Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Michelle Goldberg has a thought provoking article at The American Prospect about an Afghani women's group calling for an increase in American troops in that country to protect women against the barbaric reach of fundamentalist Islamic leaders who would likely be left in control over most of the country, if not the entire country, if we were to withdraw. If there is a compelling argument to be made for an aggressive American foreign policy of intervening in other nations, this is surely it:
Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a nongovernmental organization that runs women's shelters, schools, and counseling centers in three cities in Afghanistan, has watched with alarm as American opinion has turned against the occupation. An American withdrawal, its board members say, would be catastrophic for the women they work with. "Every woman who we have talked to in Afghanistan, all the Afghan women in the NGOs, in the government, say the United States and the peacekeeping troops and NATO must stay, they must not leave until the Afghan army is able to take over," says Esther Hyneman, a WAW board member who recently returned from six months in Kabul.In fact WAW, which has over 100 staffers in Afghanistan and four in New York, is, with some reluctance, calling for a troop increase. "Women for Afghan Women deeply regrets having a position in favor of maintaining, even increasing troops," it said in a recent statement. "We are not advocates for war, and conditions did not have to reach this dire point, but we believe that withdrawing troops means abandoning 15 million women and children to madmen who will sacrifice them to their lust for power."
But there are other voices in the same community arguing for exactly the opposite:
With such sentiments spreading, one of the few remaining rationales for maintaining the occupation is that it's the only way to protect Afghan women against the return of the Taliban. But does it make sense to perpetuate America's presence in Afghanistan on feminist grounds?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."
Joya, who spent much of her childhood in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, ran an underground girls' school during Taliban rule. Yet as much as she hates the former regime, she loathes her country's current rulers just as much. In 2005, Joya was the youngest person to win a seat in her country's legislature. She was a tireless opponent of the warlords who filled Karzai's government -- so much so that in 2007 her political opponents voted to suspend her from Parliament on the grounds that she had insulted the institution. Six female Nobel Peace Prize laureates have called for her reinstatement, comparing her to Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi as "a model for women everywhere seeking to make the world more just."
Joya insists that contrary to mainstream American opinion, the war in Afghanistan has done little to liberate women. "As I write these words, the situation in Afghanistan is getting progressively worse," she says. "And not just for women, but for all Afghans. We are caught between two enemies -- the Taliban on one side and the U.S./NATO forces and their warlord friends on the other. And the dark-minded forces in our country are gaining power with every allied airstrike that kills civilians, with every corrupt government official who grows fat on bribes and thievery, and with every criminal who escapes justice."
Joya is not the only Afghan feminist making this argument. A member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, or RAWA, has been touring the United States calling for an end to the occupation. Going only by the pseudonym Zoya, she echoed Joya's argument that U.S. troops are only compounding Afghanistan's anguish. "Even if they throw [in] thousands and millions of other troops, the situation will be the same, because we need a change, a radical change, in the system, which is so corrupted," she said. "And it cannot be healed by throwing [in] more troops. So we are in favor of withdrawal of the troops immediately."
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.
Earlier this month, The Christian Science Monitor ran a story about a visit that the radical anti-war group Code Pink made to Afghanistan, where they met with local women's rights activists adamantly against a pullout. "Code Pink ... is one of the more high-profile women's anti-war groups being forced to rethink its position as Afghan women explain theirs: Without international troops, they say, armed groups could return with a vengeance -- and that would leave women most vulnerable," the Monitor reported.
"I know Malalai Joya personally, I've always agreed with her positions," says Hyneman. "She's extremely brave and courageous, but this is one time when I totally disagree with her."
Hyneman doesn't dispute that the last eight years have been largely disastrous for Afghanistan. "There's no question, we, meaning the United States, have done a terrible job there," Hyneman says. "We've promoted the warlords, financed the warlords. We should have demanded that the warlords be bought before a court, a trial, a reconciliation process. The Afghan people want that. America under the previous administration made a chaos, a mess of Afghanistan. We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory."
But unlike Joya, Hyneman believes that the United States can be part of the solution to the problems it has helped create. "Because we have botched up things there, that doesn't mean we should leave; it means we should stay and try to fix it," she says. "It seems rather obvious. We've made a mess, we've got the warlords in power, we've done everything wrong, killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. So we just abandon them?"
To a large degree, the answer depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism. After the last eight years, that's a hard faith to sustain. Staying in Afghanistan seems indefensible. The trouble is, so does leaving.
Welcome to the real world, where the answers are rarely as simple as most of us would like to believe.
Politics
Comments
Trying to push bronze age populations into the 20th century, never mind the 21st, at the point of a gun is doomed to failure, period. Unless you're willing to, say, round the the entire population, separate the men women and children and re-educate and liquidate as required.
Read Matthew Hoy's resignation letter fort some perspective.
Posted by: The Pale Scot | November 6, 2009 9:39 AM
Ms Goldberg's argument is absolutely spot-on. This is exactly what I've been saying for some time (though she articulates it much better).
"National sovereignty" is a red herring. We can, and should, intervene to protect individual rights when people in other nations are being oppressed. If Afghanistan falls under the rule of the Taliban again, women will be returned to a de facto chattel status under the patriarchal control of their husbands and fathers, and will be deprived of the right to work or receive an education. Not to mention the other minorities who will be subjected to oppression - non-Muslims and apostates from Islam, gay people, and anyone else whose lifestyles or religious convictions are incompatible with the beliefs of militant Islamism.
In the end, the only thing that will stop this happening is the continuing use of military force against the Taliban. It is no answer to argue that it's "none of our business" or "not our problem": why are Afghan women's rights less important, or less worth fighting and dying to protect, than those of American or European women? While America and its allies can't right all the world's wrongs, I would argue that it is right to continue doing everything possible to secure individual freedom in Afghanistan. If that means continuing to fight, then so be it.
Posted by: Walton | November 6, 2009 9:49 AM
sorry, it's Matthew Hoh
http://warincontext.org/2009/11/02/fareed-zakaria-interviews-matthew-hoh/
"This is a valley, I don’t know, 15, 20 kilometers long. There’s only 10,000 people in it. They speak their own language. They speak Korengali. In the year 2009 we have a valley with people who speak their own language. Their only trade is the timber trade. And when they move their timber, they don’t even leave their valley. Most of the time, I believe, they just take it to the Mazar Valley, and a middleman picks it up and brings it to Pakistan for them.
We show up. We enter their valley. We occupy the richest man’s timber mill. And then we bring in Afghan army and Afghan police, who aren’t from there"
Posted by: The Pale Scot | November 6, 2009 10:07 AM
The Talibans are not in power anymore, but today's Afghanistan looks nothing like a paradise of democracy and human rights. Little girls who go to school are still attacked and splashed with acid. So are teachers, especially women: when they're not killed themselves, members of their family are. The burka is not a completely forgotten clothing item. President Karzai doesn't act against war criminals who use rape and murder as weapons to stregthen their local power through terror; far from it, he pardons them. So, compared to the Taliban regime, hiw government is a slightly lesser evil. If the US want to turn this mess into something like a modern and democratic state, they'll have to send countless troops to maintain order there. But they'll still be foreign occupants, and attacked as such. And they'll have tons of opium at hand, which means lots of easy money (such a situation has proven too strong a temptation for many DEA agents deployed in Colombia).
Posted by: Christophe Thill | November 6, 2009 10:15 AM
Oh yeah Walton, and we'll stay there with the thousands of troops required until they learn to treat women nice. Cause you know, nothing would make these guys be nicer to women then if there is a foreign soldier pointing their gun at them whenever they misbehave.
If god could save us from naive would-be heroic wannabes I'd be a believer tommorow. Please stick to the stories where the white knight saves the princess - reality rarely works that way.
There are about a billion things we could do to promote some semblance of equality for women in this world, most of them could be done at a small fraction of the cost of this war (check out Kristoff at the NYT for a couple). That is if we really gave a fuck about that, as opposed to trying to look all heroic.
Posted by: Coriolis | November 6, 2009 10:21 AM
Y'know, I can't help but wonder where the (New York -started & -based) Women for Afghan Women gets its funding...
(And by the way: one sign that a person is underinformed on Afghan issues is the use of "Afghani" to describe the people of Afghanistan. An "Afghani" is the basic Afghan unit of currency, typically worth just a few cents, and most Afghans consider it insulting to be called that.)
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | November 6, 2009 10:26 AM
I'd agree completely with WAW's position -- if I had evidence that an infidel foreign military occupier could change such deeply-rooted attitudes in a country as isolated as Afghanistan. Our armed forces are about the best on Earth, but no army on Earth can ever be THAT good.
The more forcefully American troops enforce women's rights, the more anti-American, anti-Western and anti-infidel hostility will be directed at those same women, in addition to the original anti-woman hostility. American military interference will have to be at the grass-roots and personal level; to get an idea of how much resentment and backlash that will generate, just imagine how we'd feel if Chinese occupation troops were kicking in our doors to resolve domestic disputes.
And there's no possible home-grown governing coalition that could possibly make a dent in all the misogyny in our lifetimes. Whoever rules from Kabul will have to reckon with a deeply rooted Taliban, acting on deeply-rooted beliefs and attitudes.
I suspect that ZERO real progress will ever be made, unless and until the Afghan people are able to establish peace and order. Only when they're responsible for their own society, and only when they can start making a living in peace, will they even be able to think of working for collective improvement in their social conditions. And we have to face the fact that there's gonna be a LONG period of absolutely deranged oppression of women in the meantime.
As far as agitating for women's rights is concerned, the best we can do is leave them to their own devices, work with them through non-coercive NGOs, get public attention focused on the issue, and show them the best exmple of Western justice and rule of law. The best tools for this sort of progress are not the tools of brute force.
Posted by: Raging Bee | November 6, 2009 10:56 AM
I thought when they invaded Afghanistan they should have taken the guns from all of the men and given them to these people.
Posted by: equisetum | November 6, 2009 11:04 AM
Who are Women for Afghan Women, and why have I never heard of them before?
Posted by: Dunc | November 6, 2009 11:10 AM
I reluctantly agree, 100% with RB in #7. Not reluctant because it is RB, but because it is not a pleasant reality--but there it is. Talk about a Sophie's choice...
What might work is if an enlightened Muslim force went in and laid the Taliban to waste.
Posted by: heddle | November 6, 2009 11:23 AM
When debating the long-term development of the middle east, I usually think seriously for about ten minutes and then announce you might as well declare the entire region socially irrepairable and nuke the lot.
What they need is a good dose of western culture, over a period of many decades - but that type of social enginering is only possible when you have a globally dominant culture that actively and openly seeks to force it's own culture upon others. The roman empire was great at that. So was the british empire. World domination through a combination of military strength and the conviction to occupy places for centuries if that's what would be needed to 'civilise' them. Unfortunatly both of those have collapsed.
Posted by: Suricou Raven | November 6, 2009 11:32 AM
What might work is if an enlightened Muslim force went in and laid the Taliban to waste.
Something like that might happen, if the US pulls out and the Taliban behaves disgracefully enough in front of enough hidden cameras. A more liberal elected regime in Iran, for example, might send "advisors" to clean things up a bit. (Of course, that might be part of an Iranian attempt to extend influence into Afghanistan, or to resist Pakistani encroachment.)
Posted by: Raging Bee | November 6, 2009 11:35 AM
If we really want the US Government to help Afghan women, then the proper agency would be State, not Defense. Hillary Clinton is seriously revamping the State Dept. anyway, and her name and face on a campaign against oppression of women would do the movement a lot of good, troops or no troops.
Posted by: Raging Bee | November 6, 2009 12:08 PM
We can, and should, intervene to protect individual rights when people in other nations are being oppressed.
Because that worked so darn well in Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq.
The US can't be Team America World Police. We don't have the money or the resources to go around attempting to save every oppressed person on the planet by invading their countries and overthrowing their leaders.
Posted by: Adrienne | November 6, 2009 12:08 PM
Raging Bee@7: Unfortunately, I've come to believe you are correct. Reluctantly, I should add. Physical enforcement just isn't going to work. Just flip the tables and imagine that, somehow, some way, the Islamic world invaded and was occupying the United States, trying to forcibly impose their ways on us. Women in veils, sale of pork forbidden, prayer 5 times daily...
Would it actually change anything? Maybe while the occupation was ongoing, but after they left? No; cultural identity is stronger than that. We'd revert to pretty much the same society as today. Some changes, of course, but about half of those would be extreme backlash, so I think it would wash out.
The only real modern examples on record of a war, invasion, and occupation actually making some real changes to a nation are Germany and Japan, post WWII. And those wouldn't have happened without the Marshall Plan and its ilk.
No, if we want to change Afghan culture and help the women and children of that beleaguered nation, we are going to have to come up with an Afghan Marshall Plan. It's what we should have done in 1989 after the Soviet pull-out, and it's what we should have done in Iraq in 2003 after toppling Saddam.
Posted by: dcsohl | November 6, 2009 12:40 PM
...and it's probably what Obama would like to do, but the teabaggers and taxophobes would never allow it. Just like 1989.
Posted by: Raging Bee | November 6, 2009 12:57 PM
Being a member of the vagina'd crowd, I can sympathize.
But I'm thinking the main issue here is religion and cultural history, which is going to be very hard to overturn - look at America; there is still widespread racism, sexism, homophobia, and other ills despite the fact that we're relatively progressive, compared to Afghanistan.
In many respects, Afghanistan is still stuck in the Middle Ages, where they're still killing women for religious reasons.
No, I think the best we can do is offer asylum to those who want to escape, sanction the crap out of Afghanistan to pressure it to come into the 21st century, criticize their less savory cultural practices (cultural relativism, as much as it is usually good, is bad when it comes to this), go directly after their opium trade, and wait.
Posted by: Katharine | November 6, 2009 1:03 PM
Oddly enough, it is the women who tend to do the most work in any culture. Afghanistan will fuck up badly if it prevents its women from getting an education; besides the fact that that's a stupid, sexist thing to do, that's an entire half of the potential labor force they're trying to shut out.
Posted by: Katharine | November 6, 2009 1:05 PM
Not only do women do most of the physical labor, they are increasingly beginning to do more of the mental labor. In America, we make up more than half of college graduates.
Posted by: Katharine | November 6, 2009 1:07 PM
Screw the opium trade -- we'll never be able to stop that (even with all those soldiers), so we might as well let them sell it and have that much more money to spend rebuilding their own economy. Bitching about the opium trade is just a distraction from more important priorities.
Posted by: Raging Bee | November 6, 2009 1:12 PM
"We can, and should, intervene to protect individual rights when people in other nations are being oppressed"
Oh boy, we get to invade Saudi Arabia next. And most of the Middle East and northern Africa, not to mention India.
Can't be hypocrites. Maine will have to go under the jackboot now, joining California. The entire Republican party, and the Mormon and Catholic clergy can be jailed for conspiracy. Along with a goodly chunk of the entire worldwide male Muslim population who follow Sharia law.
One can only dream.
Posted by: The Moiety | November 6, 2009 1:29 PM
I have to agree with Katherine. I too am one of the vagina crowd and remember when the email was being circulated about how poorly women were being treated in Afghanistan. Unfortunately pretty well every one who wasn't a male muslim was treated as a non-person. A country can't force their culture on another country without invading and occupying; the desire for change has to come from the ruling group. At this time the best that can be offered to Afghan women is asylum. All troops should withdraw or focus on rebuilding infrastructure so they can withdraw.
Posted by: cass_m | November 6, 2009 1:45 PM
We can, and should, intervene to protect individual rights when people in other nations are being oppressed.
No, no, no, no, no (banging head against wall). Please, name me one single time in the last thirty years where armed intervention has worked out.
Posted by: Shay | November 6, 2009 3:47 PM
Shay: why do we need to talk about examples, or lack thereof, from other countries? This is Afghanistan we're talking about, so the only military-policy situation that matters is the one in...Afghanistan. If I gave you the positive example you ask for, from somewhere else, that would not change the heartbreaking reality on the ground in Afghanistan.
Posted by: Raging bee | November 6, 2009 3:59 PM
Since talibanistic misogynistic tendencies are discernible in various baptist congregations, I would vote for occupation of the territories in question by US marines to prevent any further backsliding of those regions into pre feminist times.
What an idiotic argument to support an occupation.
Its the fucking afghanis own problem - why not bomb the shit out of an even mor enti feministic saudi arabia, which has a far worse track record?
Posted by: peter | November 6, 2009 7:21 PM
The reality in Afghanistan is that we are not now, we never have been, and we never will be able to make that situation better by force of arms; I'm not even sure we're in a position to prevent it from getting worse.
Posted by: Shay | November 6, 2009 9:14 PM
I second what Katherine said. As a feminist and a progressive, I would personally much rather be oppressed than dead. At least when you're oppressed you can do something to work for a more just society. When you're dead there's not many options open.
"Give me liberty or give me death" is something one should choose for oneself, don't you think?
Posted by: KristinMH | November 6, 2009 11:12 PM
I should clarify my previous comment: it is predicated on the premise that you're more likely to die in a war/insurgency situation than as a member of an underclass in a heavily oppressive patriarchal regime. This seems obvious to me but I am open to correction if I'm wrong.
Posted by: KristinMH | November 6, 2009 11:16 PM
Alexander the Great, The British Raj and The USSR, among other would-be conquerors found, to their lasting chagrin, that those unkempt, ragged, underfed, wild-eyed zealots in them thar hills were formidable and implacable fighters. I don't know about Alexander's armies, but the British to some extent and the russians for sure, did not really give a flying fuck who they killed when they were after the bad guys. Considering that we actually try not to kill everybody, our cause is lost. It's really only a question of time before another Dr. Kissinger comes along to sell out the U.S. military and the Afghan people with an "honorable peace".
Posted by: democommie | November 7, 2009 8:04 AM
We can, and should, intervene to protect individual rights when people in other nations are being oppressed.
When do you ship out? See you in Kandahar.
Posted by: Juice | November 7, 2009 5:50 PM
Walton, only a supranational police force, endowed with true supranational authority, including the authority to depose national governments, universally accepted by treaty, has the legitimacy to do what you suggest.
In short, we'd need a world government, and the overthrow of the nation-state as the supreme political entity.
No single nation, no matter how powerful or wealthy, can successfully accomplish this job.
America may be the only nation with even close to enough power and wealth to try it, but if America is to police the world, who will police America? Just as the Pax Romana lead ultimately to resentment, revolution, and the overthrow of the Roman Empire, so will any attempt at a "Pax Americana" result in the same. (By many measures, it already has).
Posted by: amphiox | November 7, 2009 7:11 PM
"Walton, only a supranational police force, endowed with true supranational authority, including the authority to depose national governments, universally accepted by treaty, has the legitimacy to do what you suggest.
In short, we'd need a world government, and the overthrow of the nation-state as the supreme political entity."
Yeah that's a good idea, since multinational peacekeeping has such a good track record of accomplishing... well maybe not. And a supreme political entity? Satan is drooling...
Posted by: Rich | November 8, 2009 11:56 PM