Would Afghan Women Be Better Off if We Left?
August 5, 2010
by The New Agenda
|H/t to JL for sharing information.
A rationale used by The Obama’s Administration as to why U.S. troops should stay in Afghanistan to for the sake of women there.
Not so fast.
A shocking documentary put together by Afghan women activists says just the opposite:
Also out last week in The New York Times, an article titled Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains cites:
Women’s precarious rights in Afghanistan have begun seeping away. Girls’ schools are closing; working women are threatened; advocates are attacked; and terrified families are increasingly confining their daughters to home.
For women, instability, as much as the Taliban themselves, is the enemy. Women are casualties of the fighting, not only in the already conservative and embattled Pashtun south and east, but also in districts in the north and center of the country where other armed groups have sprung up.
Tell us what you think?
I think it is clear that the Afghan men want to fight, dominate and bully and no outsider is going to be able to stop them. They do it to each other and they do it to females. They seem to have some deeply ingrained unworkable ideas about what building a society consists of. Probably because they are seeking personal power rather than a workable society for all. The natural outcome of their bad ideas is they kill each other off and women, given options, will leave them and the area.
So give the women and girls options. Take away the “if you don’t do what I say you will be a ugly old hag in the gutter threat”. I think that we should set up well armed shelters for any women and girls who want to come to them and opt out of the Taliban vision. These should of course be out of the way of the usual fighting places. Any women who want to leave the unstable situation should be helped to do so by legitimate orgs and governments. Women in these centers should be armed and taught how to defend themselves and educated in relevant skills to support themselves and their children. If they want to immigrate to other countries then we should match them up with sponsors.
Let the men kill each other off and impose outrageous religious and social restrictions on each other. Problem solved in one generation.
But no we cannot walk away from the Afghan women.
Bes,
Very well said and great ideas for the Afghan women!
No, we should not walk away from the Afghan women, but, as you said, we should give them viable, realistic options to the horror they must endure living under the Taliban regime that has been strangling Afghanistan for decades.
Let the men kill each other off and be done with this unsustainable male view of how life should be lived in the Afghan society. It’s all about personal power and control. The men don’t give a whit about what’s best for all, but what’s best for themselves, individually, and the women will never be considered more than just property for the men, with no hope for a life of their own.
I wonder how Hillary would have handled this situation were she President, instead of BO?
I understand the urge to end war, but history has shown us that war is complex and if you truly care about humanitarian issues you have to look at the big picture. That’s one reason I supported Hillary, she wasn’t just chanting “end the war”, she spoke about the complexity of the situation, the number of widows and orphans dependent upon us, the number of Iraqi’s working for us who could lose their lives if we walked out. I believe Hillary had the wisdom and experience to untangle us without leaving a humanitarian disaster in our wake. I hope she continues to advise this administration.
History provides several examples of horrors that result from bending to political pressure and simply leaving or refusing to engage. Certainly in WW2 our reluctance to get involved at first allowed the holocaust to go on unchecked. Millions of people were slaughtered after we left Vietnam. Not getting involved in Rwanda lead to one of the worst genocides in our lifetime. In gulf war one we pulled out and abandoned the Kurds and hundreds of thousands of them were killed.
The problem is, if we leave Afghanistan, the lives of women there will not simply improve. It’s not like we can wave a magic wand, leave, and their lives return to normal. “Normal” wasn’t so good to begin with. I remember during Bill Clinton’s time when people were pleading with him to help the women of Afghanistan because they were losing their jobs and being forced into burkas. The oppression of women in Islamic countries is fairly recent. I mean, I remember when women in Iran were wearing mini skirts and going to clubs. Afghanistan had women doctors, lawyers, teachers. Over the past few decades that all changed.
I’m concerned because frankly, this government like all others doesn’t actually give a crap for women. It’s like a Mel Gibson movie — his woman gets murdered, and it gives him a picture-perfect excuse to go on a killing spree against The Enemy, and an excuse that makes him look like a knight in shining armor to women … but in the background, he’s a woman-hating asshole himself.
Governments only care about women when it gives them the excuse they need to go on the bombing spree they want. Someone said it — when men fight over women, it’s the fight they want, not the woman. And when the fight is over, it’s back to the kitchen, bitch.
There are no good ways out, committing our own sons and daughters to police men who don’t want policing and impose a society that makes sense to us, not them is not an acceptable option. The natural way is to let the consequences of violent and repressive men take their toll on those men. We have been training and arming men in Iraq and Afghanistan to “take over when we leave” so arm the women so they can “take over when we leave”. Set up secure heavily armed and guarded compounds women and children can come to and if they just want out of a country and culture that hasn’t worked for them let them out. Also they should be picking up all widows, children, unmarried women who are living in the gutter and give them a decent place to be and a useful skill so that they can not be used by every abusive man as an example of what happens to women who don’t submit or even women who just aren’t lucky.
love the comments. train women, built shelters and arm them, not the male military/police. build schools for girls with shelters and a defense system.
Frankly, I was appalled to see Afghanistan’s women exploited to justify continued war. That’s my personal opinion. This topic, once the subject of intense media debate in the late 1990s, has not been mentioned much since that time, despite the fact that we went there. In 2001 it was all about 9/11, and a few scattered media reports mentioned that, yeah, the status of women was bad, and maybe we could fix that too.
I’m sure that Afghanistan’s women want help, and I’m also sure that their ideas of what that help would look like stand in stark contrast to the “help” we’ve offered so far and plan to in the future. I suspect they’d find the ideas offered in comments here far more helpful and effective.
that’s right. We need to recognize that “progress” isn’t along a linear continuum; that you can lose freedoms and you can lose rights and you can go back to an oppressive regime; we need to recognize that instability, poverty, and lack of resources are not the cause of in-fighting and oppression, but rather the effect of it. You cannot oppress women and have a society; period.
Yes, I agree Anna Belle. Is war the way to change women’s lives? If that were our intention with this war I think there are far better ways to help women. This war is not about women and is not being fought on behalf of women.
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