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KABUL, Afghanistan Two weeks ago in a remote village tucked inside Afghanistan's northern Baghlan province, an angry husband set his wife on fire. She was able to get to a hospital, but died a few days later. Her husband fled and has yet to be found.

The story didn't attract media attention, perhaps because such horrors are not an anomaly in some secluded parts of the country.However, one prominent Kabul-based women's rights activist,Fariha Easar, is determined to keep working until that abusive husband is caught and brought to justice.

In another of her open cases, a woman last month was killed by her husband in an escalated domestic violence attackin Helmand province. In a final act of barbarity, hedismembered her body. But as a result of the tireless work of Easar and her small team of women's rights activists -- made up mostly of men working from nondescript offices concealedin the red zone of Kabul's increasingly dangerous city center --he was arrested. Now, she said, the accused must face trial and the appropriate punishment.

"When I go to work, I cannot tell my mother for sure that I will come home," Easar, in her late 20s, told Fox News of the increasingly risky profession she has carved for herself. "But God willing, I will not stop helping other women. Still now, I just cannot imagine how human beings can do these things to other human beings."

Easar's main goal is to assist victims, which entails cooperation with various government departments such as the Ministry of Women's Affairs and the Ministry of Interior Affairs to offer support and ensure authorities act to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators. But, she stressed, the greatest progress they had in this realm came during the years of heavy U.S. presence.

"We have had an increased number of violence cases to work on, but that is only now because more women feel comfortable reporting it. Due to the war, the international NGOs came in and with public awareness campaigns encouraged women to speak out," Easar explained. "And we now have more female judges in our courts, and more female attorneys and defense lawyers."

Yet along with the U.S. troop drawdown three years ago, Afghanistan -- and its women -- lost much of its safety and stability, she said.

"We were really hopeful for the future of women up until then. We felt we had some security," she explained. "But now with less troops, increasing insecurity, it is hard to plan. We want to help women with education and jobs, but security has to come first. Without that, we cannot do anything."

While it is challenging enough for Easar and her colleagues to seek accountability in crimes against women, in regions that have fallen from government control and into terrorist hands -- which is an estimated 40 percent of the country -- it is next to impossible.

As it stands, 87 percent of Afghan women are believed to have experienced domestic abuse at least once in their lives, and while there is a long way to go, things could always deteriorate further.Like Easar, many women fear the now-weakening elastic band of protection that the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom gave them could snap at any time.

Fawzia Arifi, a 55-year-old girls science teacher, has been a victims' advocate for more than three decades, but it was only with the influx of international NGOs and U.S. support, post-2001, that she felt her work surrounding domestic violence really had its greatest impact -- specifically in the most far-flung areas.

With such coalition support and also an opportunity to conduct research for a U.N. agency, Arifi was able to travel to tiny villages visiting mostly illiterate women and explaining to them their rights. Equally as important, she endeavored to educate the males of the home, too.

"Once, I was in a home and saw a young girl had been beaten so severely by her husband and brother. Her dad said it was because he was angry he had five daughters and only one son, and girls were useless to him," Arifi recalled. "This sickness was instilled since childhood. I reminded him that it was a lady who brought him into this world and slowly we started to change this mentality."

In her view, the "American invasion was good news for women."

"Many programs were founded, we have the Internet and many more people now are happy for girls education. Americans risked their lives to help us, and we are thankful," Arifi said. "But we need to continue this struggle, and we are scared what will happen next."

A report by the Office of Special Inspector General for the Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), released at the end of 2014, found that the U.S. had spent some $2 billion on more than 600 Afghan women's programs throughout the then-13-year war. The effectiveness of the initiatives came up inconclusive as most were not adequately tracked. But there is now deep concern that whatever good that $2 billion may have done could not only be flushed away, but the situation could get even worse than it was pre-U.S. occupation.

"If the U.S. leaves altogether, it will be good only for the Taliban," cautions Miriam Panjshiri, 50, who served as director of the Ministry of Women's Affairs for 11 years, up until last year, and is now the deputy of Civil Society in the province of Panjshir Valley.

Wrapped in a turquoise headscarf and scurrying to make fresh bread from the traditional tandoor, feed the farm animals and prepare for an impending storm from her tiny Panjshir Valley mud hut home, Panjshiri -- who never married and had no children -- clasps her cracked hands and insists she wouldn't have her life any other way.

She was just 19 when she was jailed by the communist government during the Soviet War in the mid-80s, for her work as a secret spy for the U.S.-backed Mujahedeen. She endured daily beatings, long periods of solitary confinement and forced sleep deprivation. Yet Panjshiri refused to give up names of her associates and even refused an offer of immunity. Inside those dark concrete walls, her fight for females began -- teaching inmates to read and write in her self-designated campaign against illiteracy.After more than seven years behind bars, she was released after the U.S.S.R. fell in 1992.

"There was no time to marry," Panjshiri quipped. "I had important work to do."

Even under Taliban rule, Panjshiri continued her activism from behind the blue burka, helping women find work and seek protection from violence at home. Taliban leaders came looking for her several times, but she was shielded by locals and simply surged on -- taking on roles managing an orphanage, a mental institution for females and after 2001 became a prominent community point person for USAID and the U.S. military.

Yet Panjshiristill prays that her greatest imprint is still to come. She travels to university in Kabul and stays for three days each week, now in herthird year of a degree in law and foreign relations, insisting she will do "whatever it takes" for her nation's women.

"With the Americans, things were getting much better. Now it is worse. Please just send the message to please continue to support us, our values and our rights," Panjshiri added. "Please do not forget we are here."

Hollie McKay has been a FoxNews.com staff reporter since 2007. She has reported extensively from the Middle East on the rise and fall of terrorist groups such as ISIS in Iraq. Follow her on twitter at @holliesmckay

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Afghanistan women's pleas to US: 'Do not forget we are here' - Fox News

Afghans walk with camels on a road near the border with Pakistan. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Pakistan and Afghanistan plan to use Google Maps to help settle a border dispute that led to deadly clashes last week, officials from both sides have said.

At least eight civilians were killed on both sides in fighting that began when a Pakistani census team accompanied by soldiers visited disputed villages along the southern border on Friday.

Pakistan inherited its 1,500-mile border with its western neighbour when it gained independence from Britain in 1947, but Afghanistan has never formally recognised it.

Official Afghan maps reflect the so-called Durand Line, but many nationalists believe the true border lies at the river Indus that runs though Pakistan and gave India its name.

Officials from the geological survey departments of the two countries will conduct a survey, and they will also make use of Google Maps, said a senior Pakistani security source in Islamabad who requested anonymity.

Abdul Razeq, the police chief of Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan, said: After negotiations, both sides have agreed that a geological survey should be conducted. Technical teams of both countries will use GPS and Google Maps as well as other means to get the answer.

Google complies with certain countries requirements to show borders in line with national demands. For instance, its Indian site shows the entirety of disputed Kashmir as controlled by India. In Pakistan, however, the site shows the internationally recognised de facto border, the Line of Control, marked with a dotted line to denote it is disputed.

In 2010 Google was embroiled in a dispute that prompted Nicaragua and Costa Rica to dispatch troops and armed police to their joint border.

A Nicaraguan commander cited Googles version of the border map in an interview with the Costa Rican newspaper La Nacin to justify a raid on a disputed area of Costa Rica. Google later said it had made a mistake and corrected its map to reflect one sanctioned by the US state department.

Last year Pakistan began trying to harden the traditionally soft border with Afghanistan through trenching and fencing, but its efforts were met with hostility from Kabul.

Ethnic Pashtuns living in the region have traditionally paid little heed to the border. Villages straddling the frontier have mosques and houses with one door in Pakistan and another in Afghanistan.

On Sunday Pakistani forces elevated their rhetoric when they said they had killed more than 50 soldiers in last weeks border clashes a claim quickly rejected by Kabul, which said it lost two soldiers.

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Google Maps to help settle Afghanistan-Pakistan border dispute - The Guardian

A National Guard medic and a pilot have been honored for their actions on a daring medevac mission in Afghanistan, where they quickly extracted wounded warriors and a dog while nearby friendly forces engaged enemy in a firefight. Chief Warrant Officer 2 Bryan Herget and Staff Sgt. Derrick Perkins received the Dustoff Associations Rescue of the Year award on Friday, May 5,at a ceremony at the Army Aviation Support Facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming, according to a release from the Wyoming National Guard.

Both of them had been deployed for less than a month when they flew the mission.

On Dec. 4, 2015, Herget and Perkins loaded a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter fromCharlie Company, 5-159th Aviation Regiment,fortheir first medevac mission of the tour. The two were part of a four-man crew that would meet up with a second Black Hawk helicopter responding, according to the release.

Lifting off within minutes of hearing the medevac request, they learned eight casualties were on the ground, along with a wounded dog from the handler team, and three patients needed urgent care.

As the crew approached the landing zone, they got the news that near the landing zone enemies and friendly troops were engaged in a firefight.

The wounded had been hurt in an IED blast.

The crew decided it was too risky to do the typical fly-over at the site before landing. They decided to take a quick and direct approach to try to avoid the enemy, Herget said in the release.

After landing, Perkins directed those who could walk to his Black Hawk, and sent the more seriously wounded to the lead aircraft, We took on five, a dog, and an escort from the ground forces, Perkins said in the release.

Six minutes after landing, they lifted off, and "the lead aircraft pulled all the power it had," Herget said.

They headed towards Kandahar Airfield and the military combat hospital going directly over bad spots, Perkins said.

At the airfield, they helped unload and transfer the wounded. Medical personnel said later that the crew's quick actions saved lives that day, according to the release.

After the mission, Herget and Perkins got to work resupplying their helicopter, without thinking what they had just done. It was the last thing you think of when youre doing your job, Perkins said.

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National Guard pilot, medic honored for Afghanistan medevac mission - ArmyTimes.com

In mid-November, International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that her office would make a decision in the very near future on whether to launch a full investigation in Afghanistan. That statement meshed with my own reporting that prosecutors office had finally chosen to move ahead.

For more than a decade, the ICC has maintained a preliminary examination of various alleged crimes in that country, mostly by the Taliban but also allegations of torture by U.S. personnel. In its latest update on the examination (published as Bensouda announced the imminency of a decision), the prosecutors office even expanded the enquiry into U.S. activities to cover potential torture at black sites in Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.

But we are now more than six months from Bensoudas declaration, and there are no signs that the prosecutor will pull the trigger any time soon. So what happened? I checked in recently with Bensoudas deputy, the Canadian lawyer James Stewart, and he communicated the following:

Our statement in last Novembers [preliminary examination] activities report that a final decision on whether to seek judicial authorisation to open an investigation was imminent was accurate at that time (para. 230 of the activities report), but we also said in the report that the issue of admissibility of potential cases would be subject to further information that could be provided by the relevant national authorities in the course of the PE [and, we added, or any subsequent investigation] (para. 214).

We also noted the failure up to that time of the Government of Afghanistan to provide us with any information on national proceedings (paras. 217 and 226).

We stated as well that we were seeking to obtain further clarification on the scope of relevant preliminary reviews and investigations in the US before finalising a determination of admissibility of potential cases (para. 222).

Reading between these lines, the prosecutors office has a relatively simple, complementarity-based explanation for the delay: Bensoudas signal that the court was ready to leap into Afghanistan prompted scurrying in Washington and Kabul to provide additional information on their domestic processes and (perhaps) convince the court that no investigation was needed, at least of their activities.

Assessing the validity of the decision to delay is hard without knowing what new information has been provided. From the U.S. side, its tough to imagine that the Trump administration has provided compelling evidence that it is examining U.S. torture policies at anything like the systemic level that the prosecutor seems to want. The Afghan side is murkier. There are indications that Afghanistan has draft legislation on ICC crimes and may be considering new moves, but an Afghan civil society delegation that visited the court in April (facilitated by the human rights group FIDH) saw little progress on accountability.

Its tempting (if entirely speculative) to wonder if Trumps ascendancy has prompted some rethinking in the prosecutors office about the suitability of this moment for picking a fight with Washingtonand a fight would certainly result from the prosecutors first ever investigation of American conduct. There may also be more mundane budget and logistical issues at work. Moving to a full investigation requires substantial new investments of personnel and resources.

Whatever the factors influencing the prosecutor, the ongoing dance on the Afghanistan examination is a reminder that complementarity analyses have become a vital source of flexibility for the court. The prosecutor has very ample discretion about whether and when to move from a preliminary examination to a full investigation, and complementarity has in many contexts become the focal point for that discretion.

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Will the ICC Launch a Full Investigation in Afghanistan? - Lawfare (blog)

Sgt. Monesa Kashefi was once afraid of gunfire. Now the 25-year-old has taken part in more than 1,000 combat operations in six years.

Kashefi is one of several dozen women serving in an elite Afghan police force, the Crisis Response Unit, that increasingly finds itself at the center of the countrys long war with Taliban militants. But Kashefi doesnt just battle the Taliban. She is also up against Afghan traditions, which relegate women to domestic roles and near-invisibility in the body-length garment known as the burqa.

The U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan has long tried to increase the recruitment of women in Afghan security forces, but they have never made up more than 1% of forces. In 2016 alone, the United States budgeted $93.5 million to bolster the ranks of female soldiers and police in Afghanistan, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a watchdog agency.

But the office said in a report last year that female recruits leave the security forces because of opposition from male relatives, problems with male colleagues, low pay, family obligations, lack of promotion or meaningful assignment opportunities, and a lack of training and security.

The Crisis Response Unit is often the first to respond to major attacks, as it did last month when Taliban militants raided a northern base and killed more than 100 soldiers. The unit has come under pressure as Afghanistans conventional soldiers and police face increasing casualties from the Taliban and allied insurgents.

Officials would not disclose the total number of commandos in the Crisis Response Unit, but they are believed to number about 5,000, spread across all 34 Afghan provinces. The unit has filled only 83 of the 254 positions set aside for women.

Kashefi eschews the burqa while on duty, instead wearing fatigues and a black head scarf under her helmet, while carrying 33 pounds of equipment including an antiballistic vest, AK-47 assault weapon, radio and canteen. She marches through mud, water and forests the same as men do, she said during a recent interview in Kabul, on a break between missions.

While she misses her family deployments keep her away from her three children for months at a time she said she loves her job.

Id love to spend my entire life in my unit, she said.

Commanders say Kashefi and other women fill a crucial role by conducting body searches of women during raids on suspected insurgent houses. Under the strict Islamic laws observed in Afghanistan, male officers cannot search women.

Kashefi described a recent operation in Logar, the rugged eastern province where she is based along with about 450 commandos. At a house where two Taliban militants were believed to be hiding, a woman came to the door and it fell to Kashefi to speak with her.

When Kashefi asked to search her, the woman fell to the ground and feigned a stomachache, she said. Kashefi searched her anyway and found a pistol and two hand grenades on her body.

She and the two men were quickly arrested, Kashefi said. The woman started crying and said that Taliban fighters were forcing her to host and cook for them.

It is not common for Afghan women to spend weeks at a time away from home or work alongside men, although Kashefi said she enjoys the respect of the men in her unit, calling them brothers.

A senior Crisis Response Unit commander, Maj. Gen. Sayed Mohammad Roshandil, praised Kashefis courage. He said she once helped carry a male officer who was wounded in a combat operation an unusual thing for an Afghan woman to do, but a sign of her dedication.

The women in our units are really brave, Roshandil said.

But officials acknowledged that women in the security forces are not frequently promoted, and not all enjoy such support.

One female Afghan Interior Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, said women in the Afghan special forces often struggled to maintain their Islamic modesty and also faced sexual harassment from senior officers.

Some senior officials invite their female colleagues for night parties, the official said. If the ladies say no, they never get promoted. Unfortunately, some women surrender to their seniors demands.

Kashefi is the sole breadwinner in her family. Her monthly salary of about $640, along with a small bonus for each combat operation, supports her mother, brothers and three young children, who live with family members in Kabul. (She wont publicly discuss her marital status.)

She never thought of taking any other job, having joined the special forces after leaving school in ninth grade.

I chose to join the military because I want to fight, she said. I fight for peace.

ALSO

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U.N. says Afghanistan's court system fails women

Faizy is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Shashank Bengali contributed to this report from Mumbai, India.

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In Afghanistan, an elite female police officer battles ...