribution that is reaching the people immediately. And they're so grateful that it's an American group of people, American women that came there and are doing this for them. There is a lot of potential goodwill that we are not tapping into here because although we were there as an occupier, there is a lot of relationships that have been formed with Americans, whether it's through education or people just know, especially in the urban areas, they know Americans, they like them, they know they were very generous. And apart from everything else that we did, the bombings and the drone attacks, which we all know about, but there is generally goodwill. And I hope that we will capitalize on that goodwill and not give that up. So here are a couple of key takeaways for those people who don't know much about what's going on in Afghanistan. That the government in transition has generational divides and internal divisions between the moderates and the extremists. Much like what's happening in America, societies are polarized, their society is not polarized, there's just a lot of distrust because people don't trust one another. And there are some who absolutely want to see girls go to school and women working, but there are smaller factions of conservative people from rural areas who are basically flexing their muscle and saying that our customs are more important than religion. And the leadership is afraid to overlook and potentially lose the support of this rural base. And I believe this is why girls education, this particular segment of girls education, which is the high school girls in public high schools is being held hostage. I think that is what's going on. If we could focus on that and really undo that, I think that that is going to be the critical thing. And we have to understand the dynamic that's preventing the girls schools from being opened. The Islamic Emirate, as they call themselves, officials were truly touched by our delegation. They were really moved by us women all the way from 80-year-old to 30-something-year-old coming together for the sake of the Afghan people and willing to meet with them face to face. They saw a different face of America that we traveled so far away just to meet the Afghan people. We were the first delegation, first American delegation that arrived after the August takeover. There is no political alternative to the Taliban. They're there to stay. There is no other movement, no other political force. And if we insist that they create an inclusive government which includes women as well as other ethnicities and we used all the muscle that we have, meaning soft power, not like hard power, then I think that we will be able to shape or influence things in the right direction for the Afghan people as well as for our own values. Fourth is, Afghans are tired of war. They want peace. The fighting has stopped because the three groups that were fighting one another, the Afghans, the Americans and the government are no longer fighting one another. And there are occasional bombings and one can talk about where that's coming from but it's not really from the government. But Afghans are very happy for one reason and one reason only that they can travel long distances in their own cars without any stops and without any checks and without getting blown up by some group. Then finally, this is what I believe, I think internal pressure from the Afghans itself, especially religious leaders, women, civil society is critical to shaping the Afghan government because the Afghan government knows that they are now trusted by the populace, especially in urban areas. And they desperately want to win these people over and need the support and they cannot alienate these people. So to the extent that we can support, like when we went there, we met with the people, then we told the government what these people were saying, there is nobody translating each other's concerns. And that was a very important dynamic. And I think that as Americans, we could put all of our best skills to force, like dialoguing, conflict resolution, those kinds of things. And I think those skills are desperately needed in Afghanistan and we can help that. So these are my key takeaways. And I do have a universal declaration of Muslim women's rights, which lists all the rights that Muslim women have in Islam and I did present that to them and they welcomed it. And it is my hope that we can create a long-term educational awareness campaign around this issue in partnership with the group that is here and an additional people that are in Afghanistan. So education, dialogue, collaboration, talk face-to-face, these are my key takeaways. Not sanctions, not alienation, that doesn't work. It's not gonna work. We're just gonna push them into the arms of China. Thank you so much, Daisy. And we have in the comments, thank you Daisy for representing the true Islam. And if you wanna put in the chat the links to the work that you do, that would be great. Our next speaker is somebody that I went to Afghanistan with 20 years ago. She's one of the co-founders of September 11 families for Peaceful Tomorrow's. And back then 20 years ago was carrying the same message of war is not the answer, the dialogue and communication are the answers. And Kelly, it's just been so wonderful to be with you then and to be with you now as you work to try to bring some justice to Afghanistan. And thank you for being with us, Kelly Campbell. Thank you, Medea. It's great to be here with everybody tonight. I'm gonna show some slides while I talk. So if Shay can get those going. So here's a picture of Medea and me and Darrell Bodley 20 years ago in Afghanistan with youth in an internally displaced persons camp. So that was 20 years ago when we were there really calling attention to Afghan civilian casualties and the issues that Afghans were facing right after 9-11 where they were being bombed by the US just innocent people just like our family members from September 11 families for Peaceful Tomorrow's but they were Afghans and they'd also just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I came back from that trip 20 years ago and helped to found September 11 families for Peaceful Tomorrow's, which is a group of 9-11 family members who've been working for peace and justice for the past 20 years. On that initial trip, we met with Afghans whose homes were bound by the United States and we met with Afghan children in the hospitals missing limbs from US cluster bombs. We also met with girls returning to school for the first time in many years and I think there's a photo of that is next. So this is 20 years ago when schools were just opening and these are all the kids raising their hands when we asked who wants to be a doctor. They all wanted to be adopters. So we returned to the US at that time to show the stories of Afghans civilian casualties and to push for peace. So I decided to go on this trip last month with this amazing group of women for a couple of reasons. One is, as Medea mentioned, we had hoped to celebrate with Afghan girls and their families as they all returned to school, which unfortunately didn't happen yet. And as the mother of a 13 year old myself, I really hope this policy can be changed as soon as possible. The other purpose of my trip specifically was to advocate around Afghan central bank reserves that they need to be returned to the Afghan people. And so it's very clear from what we experienced in that week in Kabul that Afghanistan needs its funds returned as soon as possible to show up the banking system and help fuel the economy. So I can understand- I'll stop you there for one second. I think it needs a little more explaining about the funds. I'm not sure everything- Thank you. Yeah, so I was just gonna get to that. So what happened after the Taliban took power is that there were about nine and a half billion dollars in Afghan central bank funds that were frozen either in the US or in European banks. About seven billion of that was in the United States. And when the Taliban took power, those funds were frozen basically because there wasn't clarity around how to keep that going to the Afghan people. When that happened, there was a group of 9-11 family members called the Hablish plaintiffs who had a judgment against the Taliban from 2012. And so they filed a legal motion saying, hey, we should get to have that money. In fact, they asked originally for like 6.8 billion of that money for their 150 clients. Since that time, a number of other 9-11 family lawsuits have jumped in as well saying that's not fair. We should also get some of that money. And the Biden administration finally weighed in in February and basically split the baby and said, we think that half of it, 3.5 billion should go into a trust fund that will benefit the Afghan people. And the other 3.5 billion should be preserved for these lawsuits to try to go after it. The Biden administration didn't take a position on whether these lawsuits have merit, but if you read their statement of interest, they basically go through all the reasons that these statements don't have merit. And I can get into that in the Q and A, it gets kind of complicated. But basically we've looked at this and we've filed an amicus brief, both September 11 families for peaceful tomorrows as well as unfreeze Afghanistan. And there are several other organizations we've seen that have also filed briefs explaining why legally the 9-11 lawsuits really have no claim over this money. And it's really quite sad to be honest that 9-11 family members are being petted against innocent Afghans once again, and that these family members are being told by their lawyers that they're probably gonna win when we're hearing from the lawyers we're talking to, including people in the administration, but that's very unlikely. So part of our delegation was to see what is really going on. And we did see on the ground people, not just extreme poverty as Daisy mentioned, but we also saw middle-class people slipping into poverty. People aren't able to get out more than $200 a week out of their bank accounts. There were women in bread lines. I'm sorry, I'm not able to look at the slides in my notes at the same time. So if you wanna advance the slides, these are some of the girls we met with in a girls after school program, the girls that Suni talked about that we're making the love packets. If you wanna go to the next slide, this is us with those girls again. So you can see there's light shining through the cracks, there's people figuring out how to get around the policies that make no sense. And so I think that was encouraging and that's something that we need to do as well, is get around our US policies that make no sense. And the next slide here will show us meeting with... On the left there, I was meeting with girls or young women who had just graduated from medical school and there was a medical school graduation at our hotel and many of them don't have jobs to go to even though they're so desperately needed. And on the right is one of the teachers at the after school program for girls. If you can advance to the next slide. This is what I was talking about that there, we saw this every day when we left the hotel, there were lines of women waiting for bread outside of bread shops. So people would go in and buy an extra piece to give to them or they were waiting till the end of the day to see if the bakery would give out what was left over. That was pretty rampant. We saw things like this going on. We also saw, if you look at the next slide, I think it's middle class families, I guess it's not there, but we also saw middle class families selling their furniture on the side of the road in order to eat. So there's widespread economic problems that the fact that they don't have a functional central bank is exacerbating. And here you can see we're meeting, this is us waiting for the folks from the DAB, the Afghanistan bank is what they call their central bank to come in and meet with us. So we did meet with officials from the bank there who also were very clear. This is not the Taliban's money. The central banking reserves belong to the Afghan people and they need to be returned in such a way that they can have a functional banking system. Next slide. And this is our press conference at the end where we shared similar to what we're sharing today we shared with people in Afghanistan. And you can see there are a number of television cameras there. I got a lot of local and regional press but not so much press in the United States. So to conclude, we at September 11th families for Peaceful Tomorrows are working with unfreeze Afghanistan and other partners speaking out to the press, talking to Congress, talking to the Biden administration and pursuing legal action to help ensure that Afghans have access to their own funds. And so it was really my privilege to be on this delegation and be able to talk to Afghans directly to let them know that they're not alone, that there are many of us here in the United States that want them to have their funds back and that we'll be struggling alongside them in order to achieve that goal. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Kelly. That was wonderful. And people can put your questions in the chat and we will later on have a chance to do some Q and A. And now we're going to hear from Ruth Messenger, who is the Queen of Double Triple Tasking. She's always doing many different things at once. And she just wrote she was in a crowded subway. So I'm not sure where you'll be right now. I'm home. You're home, good. Okay. So Ruth is the former president and inaugural global ambassador of American Jewish World Service. She was formerly part of the State Department's Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group and is a member of the World Bank's Moral Imperative Working Group on Extreme Poverty. She's also doing international human rights work for AIDS-free world and serving as the inaugural social justice fellow at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She is the social justice activist in residence at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan and is an icon in New York politics where she served as New York City Council member and then as Manhattan's borough president. So it was such a great thrill to be with you on the trip, Ruth, and so glad you could join us tonight. And maybe you could put your screen down a little so we could see your face. Yes. And now we can't hear you. Not too well. Now, yeah. Is that better? Okay. And I think the audience has heard most of what we all saw and felt. My connection to Afghanistan was that not American Jewish World Service, one of the first projects that we funded after I came in 1998, were the secret schools for girls that were being run by the Afghan Institute of Learning. And it was very reassuring in lots of ways to see that the Afghan Institute of Learning has grown hugely as running schools and clinics throughout the country and to underscore the position and the point that Sunni made before is found ways to continue to provide services to the women and girls who need their help. It was very, very encouraging to be at, like, three different sites where we saw that girls were being served by non-governmental organizations. Although I would note that the bank problems that each of my colleagues has talked about are problems for the NGOs as well. They may receive money from the states. They may have bank accounts, but there's limits to how much they're allowed to take out also because the currency is so unstable. I was really moved by the number of families we saw in severe poverty, the woman who may have been described already, but who told us that, of course, she was for education for girls, but meanwhile, there was education for boys, but she couldn't access it because she didn't have money for a notebook and a pencil for her son. So the problems are severe, and the country will continue to slip into more and more higher levels of food insecurity and starvation, particularly because one of their sources of food has been the Ukrainian sort of wheat bread basket for that part of the world, which is obviously not functioning now. And that just makes it more imperative, I think from all of our points of view, that the United States find ways to keep pressure on for girls' education and also find ways to move money. It does not have to be $7 billion all at once, but to move money that is the money of the Afghan people in small tranches with expectations that have to be met about how the money will be used, but to see the money used before Afghanistan becomes a failed state. And the Taliban are in power, they also don't have experience running a government, and there are ways in which we could be helpful as well as being supportive of the severe needs of the population, but we have to encourage our members of Congress to stand firmly on all of these issues to get Afghan people some of the money that is theirs and to change the rules so girls can go to school. And it was a special honor to be part of this delegation. And now we're several of us working in various ways, like as with this meeting tonight, but to bring our collective and discrete messages to broader swaths of the public and to members of Congress. Wonderful, thank you so much Ruth. And I just wanna fill in a couple of things. We are gonna be doing an action later, and part of that is to call for the unfreezing of the Afghan funds. We're very clear that supporting women and girls, you can't support them by starving them, by contributing to the collapse of the economy, which is not only the freezing of the funds, but the vast majority, 85% of the government expenditures during the time of the US occupation was coming from foreign sources, and that has dried up. So imagine an economy that for 20 years was so dependent on the outside, not having that now. And then the nine billion, over nine billion, seven billion of which is in the US, two billion in other places being frozen. We were on the street one day when a woman, obviously a poor woman came up to us crying, saying, why have you frozen our money? I can't take my pension out of the bank. We were at an event where it was the reopening of the Afghan Women's Chamber of Commerce. And one of the women we spoke to said that she can't get the money out of the bank to pay her workers who were all women making clothing. And she's gone from having 150 women workers to about 15. And part of that was she couldn't get the money out. And the other part was that people just don't have money now to buy the clothes. So we're calling for the unfreezing of those funds and for that to be given back to the bank. And we as unfreeze Afghanistan have submitted an amicus brief to the court just a couple of days ago explaining our reasoning. And Kelly Campbell with the September 11th families have done the same thing. We also in our action, the petition we're asking you to sign also calls for the US to give more money in humanitarian aid. We wanted to be clear, the central bank money should go back to the central bank because it's needed to fulfill the functions that central banks do, which includes having liquidity. There are not only a shortage of dollars in Afghanistan but there's a shortage of Afghan money. And we want separately more humanitarian aid. The UN did an appeal for Afghanistan calling for 4.4 billion dollars. And there is a shortfall of 2 billion. And we're saying that because the US during 20 years of occupation spent $300 million a day every day for 20 years filling in that shortfall would be less than a week of what that spending was. So those are the two things that we will be asking you to help us on. And we are also having quite a lot of discussions with Congress. We did a briefing that had over 40 members of staff from the Congress on it. And they have been following up with us wanting to meet. And we have had a number of good meetings. There are some Congress people who really want to do something and understand that a failed state in Afghanistan would not be good for the Afghan people. Somebody in the chat had asked who is doing the bombing. There is ISIS in Afghanistan. And if the economy continues to crumble there will be more young men that won't have any opportunities to earn a living and will be there for the recruiting by groups like ISIS. The other thing about a failed state is that there will be even more of a mass migration. And we met so many people in Afghanistan who are desperate to leave the country. Some because they don't want to live under the Taliban and many of them because they see no economic opportunities. And there's already, as you well know and a refugee crisis with the Ukrainian refugees and of course a refugee crisis on the US Mexico border having millions of Afghans trying to leave the country as many have done to neighboring Iran and Pakistan are only creating more problems in the region. So these are some of the things that we talked to Congress about why it's so important to do something to help uplift the Afghan economy. So with that, Marcy, you wanna... Yes, I just wanted to jump in before we go to the Q and A and I thank you, Median, all of our guests are featured speakers. It's just, it's so moving to hear these stories and see the pictures. And I know that those who are on the call with us are motivated to end this travesty. So Shay has posted the petition in the chat perhaps Shay, you can post it again. And I ask that everybody on this call click on the petition. We will be delivering this asking for a more humanitarian aid and unfreezing the funds that we have stolen from the Afghan people. So Median, how about a Q and A now? Yes, I think there have been some questions about, let's see, I see one from Paul Namfi here. Can more be said about specific advocacy points that credible women's organizations inside Afghanistan are asking, specifically citizens and decision makers outside of Afghanistan what can be done to help empower women. There was also a question for Daisy about what you meant when you said that women that there are cultural issues that are holding women back and that is separate from religious issues. So why don't we start with you, Daisy, on that question. Yeah, thank you so much. So the cultural issue is that there is a fair amount of conservatism in the rural areas where there is, first of all, Afghanistan has been in a war state for 40 years. So you can imagine when you're a country that is so war torn, people go back to their tribal ways and Afghanistan is a tribal country, at least the rural areas. And there isn't a tradition of women, girls going to school, because most people just don't see the value of girls going to school. So that, plus there have been other things like forced marriages and exchange marriages that Medea was mentioning, which when the Taliban took over, kind of outlawed these two very horrendous practices of forced marriage and exchange marriages. So they have done something. In other words, if they really want a decree to, if they want the decree to be implemented, they can implement it. It just requires the political will. So what they're afraid of is that, first of all, I think that they are aiming for segregating their schools between boys and girls, so gender segregation in schools. And that has posed some problems for them to continue the middle schools, the high schools, because girls are coming of age and boys are coming of age and they're probably afraid that there might be some sexual attraction between these groups. And so they're determined to do the separation. I don't think they really know how to do that. Plus they don't have the facilities. So one issue is that, just the practical issue of separating the boys and the girls and how to do it and in what timeframe to do it. And that is why we keep hearing excuses like uniforms and then there is, you know, then there's the curriculum and then there is the whole stuff, different excuses. But culturally, they do have a real issue where they can't seem to bring their rural areas along. And there are some tribal leaders in the rural areas that are powerful, that have a very strong base. And I think they are threatening to pull out their support. And this is why the girls' education, that particular segment of girls' education has become the bargaining chip, in my opinion, from what I see between the lines and read between the lines. So the cultural issues are real, but of course not for the urban areas. So the Taliban is not there to govern just for the Pashtun tribes and the rural areas. They're there to govern for the whole country. And this is why they are now in a big pickle because they're actually governing in the urban areas. They're actually governing in Kabul. And they're being confronted with these educated people, both men and women who see the equality of men and women as being intrinsic to their Islamic values. And they're being confronted by that. So even somebody like me, when I sat there across the table from them and I confronted them, you know, gently on the issues. And I mentioned how frequently the Quran mentions education and knowledge. Like there are 700 references pretty much to acquiring knowledge and seeking education, the reading books and using the pen, everything. And, you know, they agreed and they know, they know this is what the Quran is, but how do they bring those rural areas along? So that's why when I said, I'm happy to go there if you invite me, you know, because I will go with your partners, with the local partners, and they extended a warm welcome, which, you know, because they know they need the help. They need our help to go and speak to people at the ground level. There was a gentleman who came up with a wonderful proposal that we should empower women in the rural areas starting financially, making them financial independent by creating very small micro loans, basically not giving them money, but giving them equipment and skills. So they could actually start home businesses, which is culturally appropriate for them. They could make honey, they could make berries, they could make embroidery, they could do those small, you know, and that way we can also go and do some skill building, and we can introduce the idea of education and literacy, and that would be a really good first step to starting a change. Anyway, so those are, I hope that answers the question. There's one follow-up question, and I was actually wondering this myself, and that is, would the Taliban go along with schools in the urban areas and then bring the rural areas along gradually? That's what I think they should do. And I don't know why they want to, I think they are trying to create some kind of a uniformity in their own way, they were going, well, we should, you know, I explained to one of the guys, I said, even in America, we don't have one educational system. I said, we disagree with state by state. State, every state has its own curriculum, its own, this thing. The problem is, they don't have the technocrats and the bureaucrats to think the way we think, right? We know the process, we think in a very creative way, we have, everybody's gone, everybody's left Afghanistan, and you have a government in transition that's trying to govern, that's trying to keep security, they're not recognized by anybody, so everything's in a flux. And then they have a supreme leader who's listening to these people. So you have like, like nothing is, there's nothing that everything seems like, you know, one decision could be reversed the next day, basically. So, and it's all because, who are they really listening to? Who is their constituent? You know, it's like a government in transition. I don't know if people have studied this, but there needs to be a study of what do you do with governments in transition that are not recognized by the world, but they are governing. So yes, I wonder if we want to address this issue of dialogue. And Ruth, I'm not sure, are you still with us, Ruth? Well, Sunita, I'll go to you because there's a question of, you know, what is dialogue with the Taliban mean? How do we do that? Where are the issues on which we could dialogue? And I just want to say that when they decided to not open up the schools for secondary education, this was taken by a lot of the international community as a reason to cut off that dialogue. So, Sunita, can you take that issue? Yes, I guess it was a question for me too as we were going on this trip. I think the day that that decision was made, we all, one person in our delegation couldn't get out of bed because it was that depressing. And we all had the question, should we go? And I personally spoke to the woman who ran the women's shelter that we ended up visiting. And she said, well, of course you should come because my girls would rather meet you than not meet you and rather see a compassionate face of America than not see that face. So please come and walk with us, she said. If whatever we're going through, it's bad and maybe it'll get worse, but walk with us. And this is the thing. The Taliban, I think Daisy said it, the Taliban are the government of Afghanistan. And I don't think anybody is gonna go and rescue the Afghan people from this government anytime soon. So if the people of Afghanistan have to deal with this reality as people who care for them, as people who want to do something, we need to walk with them. And that means engaging with the Taliban. That means advocating that our government engages with their government. So on every level, whether it's the last group or the at the government level, engaging is absolutely essential. And we prove that you can do it. I mean, whether they were telling the absolute truth or not, who knows? They seemed, the individuals that we met with seemed genuine. When we talked about the girl's school issue, they told us they had daughters and they wanted their daughters in school, their older daughters and their younger daughters. I didn't think they were lying. They seemed genuine to me. They talked about the schisms within their ranks and how they were trying to convince this Emir and the more conservative factions. So we went there and we engaged and we were welcomed into those conversations. And as Daisy said, we were welcomed back. So I think engaging is absolutely the right thing to do. And we have had a green light for that engaging. I also got something extraordinary after, which is we set up a meeting with the Ministry of Education and invited Congress to join that. So that was quite amazing. Ruth, did you wanna add anything to this dialogue question? Yeah, I wanna say that it would take a half step back and look at American history or American diplomacy in the last five years. We deal with countries that we love where we're on the same track. We deal with countries where we clearly are in opposition to them. The government is talking now about going to meet with Putin in order to stop the war. I mean, it's not as if we have this track record of only working with people who are in total agreement with us. Our track record is quite different. We are a leading country in the world and we have figured out over time ways to move aid, ways to talk to people, ways to move people. If the seven of us could have, as Medea just said, not only a meeting with the education ministry but a follow-up phone call with the education ministry that was joined by members of Congress, of staff, then you have to imagine that if 10 members of Congress themselves and in the White House said, like, we don't wanna just meet with the education ministry staff. What we wanna know is how do we have access to this amier who people say is making the ultimate decision? It's worth a try. It's worth a discussion. It's worth taking some of the money which I wanna repeat is Kelly's point is the money of the Afghan people and saying, none of us is saying, like, okay, here's $7 billion and we happen to still have it in Washington. We're sending it to you. You can make that argument from some hypothetical point of view but that's not what we're saying. We're saying like, what if we said here's $200 million? We're giving it to the bank, not to the regime in power but to the bank itself and the bank officials. We wanna know what it is you can do to further stabilize your economy and create an expanded pool of liquidity. And I picked $200 million, you're gonna have $500 million, you're gonna have $100 million, gonna give them some money in some fashion or other and see what happens with it. When we met with the education ministry on the phone last week, they acknowledged what many of us remembered which is that about, I can't remember when, four months ago, eight months ago, some of the Western powers move money to UNICEF and UNICEF then move money to give some salary payment to teachers and healthcare workers. So there's in Afghanistan, so there's lots and lots of ways of doing this and the notion of somehow that the money is frozen, we're frozen and because we don't like who took over the country on August 15th, we're gonna stop all communication of every sort is not anything like the way in which the US actually acts in the world. And as we've all said to you, we think it's really dangerous for the future of the Afghan people and for the future of the country. What about the State Department? Are there allies in the State Department who would like to see this money given to the Afghan people? Is there, what is the concrete reaction that you've gotten from members of Congress in terms of meeting with members of the Afghan government? How much longer? Kelly, address that because you've actually met with people in the White House. Yeah, so we've met with people in the State Department, we've met with people in the White House and really it's interesting because the Biden administration, they feel like what they did was free up, because the money was stuck after the Taliban took over and then these lawsuits had a writ on it. And so in February, when they issued the executive order, they viewed that as being helpful, but they were saying this three and a half billion should get to Afghanistan soon. And the rest probably get there eventually because these lawsuits aren't gonna win. But that is not how it was reported in the press. That is not how Afghans perceived it definitely. It's not how many of us in the US perceived it. So if you take that at face value, the Biden administration feels like it is trying to help to get this money to Afghanistan. It's obviously not doing it quickly enough and it's obviously not doing it as comprehensively. I think that they could have issued a stronger executive order and claimed executive privilege and foreign policy and said this is clearly not money that's subject to a writ of attachment by US lawsuits, but they didn't do that. They tried to have it both ways and they kind of made everybody mad and by doing it that way. So I don't know, I think we need to put pressure on them. I think Congress needs to put pressure on them. I think we just need to not give up and not assume that this money can't get there because it absolutely can. There's Congress people, there's senators who have proposals about how to get money there in trenches so that you can, as Medea was saying, you will put some money in, see how it goes and give them more money. There's ways to do that through the central bank. There's ways to empower a private bank to act as a central bank. There's ways to use that money to get the economy going again. And we spent $300 million a day on war for 20 years in Afghanistan. There is no excuse for us to be sitting on any of their money. There's no excuse for us to not be helping get their economy going again. We had 20 years at 300 million a day. So let me just say that I'm a little angrier maybe than Kelly, she's more the diplomat. I feel like Biden, if he hadn't frozen the money in the beginning, the money would have gone back to Afghanistan. They created this situation. And a lot of it is because they are just so terrified of what a mess the exit was and how they wanna wash their hands of Afghanistan and they don't want to be labeled as soft on the Taliban. And so there is a question here and I just wanna acknowledge that we have a representative Mira Wood from Democratic Socialists of America International Committee and they wanna work on this issue with us and we're very excited by that. And she's asking, are there efforts to bring in larger groups, faith groups, labor organizations and others to apply pressure? That's exactly the kind of work we need to do right now. Every day there are different groups who are coming out. There were a UN experts that just wrote a letter and we look forward to working with you Mira and anybody else on this call that can help us to put more pressure on the administration and on Congress. So with that, you can always reach us at, well, I'll put my email here and I think Sunija has put hers. We can all put ours in there to reach us. And Marcy wanna take us to the action, Marcy and Shay. Oh yeah, again, for those of you who may not have had an opportunity to sign onto the petition, that is our action. It's a petition that calls for the unfreezing of the funds by all means, give it back to the Afghan people. And Shay, if you can, wouldn't mind posting that one more time that would be terrific. And what else can we do to push the Biden administration? We should write the White House now. Write the State Department. Write to your congressman. Write to our Congress people. Well, work with us, you know, as we are reaching out to our members of Congress, there's gonna be a new letter. One thing we're talking about is getting the women in the House and the Senate to do a letter to saying that we are hurting women and girls by this policy. So we welcome you working with us on that. We're talking to members of Congress who actually served in the military in Afghanistan and they understand that this is not helpful. So there's lots of opportunities and we really welcome your participation with us as we move forward and try to bring some justice in more humanitarian aid, getting the money back to them and getting these programs going that are World Bank programs. IMF had $600 million destined for Afghanistan and that money has never been distributed either. So there's plenty of funds that have all been frozen that need to be unfrozen and Kelly, you might wanna just say what you have heard in terms of unfreezing the $2 billion in Europe. Well, the latest that we've heard on unfreezing the money in Europe is that that may even be more difficult because some of it is dependent on the Taliban actually being recognized as the official government and most countries aren't doing that or aren't gonna do that anytime soon. So I think as Americans, it's our responsibility to get the money that's in the US unstuck. What the Biden administration also said was that, well, their plan to have three and a half billion be going was supposed to be a nod to the Europeans that they could also release that money, but it doesn't look like that's happening anytime real soon. Is there anyone within the State Department that you think we could reach out to who would perhaps lead this effort? Well, Tom West is the representative who's supposed to be working on Afghanistan. We haven't talked to him directly, but I think finding how to get to him probably makes sense. And we were told that Ron Klein, the chief staff at the White House, is the man to go to. So anybody who has connections with them, great, but we will continue doing this work and we're so glad that you all joined us at the height we had about 200 people on tonight and it's also being live streamed on YouTube and on Facebook, so we're reaching lots of people. And Marcy, you wanna say anything before we close? Sure, yes, I also wanted to thank our guests. This was a fascinating evening. And I feel so grateful, I almost like crying. Thank you for going there, but that was a big trip. And you took a risk and you are to be admired and I know that many of us on the call feel the same way and are gonna follow up with our representatives in Congress to find out what they're doing. Like you said, Medea makes absolutely no sense to see this country fall into a failed state. So let's all do what we can, I'm a retired teacher, I'm gonna reach out to the president of the teachers union to see what we can do as teachers, as educators. And I'd like to see members of Congress go to Afghanistan and witness what's going on, right? We should be asking. That's what we should be asking for because honestly, the discussions we've had with them, they have so little knowledge of what's really going on and the facts are 2.7 million girls are going to school, 92,000 teachers are teaching, there are no female teachers fired, 1.3 million girls in public secondary schools are not in schools. And that is what we have to focus on and make sure that that happens. And there is some hope and the most important thing is the Afghan people are not taking the Taliban lying down, they are fighting for their rights, they're insisting on their rights, they become bold and brash and they fear them but they're willing to speak out. So we have to help those people and then we also have to help the moderate elements of the Taliban. That's a great note to take us out on Daisy because I think we didn't emphasize enough all these brave women that we met, including journalists who openly confronted the Taliban at our press conference and have been sending us every week videos that they take out in the countryside talking to women and girls and we're gonna be posting them on the Code Pink and the Unfreeze Afghanistan website so you can see directly from some of these very, very poor families and what the women and girls are saying. So thank you so much. Marcy- That's all on mute and thank our guests, how about that? Yes, and the next, Marcy, the next- Sure, yes, next week we're gonna, we're working on looking at the Pentagon budget, the proposed Pentagon budget for 2023 and getting some experts on to talk about programs that the Biden administration wants to cut where there's pushback and what we can do to demand less money for the Pentagon, more for the people.