Women and Islam: The real test of our values

"And frankly, a prolonged stay in Afghanistan is neither in the U.S. interest..."

Are you kidding? Let's see how this will probably play out if we leave:

1. We leave.
2. The Fundies of Pakistan will just rush in to take over Afghanistan.
3. The Taliban will regain control.
4. Iran will assert their own control and use Afghanistan as a training base for their proxies (Hamas/Hizbollah/etc).
5. As Afghanistan becomes again the one of the most unstable countries in the earth (worse than it is now), that instability will turn back on Pakistan and because of it's closeness to Europe, will not so slowly drift there...destabilizing Europe.
6. As more and more terrorists that are trained in Afghanistan turn their violence all over the rest of the world, AGAIN the world will look to have to go back into Afghanistan...

It's impossible that an Afghanistan free of American influence will remain a free and safe state in context to its inherent danger to the rest of the world.

Yet, you say, "And frankly, a prolonged stay in Afghanistan is neither in the U.S. interest..."

I wish that you would take a moment to qualify that statement. How in the world is it NOT in our best interest or the world's best interest to sit on Afghanistan.

Folks, this is our future - where failed states like Afghanistan take us we have to follow. We can't allow states like this to destabilize the rest of the world. It's too dangerous of a world now to just leave these people to their shenanigans.

We have to look at this issue as bad vs. worse, and it's WORSE to leave and allow the mess to happen that would surely happen if we up and left.

Women? They're screwed no matter what, but at least this way it's a tad better for them. But, that's not why we'd stay - it's a bigger issue than that.

"And frankly, a prolonged stay in Afghanistan is neither in the U.S. interest..."

Whatever...

Beneath the terrible picture of the woman whose nose was cut off it reads: "Saving Women Is More Important Than Fighting Terrorism." Saving women is fighting terrorism. The aggression against women goes against everything the original tenets of Islam proclaimed. When the Islamic world wakes up to this fact, we shall have turned a corner.

These things happened before the US went to Afghanistan, they are happening now, and they will happen after. Accept it. The US is a ‘moral’ society only because it says it is; others claim the opposite. Who is right? What is right? Devising ‘moral’ conundrums is an intellectual pursuit as old as thought itself, but extracting woolly Presbyterian/Judaic moral fervour from an illustration on the cover of a politically selective journal and then prestidigitalising it into US foreign policy is not sensible employment of ink and paper. I am sure the author is well aware that 'Human Rights' are for justifying certain US actions, not for guiding them. Awarded an F.

CORRECTION: Beneath the picture of the woman whose nose was cut off, it reads: "Saving Women Is More Important Than Fighting Terror." Saving women is fighting terror.

Venerable Mr. Rothkopf,

I'm impressed with the clarity of your internal monologue. Clearly you are coming grips with the monumental injustices that exist despite the presence of a near-all-powerful entity such as the U.S.A.

It's almost like asking: If there is a God, how can there be so much evil in the world?

-->If there is a superpower able to enforce human rights anywhere, why are there such diffuse human rights abuses across the globe? And in our allies even? And in our own military prisons even!?

The way that I mentally/ethically/etc. justify such contradiction is by recognizing that a world minus an effective U.S. is worse off. In this situation--would the ultimate damage to the U.S. (ability to fight future conflicts for human rights, etc.) be greater than the gains?

Very utilitarian, I know.

In the case of the Afghan women the answer is at the bottom of the absolute abyss which is the future of Afghanistan.

Would helping them be a good idea? Maybe the answer is yes and maybe no but definitely nobody knows the answer (and if they say that they do Do Not Trust Them!).

1. Cutting off someone's nose and ears for not wanting to go through with a marriage is not an aspect of Islamic law.
2. The hudood about stoning is almost impossible to enforce when properly implemented. Iranian cases of stoning generally result from two instances: the judge is assured on the person's guilt (something which, at least in Sunni Islam, is not valid grounds for punishment--Shia Islam may be different, cause Shias believe Aisha did commit adultery even though there were no witnesses to the alleged act) or the husband accusses his wife, and the wife is not informed that if she denies the accusation she isn't to be punished.
3. The hudood laws for adultery in Iran are the same for men and women, thus to call them specifically a crime against women is misleading.
4. As much as the behaivor on the part of Afghan men is reprehensible, one also has to take into consideration that it's a nation that is considerably psychologically scarred. I believe a study was done and found that a signficant majority of the country has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and I know that, at least among returning US vets which such symptoms, rates of domestic violence are far higher than average.
5. If you wanted to reduce the level of idiotic decisions carried out by local clerics, you may want to consider allowing such regions to have some source of sharia within their legal system. The fact of the matter is, is that such areas have historically been governed by legal systems with at least some aspect of the sharia intertwined to it. The vast majority of Muslims throughout the world would like some form of the sharia to influence their legal systems. At least if the government has some regulation over sharia courts, it could keep avoid significant mishandling of court cases. It could also train judges who are knowledgable of the sharia; Ottoman judges were far less prone to such mistakes given that the courts were strictly maintained. Trying to impose a foreign legal code (which is what just about every "Islamic" nation has) is just not terribly sensible.

And TIME's article was obviously just a piece of propaganda that was put out in order to help negate some of the unfavorable views about the war that the Afghan leaks had. They have the document right on the wikileaks page discussing media tactics such as using the stories of Afghan women who have been abused in order to shore up support for the war.

A government that actually governs by the sharia can have the head of the judiciary or a khalifa can place moratoriums on certain hudood punishments. This is what the Ottoman Empire did for many hudood during the Taniznat reforms. Stoning was merely punished with a fine. These reforms only had authority due to the fact that a khalifa ordered them to be done, and the subjects of a khalifa are commanded to obey those decisions. Having a bunch of secular autocrats in control who govern by Western colonial laws doesn't grant legitamcy to their decision in the same way that a ruler who implements the sharia would.

The topic of these discussions has wandered far from the exalted thoughts of David's column.

However, if this is really the reason to stay in Afghanistan, then the President and the Congress need to unambiguously state to the American people that our soldiers and Marines are dying for the Afghans and not for us, and stick to their guns. To maintain the official line that we are protecting ourselves from terrorism while acknowledging privately that it's really a humanitarian mission is unacceptable.

Wrongo, KASEMAN. The Khmer rouge were a fringe peasant party until the U.S. bombing of Cambodian border areas , and the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk's government by a U.S.-backed military junta. These events enabled the Khmer Rouge to "seize the moment", promote themselves as the the Saviors of the Cambodian Nation, hence rallying Cambodians to the Nationalist cause.

The primary reason for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is that the perpetrators of 9-11 are enjoying refuge across the border in the Pakistani so-called "Tribal Homelands".
The # 3 Al Qaida, Mustafa al Yazid, killed in a U.S. drone missile strike in the "Homelands" in May 2010, had stated that "al Qaeda had a hand in Every operational aspect of the Afghani Taliban."
Reason enuf to stay away, in my humble opinion.

This article summed up my thoughts on the latest and disingenuous cynical attempt to shore up support for the US/Western invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by appealing to feminist and gender issues. Doubly so considering the recent shrill cries from the US begging the Taliban to join a joint Afghani govt as the US looks about desperately for some way to extricate themselves from this latest neo-imperial venture.

Burkas and Bikinis:Time magazine's cover is the latest cynical attempt to oversimplify the reality of Afghan lives

Priyamvada Gopal

Reprising a legendary 1985 National Geographic cover, this week's Time magazine cover girl is another beautiful young Afghan woman. But this time there is a gaping hole where her nose used to be before it was cut off under Taliban direction. A stark caption reads: "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan". A careful editorial insists that the image is not shown "either in support of the US war effort or in opposition to it". The stated intention is to counterbalance damaging the WikiLeaks revelations – 91,000 documents that, Time believes, cannot provide "emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land".

Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy, and the Time cover already stands accused of it. Interestingly, the WikiLeaks documents reveal CIA advice to use the plight of Afghan women as "pressure points", an emotive way to rally flagging public support for the war.

Misogynist violence is unacceptable, but we must also be concerned by the continued insistence that the complexities of war, occupation and reality itself can be reduced to bedtime stories. Consultation with child psychologists apparently preceded Time's decision to run the image, but the magazine decided that in the end it was more important for children (and us) to understand that "bad things do happen to people" and we must feel sorry for them. The WikiLeaks revelations of atrocities and civilian deaths are evidence of some rather terrible things that are done to people but are bizarrely judged not to provide a "window into the reality of what is happening".

Time is not alone in condensing Afghan reality into simplistic morality tales. A deplorable number of recent works habituate us to thinking about Afghanistan as what Liam Fox, Britain's defence secretary, called a "broken 13th-century country", defined solely by pathologically violent men and silently brutalised women.

While Afghans have been silenced and further disempowered by being reduced to objects of western chastisement, a recent judgment against Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul has raised the possibility of challenging their depictions. Based on her stay in the eponymous protagonist's home, Seierstad's memoir uses offensive commercial language to describe ordinary marital negotiations and refers to female characters as "the burka". The tone implies even the most anti-Taliban Afghan men are irredeemably vicious patriarchs. Predictably, some critical reaction deemed Afghanistan a "horrible society".

While there exists a colonial tradition of relegating the non-west to the past of the west – and some suggest leaving it to rot in hopelessness – the trendier option involves incorporating Afghans into modernity by teaching them to live in a globalised present. In non-fiction bestsellers such as Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School, an American woman teaches Afghan women the intricacies of hair colour, sexiness, and resisting oppression. "To all appearances, there is no sex life in Afghanistan," writes Rodriguez, obsessed – like Seierstad – with the nuptial habits of Afghans. Sex and the City in the Middle East may have tanked as a movie, but as ideology it has displaced meaningful global feminism.

Acceptable Afghan-American voices such as Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) and Awista Ayub (Kabul Girls Soccer Club) reiterate the notion that suburban America can "infuse" Afghans with freedom. Formulaic narratives are populated by tireless Western humanitarians, sex-crazed polygamous paedophiles (most Afghan men) and burka-clad "child-women" who are broken in body and spirit or have just enough doughtiness to be scripted into a triumphal Hollywood narrative. The real effects of the Nato occupation, including the worsening of many women's lives under the lethally violent combination of old patriarchal feudalism and new corporate militarism are rarely discussed.

The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.

And how could they? In the affluent west itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits. Other ideas once associated with modernity – social justice, economic fairness, peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women – have been relegated to the past in the name of progress. This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/03/burkas-bikinis-reality-afghan-lives

It should also not be forgotten that it was the US in pursuit of their geopolitical games who armed, supported, trained, and empowered the Islamic fundamentalists and mujaheddin just two short decades ago against a socialist Afghani government that was attempting to protect women, do away with the veil, and bring equality and education for all (including women) - well before any Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to help the Afghani government fight off the fundamentalists according to the NSA advisor at the time, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has even admitted proudly and publically that the US support of Islamic fundamentalist in Afghanistan was meant to trick the Soviets into sending troops there, to "give them their own Vietnam".
Any belated US bleating about women's rights nine years into an occupation of is ridiculous. The US itself is to a large extent responsible for the plight of women in Afghanistan today.

Misogyny runs throughout these societies, stretching from Morocco to Pakistan, and it predates Islam. Blaming Islam for Afghan misogyny makes as much sense as blaming Catholicism for catcalls and endemic machismo in Latin America and the Mediterranean.

Look at the Mosaic laws, pretty Taliban-esque if you ask me. The point is, getting rid of those nasty Taliban and ayatollahs ain't gonna change things when even many secularists like the wife to know who is boss. And moreover, if we were genuinely concerned with the status of women in the Middle East, killing off the old communists and later Saddam wasn't an auspicious start.

Yes, they're brutal to women. And they hate Israel. But do the women they brutalize also hate Israel? If so, that reduces my sympathy for them.

Your article is horribly arrogant and suffers an all too common utter unawareness of the damage you do. You argue, like a flippant Tom and Daisy about how uncivilized those Muslims are. I notice how Jews treat Palestinians as less than human. To paraphrase your central question, "How should we deal with Jews?" AND, the Book of Joshua DOES seem to absolutely affirm that Jews can rape, pillage and commit genocide and ethic cleansing to gain Israel.

Now, the Koran offers no such justification for the treatment of women you've condemned. I'd first ask you to avoid the religious track, especially when cultural rather than religious influence justifies what you're condemning. Again, the Old Testament don't hold up so well to scrutiny, so you really don't want to get in one of those battles.

You can't ignore the vast destruction we've brought to Afghanistan. It was Zbig's very policy to draw the Soviet into there. We've played Mephistopheles there for 30 years and you offer this slight of hand? Have you no shame? Seriously, at long last, do you have no awareness of what we did there?

We never even tried to extradite Bin Laden. The Taliban asked us to offer some proof of our charges--as is customary for extraditions. We never should have rushed to invade and occupy Afghanistan, we never offered them the troop numbers to accomplish that task, haven't proposed sending that number of troops, and won't.

What we did then was to bring the patient into the ER, (I don't know how you'd create the background for this analogy to accommodate the 24 years of letting another butcher surgeon hack away for two generations. Before even those days we had a hand on first marginalizing the King, who was so popular that Pakistan wanted to unite the two countries in an Union with a democratic monarchy. Britain and later the US would ensure this would never happen. We've long supported divide and conquer.

You may wish to ignore what effect this has on societies, you may wish to ignore what our colonialism and our rabid extension of the this, "war on Terror" but it is profound. Algerian women almost never covered 20 yrs ago, now, even modern, Europe inspired but normally observant young women cover out of choice. I know this personally. This same trend is has followed through out the Arab world. This has been a reaction to our foreign policy.

You're an "expert" but you're article evidences a terribly insular attitude. It is frankly shocking, sophomoric, literally 2nd yr college stuff. You write uncluttered by consideration of the obverse of your argument, probably unconcerned. I've become convinced you're a sophist and surrounded by sophists. Everyone you meet is literally lobbying for someone--this is half the way to sophistry, it's willingness to twist arguments, facts and attention that completes the term.

Seriously, what guides your focus on women? I'd suggest the universal code is the Golden Rule, something else that can be found in the equivocal Old Testament. It's actually common to all faiths, and the great challenge of all ethics is captured in the question, "who is my neighbor." Jesus offers us the example of the Good Samaritan, and forever Christians should be judging everything, even the bible itself against this.

Jesus' answer is a terrific challenge in that he points to an non-Jew, but a man who was touched by another man's suffering. He wanted to help. HE DIDN'T BOMB HIM! INVADE OR OCCUPY--HOW IDIOTIC IS IT THAT YOU IGNORE THIS. HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF DECENCY SIR? War is the most vicious way to help people, have you ever read Orwell?

Or, Invisible Man? He was invisible because he was black, no body saw him, or his humanity. You ignored long ago the humanity of the brown people, ironic a Jew, a brown person, a self hating brown person, which is a very real phenomenon. But, Jews are special brown people and are really white, endowed by a promise from a racist G-d. Not all Jews do this, go through this, but I guess you do somewhere down deep. I'm white, and I've only heard whites and Jews suggest they are genetically superior.

I was disproportionately excited and proud of my Irish, English and Scotish history. Some say the Irish and Scots are irascible, I can identify with that, I usually call myself an asshole. But I'm fair, honest and earnest. I'm not racist, I'm gagging on it. I choke on the propaganda pushing us to war with Iran. I'm troubled that we can't cut our defense spending, that we have so many tentacles that we don't know that we aren't fighting ourselves. We ARE fighting ourselves with the Taliban. I'm not making the genetic fallacy, though we DID foster the Taliban, we suckled them with weapons, shoulder fired anti-air missiles, mines and the like. And, we're paying them off today, for safe transport passage, to stand down, to fight others.

You've so over thought this Machiavellian morass you all should be shot. You may be earnest, but every substantive voice on this is a sophist whore, and those that aren't are really scary, Dick Cheney. But all your "thinktank" peers are whores. I am anxious to see how Newt defiles every principle Camus ever articulated in his new hypocritical, delusional, "advocacy" for the Military industrial complex.

We are gutting our Entitlements, which are PAID by the poor, it's Income taxes they don't pay. Income taxes pay our DISCRETIONARY Budget but sadly, we don't get such scrutiny of discretionary spending. Forget that our entitlements address classic utility/monopoly markets which private enterprise can't responsibly run without regulatory restraints.

But in the Discretionary budget we've created vast monopolies in Agriculture where no monopolies should exist. We have a Pentagon budget that CAN'T be audited. We've lost 16 billion in Iraq, just lost 8 billion of our own and another 8 billion of Iraqi money. Also, the oil ministry reported the volume of oil released one month and their revenues the next. The final price was $15/barrel when oil was selling for $50. To my knowledge, this was never investigated, and would be far larger.

But let's forget all that waste, all that theft, all that destruction. We were talking about sophist elite insularity and women's rights, while ignoring the rights of whole peoples. Or bringing aid with all the wonder accouterments of war. Why don't you care about the peasant Chinese, the Uuigurs? What about our funding of the Uzbecks, Tajiks and other reprehensible regimes for NO OTHER REASON THAN THE AFGHAN INVASION? Do you have no better ways to bring help than War? IF SO, YOU NEED TO GO TO HELL! Seriously.

"Try 3 Cups of Tea," that would also do wonders for your insularity, to actually meet real people not the sophistic whores that have risen to power abroad. Often by courting American Sophists. See, how you create a mirrored bubble. Final proof, you'd NEVER tolerate someone with my attitude, my earnestness in your presence. Because sophist won't tolerate being exposed.

I failed to note that while we have this patient on the table open, flies buzzing, for 24 yrs before we come in with dull scalpels and an inability and unwillingness to do what's needed to pull this off.

Also, I wanted to note that you write this article after we leave Iraq teetering, where sophists lied, obfuscated, and twisted reality to make Saddam seem an WMD armed threat to the world. Of course, you never reminded us that the only way Saddam would have used those questionable WMDs if we INVADED.

But we did invade. And, that war had the usual hardships of attendant with war. Death, rape, strife, destruction of infrastructure, for which you will mock them later for their shoddy war ridden infrastructure. We need to INVADE to provide infrastructure. But, you're the thoughtful feminist who thinks deeply. How have women faired in Iraq?

I appreciate that you were trying to demonstrate the equivocal nature, or some might say the self contradictory mission that COIN entails. And all our decisions become bad decisions. That sounds like a dilemma I'd rather avoid. Yet, you foster the ugly, murderous, false dilemma of retreat or help. What a sophistic, murderous policy you call on. You're seriously advocating the rising of war and it's attendant harms for women. This isn't Chemotherapy to treat cancer, this is war is peace, good is bad, god bless America and no one else.

Read "3 Cups of Tea," read Smedley Butler, read Glenn Greenwald, he's an earnest voice, who is strikingly not seen on the Sunday shows.

Let's put this into some context.

In the early part of the 20th century, a modernizing king, Amir Amanullah Khan, did attempt to carry out measures aimed specifically at liberating women. Friendly to the Soviet Union, and the first king to visit Moscow, Amanullah was deposed and driven out by the social equivalent of the contemporary mujahedin. The last decade of Zahir Shah’s reign, from 1963 to 1973, was a period of some political ferment. But the slender rights achieved then were won through struggle, not the “good offices” of this reactionary monarch. In 1968 when Zahir Shah’s parliament threatened to prevent women from studying abroad, hundreds of young women protested. In 1970, when Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — later one of the most barbaric mujahedin leaders and the recipient of the largest amount of CIA funding — sprayed acid at unveiled women and shot at their legs, 5,000 young women took to the streets in protest. The Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the Democratic Organization of Women of Afghanistan (DOWA) campaigned for the right to vote, to study abroad and to work outside the home, and four women from the DOWA were elected to government in the 1970s.

In 1973, officers loyal to the left-nationalist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) played a major role in overthrowing the monarchy and participated in the newly installed Daud government. When Daud moved right and tried to crush the PDPA in 1978, mass demonstrations of students and government workers erupted in Kabul. The PDPA military faction outgunned Daud’s forces and he was killed. This was the so-called “April Revolution,” essentially a left-wing military coup with popular support among intellectuals and government workers.

In power, the PDPA embarked on a program of reforms — cancelling peasant debts, carrying out land redistribution, prohibiting forced marriages and lowering the bride price to a nominal sum. The PDPA’s measures, particularly those aimed at freeing women from feudal tyranny, threatened the mullahs’ stranglehold on social and economic life and immediately provoked a murderous backlash. Even the New York Times (9 February 1980) acknowledged, “It was the Kabul revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed Orthodox Moslem men in the Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up their guns.”

A decree allowing women to divorce was not officially announced because of the Islamic revolt. Most explosively, the PDPA made schooling compulsory for girls and launched literacy programs for women, building 600 schools in just over a year. The tribal insurgents denounced schooling for women as the first step in a “life of shame” and the earliest bloody confrontations were over women’s literacy, as PDPA cadres and women literacy workers were driven from villages and killed.
The PDPA could not quell the mujahedin insurgency, which was heavily backed by the US, Pakistan and Iran (where the Islamic theocracy under Ayatollah Khomeini had come to power in early 1979). Repeatedly and urgently, the PDPA asked the Soviet government for military aid, including troops. Concerned above all to pursue the chimera of détente with imperialism, the Kremlin temporized. But toward the end of 1979, the Soviet high command watched anxiously as US warships were positioned in the Persian Gulf and reports emerged that Washington might invade Iran. The US was already bankrolling the Afghan mujahedin and trying to foment Islamic counterrevolution in Soviet Central Asia.

In December 1979, fearing the PDPA regime was about to collapse and with Afghan president Hafizullah Amin reportedly making approaches to the US, the Soviet Union sent in 100,000 soldiers to combat the Islamic reactionaries. The imperialists seized on the Red Army intervention to launch a renewed Cold War drive. As the CIA undertook its biggest covert operation ever, Afghanistan became the front line of the imperialists’ relentless drive to destroy the Soviet Union.

Much is made of the resistance to the murderous regime of the fundamentalists by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Though individual members are undoubtedly brave, as an organization RAWA limits itself to demands that it thinks the mullahs and warlords will allow or what is “popular” among “liberals” in the West. Formed in 1977, RAWA opposed the PDPA government from the start, denouncing the PDPA in crude anti-Communist terms as Soviet “stooges.” When the Red Army moved in, RAWA joined the imperialist-sponsored insurgency. RAWA founder Meena Keshwar Kamal declared at that time, “To fight against the Russian aggressors is inseparable from struggle against the fundamentalists. Nevertheless for the time being we should give priority to the former” (Arizona Persian Bulletin [Web site], 10 October 1977). In October 1981, Keshwar Kamal was invited to attend the congress of French imperialist president François Mitterrand’s viciously anti-Soviet Socialist Party as a representative of the “Afghan resistance,” and from there toured other European countries on behalf of the mujahedin.

RAWA said it was fighting for “the independence of our homeland” while the imperialists screamed about the Soviet Union’s violation of Afghanistan’s “national sovereignty.” This sanctimonious concern by the blood-drenched imperialists for “national rights” was bogus to the core. Afghanistan is not (and was not then) a coherent nation, but an artificial state whose borders include and cut across a mosaic of ethnic and tribal groupings. It was under the Soviet presence that the murderous ethnic and tribal differences started to break down, while among the mujahedin they intensified.

What did it mean to back the mujahedin? The tribal khans and mullahs that the RAWA feminists signed on with got billions of dollars from the US government. Favourite mujahedin targets were schools and teachers. By 1985, they had destroyed over 1,800 schools and by 1987 they had slaughtered 2,000 schoolteachers. The mujahedin committed blood-curdling atrocities against captured Soviet soldiers, hacking off limbs and genitals before murdering them. In the first four years of the war, only eight living Soviet soldiers were turned over to the Red Cross. In Pakistan, the “holy warriors” threw women and children into their jails and torture cells.

To secular-minded Afghan women who had finally gained a degree of emancipation following the Red Army intervention, RAWA would have had little appeal. RAWA’s secular pretensions are really a tissue-thin cover for flagrant conciliation of religious reaction. Tahmeena Faryal raved that the Soviet forces “were trying to give some rights to Afghan women that are obviously okay in Western societies, but are not acceptable in our societies ... For example, they wanted to give so-called liberties of having a boyfriend or dancing in a nightclub, which are not acceptable in our society” (Z Magazine, January 2002).
RAWA’s homage to Islamic strictures stands in contrast to the experiences of young women who came to adulthood and received an education during the Soviet period. “Life was good under the Soviets,” recalled Saira Noorani, a young woman doctor. “Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go wherever we wanted and wear what we liked” (Observer, 30 September 2001). Another account, in the 1988 book War in Afghanistan by journalist Mark Urban, who was far from friendly to the Soviet forces, powerfully testified to the stakes for Afghan women:

"There is no doubt that thousands of women are committed to the regime, as their prominent participation in Revolutionary Defence Group militias shows. Eyewitnesses stated that militant militiawomen played a key role in defending the besieged town of Urgun in 1983. Four of the seven militia commanders appointed to the Revolutionary Council in January 1986 were women.

"By 1989, confronting the treacherous Soviet withdrawal, all PDPA women members were receiving military training and arms and some 15,000 women had joined the militias, taking up arms to defend not only the rights they had won but their very lives.

How many of these women are still alive?

In 1988 (the year before the Soviets pulled out) there were 245,000 women workers in Afghanistan. Women comprised 40 percent of the doctors and 60 percent of the teachers at the University of Kabul. Four hundred and forty thousand female students were enrolled in educational institutions and 80,000 more participated in literacy programs. Fifteen thousand women were serving as soldiers and commanders in the army. The All-Afghanistan Women’s Council had 150,000 members. Western dress was common in the cities and women enjoyed some real measure of freedom from the veil and subjugation for the first time in Afghanistan’s history.

When the mujahedin of the Afghan/Pakistan region — ‘spiritual’ progenitors of the Taliban — were being armed, trained and funded by the CIA to manoeuvre the USSR into yet another game of global ‘chicken,’ they enjoyed the whole-hearted support of many in the West. I remember these ‘bearded-bricks-with-dangly-bits’ being hailed as ‘noble Freedom Fighters’ even while they were murdering teachers who were trying to educate Afghan women and girls, or throwing acid in the faces of women who wore ‘immodest Western dress’ or fraternized openly with men to whom they were not related. I also remember the Afghan chauvinists of RAWA (“Donations using AMEX tax-deductible”) claiming that educating women, Western clothing and inter-gender fraternization were ‘contrary to Afghan culture.’ I remember a colleague of my father’s almost salivating with delight as a news bulletin described how a PDPA soldier crawled burning from a shelled Soviet tank while the ‘freedom fighters’ riddled her body with high-velocity rounds from US-supplied weapons.

The ‘woman-question’ was pivotal in Afghanistan from the earliest days of the ‘current crisis,’ yet few in the West actually cared. Foremost in the minds of our political ‘betters’ was checking the ‘Evil Empire,’ even if they had to ally themselves with a motley crew of mediaeval fanatics to do so — what matter if a few women died in the process, especially since they were most likely ‘godless commies,’ functionaries or soldiers of the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or maybe doctors or teachers, female roles also ‘contrary to Afghan culture’?

Now that the ‘danger posed by the Soviet Union’ is no more, Western leaders, media moguls and even quite ordinary folk have ‘discovered’ — shock, horror — that women in Afghanistan are actually being viciously oppressed. Now they have ‘realized’ that their precious Freedom Fighters — whose motto is “A woman belongs in the kitchen or the grave” — weren’t kidding when they talked of recreating the world of the 7th or 8th centuries. Now it’s “gee whiz, maybe we put our money on the wrong dog!” However unexpected this discovery, however genuine this remorse. It avails little those who have already suffered brutality at the hands of the fundamentalist rabble — or those who will suffer in the future.

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I am really disappointed about the situation of women in Afghanistan.There are too many doctrines for women in Muslim countries. I wish that women in afghanistan have more rights and more freedom.Ornela from inzercia zadarmo