The Women Of Afghanistan

I was about to write a post saying that in the debate over sending more troops to Afghanistan, you never really hear about women's rights issues when all of a sudden TAPped publishes a little piece surveying the field. Turns out that Afghan feminists are not united in how they feel about the American occupation:

From the United States, it's difficult to figure out who speaks for Afghan women, or even Afghan feminists. Malalai Joya, a heroic 31-year-old Afghani activist and politician, calls for an end to the occupation in her new book, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice. "I know that Obama's election has brought great hopes to peace-loving people in the United States," she writes. "But for Afghans, Obama's military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians, while it may not even weaken the Taliban and al-Qaeda."

...Listening to Joya and Zoya makes everything seem simple. If these astonishingly brave Afghan women want American troops out of their country, then it would seem that feminists could, with clear consciences, join their fellow progressives in calling for an end to the war.

But there are also many seconding the message of Women for Afghan Women. "As an Afghan woman who for many years lived a life deprived of the most basic human rights, I find unbearable the thought of what will happen to the women of my country if it once again falls under the control of the insurgents and militants who now threaten it," the Afghan human-rights activist Wazhma Frogh wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

RTWT here.

Comments

[herxanthikles]

This is all really interesting. I think Afghanistan has completely come down to a tactical evaluation, not an idealogical one. If you concede the possibility of a legitimate war, Afghanistan certainly fits the bill. We went in there for legitimate reasons, and we can certainly find legitimate reasons for staying given that the Taliban are very very bad people who would like to do very bad things to women and not a few men.

The question now is entirely is the potential good we can do by remaining worth the American and Afghani lives? It's hard to say how much good is enough because our aims are grand and diffuse. We would like to build a strong Afghani country, but the Afghanis have never built a strong Afghanistan, so it's hard to see how we are going to do much better. At least in the post-war reconstruction of Germany and Japan, we were helping to rebuild coherent countries. So we are faced with the goals we are unlikely to ever achieve with an enemy we are unlikely to completely defeat. That's a hard war to commit to.

[Josh]

Did you see this?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/27/troops-in-afghanistan-out_0_n_336096.html