Aid Groups: Afghan Women's Rights Under Threat

Graffiti on a Kabul wall March 5, 2012, depicts a distraught woman encased in a head-to-toe burqa slumped on a cement stairwell. Afghan women's lives are still marred by violence and injustice despite progress in women's rights since the Taliban was toppl

Afghanistan's caretaker Minister for Women's Affairs Dr. Husn Banu Ghazanfar visits an Afghan girl, who was tortured, beaten and locked in a toilet for months after refusing prostitution, as she lies on a hospital bed in Kabul December 31, 2011. Sahar Gul

Shabnam Rahimi, 19, (blue) and her sister Sadaf, 18, (pink) lift weights during a practice in a boxing club in Kabul December 28, 2011. Female boxing is especially unusual in Afghanistan, where many girls and women still face a struggle to secure an educa

Afghan girls training to be boxers practice at the gym at Ghazi stadium in Kabul, Afghanistan, Oct. 23, 2007. The stadium is where the Taliban used to hold public executions in the late 1990s. This new generation is challenging the stereotype of Afghan wo

Afghan women shop in a busy Kabul market, on May 1, 2007. Despite advances in women's rights since the fall of the Taliban regime, most Afghan women, especially outside the capital, still opt to don the all-enveloping cloak known as the burqa. (AP)

Two women examine the cap of a burqa in a shop in Kabul on April 17, 2007. Despite advances in women's rights since the U.S.-led invasion of late 2001 led to the toppling of the Taliban regime, most Afghan women, especially outside the capital, still opt

This photograph is taken through the eye-hole webbing of a burqa veil in front of a clothing store in Kabul, Afghanistan on Thursday, May 3, 2007. (AP)

An Afghan woman holds flowers during a fair to mark Women's Day in Kabul, Afghanistan, March 8, 2007. At the time, roughly two out of five Afghan marriages were forced, and 45 percent of women are married by the age of 18. According to UNIFEM, at least on

In an early celebration of International Women's Day 2005, a group of Afghan refugee women wait to receive gifts distributed by U.S. Corps of Engineers employees and soldiers from Combined Forces Command on March 4, 2005. Rights groups in the run-up to In

Women were seen as key to the success of the first presidential election in 2004 in Kandahar, the former capital of Afghanistan's ousted Taliban. Since the hardline militia's ouster, millions of women and girls returned to work and education, especially i