A policy brief paper by Norwegian Peace building Resource Center with latest update on overall state of women rights and the international community engagement has interesting conclusion for donor countries: less aid, more politics. With the 2014 withdrawal getting close and lack of donor interest and aid flow, women rights is of course no more an area of focus.

And as with the counterinsurgency, local conflict resolution, development priorities and good governance promotion issues, it is too late for highlighting the lessons learnt. However, I found the paper interesting and following are excerpts. With policy recommendations for Norwegian government, as an important donor on women rights issues, the recommendations of the paper actually should be a consideration for all countries involved.

"Promoting women's rights in Afghanistan is often framed as a choice between committing to high levels of aid for gender-related activities and an uncompromising public stance vis-à-vis the Afghan authorities, or a realization that women's rights are an internal issue where outsiders can achieve little. Both these options are based on misguided assumptions. Attempting to "fast-track" Afghan women's rights in isolation from local politics will fail. But neither is it correct to assume that Western actions can have no impact."

Western "commitment should not be measured in aid volumes, but in strategic support based on knowledge of civil society and Afghan politics more broadly. Compared to the Taliban period and the years of turmoil that preceded it, the lives of many Afghan women have been drastically transformed since 2001. Commonly cited figures on education and health testify to this: from virtually zero during.

Taliban rule, 37% of school children are now girls, while maternal mortality has decreased by 22% since 2001. Since the overthrow of the Taliban government, urban women have also regained much of the public visibility of earlier times, returning to work in government positions, teaching, business and aid organizations. Women's participation in politics, aided by constitutional quotas for female representation in parliament and provincial councils, is another dramatic change. The legal framework1 and, to some extent, state protection offered to women have also improved.

These gains are on the whole modest and reversible, and some are mostly of a formal nature. Afghanistan remains a highly unequal society in terms of gender. Life expectancy and literacy rates for women versus men in Afghanistan compare unfavorably with almost all other countries in the world, and extremely high levels of physical violence against women within the family also add to a picture where women are discriminated against in almost all areas of life."

After a decade the contradictions of the externally supported promotion of women's rights, or what has been termed donor-driven gender activism, are well known. An unprecedented political focus accompanied by large international funding flows in a society ravaged by war and with an extremely low female human capital base, has led to the emergence of a donor-dependent, fragmented and competitive women's "movement". Many of the formal gains, frameworks and compliance mechanisms that have materialised in this context were the result of externally driven efforts, sometimes with a small group of Afghan actors attached.

Afghanistan's ratification without reservations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) as early as in 2003 seemed to be an action to satisfy donors or a result of their direct pressure. In fact, Afghanistan recent signs have emerged that advocacy is slowly becoming more organized and strategic. The national umbrella network for women's organizations, the Afghan Women's Network, has upped its game in recent times, spearheading several lobbying wins.

These include reversing the Afghan government's decision to nationalize women's shelters under a deeply problematic framework and greatly expanding women's participation at the 2011 Bonn conference. Donors, including Norway, have also started to co-ordinate and pool their funding for civil society, in particular through the recent establishment of Tawanmandi, a joint funding mechanism intended to counteract short-term and uncoordinated donor support.

There is also an emerging recognition in many Afghan quarters, particularly among younger activists, that rather than a plethora of vocational training courses, micro-credit schemes and other short-term NGO interventions, the promotion of women's rights requires an issue-based, broad political mobilization against gender injustice and patriarchal practices. Moreover, not all individuals who claim to be speaking on behalf of women are committed to this kind of politics.

From this perspective the anticipated decline in international funding might not be entirely bad news if it means driving away those actors whose entry into the women's rights field has been overly opportunistic. For external actors, promoting women's rights in Afghanistan in the present climate is not a question of steaming ahead with large financial resources and elaborate technocratic interventions, along with the occasional uncompromising statement addressed to Afghan leaders. This might appease domestic audiences seeking to hold Western governments to account for their pledges to Afghan women.

However, experience has shown that commitment cannot be measured in funds and strong public stances, but in the willingness to adopt a long-term perspective that acknowledges the broader dynamics that shape the conditions of Afghan women and their struggle for rights and status.

It should be recognized that the short-term international strategy of empowering military actors and circumventing nascent democratic and legal institutions is fundamentally detrimental to women's rights in ways that cannot be corrected by large financial injections into what is narrowly and conventionally understood as the "women's rights field".

The most important contribution a country like Norway can make to Afghan women's rights is to call on its allies, particularly the U.S., to halt such policies. It should be acknowledged that Western actions in the political and military arenas have consequences for Afghan actors striving to promote women's rights. All too often, gender equality has been treated as a standalone issue and in turn one that is most easily traded away in compromise under the guise of cultural difference.