American Footprints » women’s rights

For the Good of the People

Eric Martin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:51:44 +0000

In the debate over the future of US policy in Afghanistan, it is taken as a given by most proponents of prolonging the occupation that our presence is benefiting the Afghan people. According to this view, we are a bulwark against Taliban aggression – a prophylactic for a liberal-minded, yet vulnerable, contingent of Afghan civilians. In fact, through repetition and embellishment, the factions that we are supporting have become stand-ins for the entire Afghan population, at least in the abstract. To leave, it is argued, would be to abandon “Afghanistan” the nation, or the “Afghan people,” writ large.

This formulation ignores the obvious rejoinder that for US forces to stay and battle the “Taliban” (whatever that term is supposed to mean on any given day) means to target large swaths of that same Afghan population. Some of the anti-government groups are remnants of the Pashtun-dominated Mullah Omar-led Taliban that hosted al-Qaeda, some are entirely unrelated tribal entities, some are ordinary Afghans radicalized by the presence of a foreign occupying army, some are narco-warlords defending their turf and revenue stream, some smaller group are foreign fighters, etc.

Regardless of the exact identity and motivations, and aside from the small group of foreign fighters, the people that we are killing also count as the Afghan people. In actuality, we are protecting certain Afghan factions while doing our best to kill others. It is an unstated, reflexive act of dehumanization to associate our favored factions with the “Afghan people” while relegating those groups that oppose the Afghan government to some form of limbo status in terms of their humanity/national identity.

Not to mention the fact that in the crossfire, we are also unintentionally killing Afghans that we readily recognize as Afghans. Here are some stories from some of the people that we are protecting:

At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was dead.

What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker’s fuel. Poor people in one of the world’s poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much as they could for the coming winter.

“We didn’t recognise any of the dead when we arrived,” said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. “It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this,” he brought his two hands together, his fingers curling like claws. “There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.

“The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone.”

So the elders stepped in. They collected all the bodies they could and asked the people to tell them how many relatives each family had lost.

A queue formed. One by one the bereaved gave the names of missing brothers, cousins, sons and nephews, and each in turn received their quota of corpses. It didn’t matter who was who, everyone was mangled beyond recognition anyway. All that mattered was that they had a body to bury and perform prayers upon.

“A man comes and says, ‘I lost my brother and cousin’, so we gave him two bodies,” said Omar Khan. “Another says I lost five relatives, so we gave him five bodies to take home and bury. When we had run out of bodies we started giving them limbs, legs, arms, torsos.” In the end only five families went away without anything. “Their sons are still missing.”

While on the homefront, many Americans are convinced that we are protecting the “Afghan people,” the view in Afghanistan can vary greatly with respect to the security benefits of our presence. Obviously, the Afghans in the above-cited piece might not take such a rosy view of our mission – nor would Afghans in the regions targeted by US military action. Further, as Joshua Foust recounts, some villagers in areas where we have taken up defensive positions have struck deals with US forces to stay outside of their population centers because the presence of US forces brings conflict to their doorstep.

In other words, in Nuristan we had begun enacting the McChrystal policy over a year before it got pushed out as an order. Only, as we know from Want, it ended very poorly (rumor has it the villagers near Want asked the U.S. to withdraw from the region because their presence made security nearby substantially worse off). [...]

Moreover, as this Washington Post piece makes clear, in places like Kamu and Kamdesh the U.S. almost never interacts with the local population anyway (a little birdie told me the community of Kamdesh struck an agreement with the military that no one from its Observation Post 300 meters away will ever step foot inside their village). Needless to say, there’s not much “reconstruction” going on there, either—the provincial capital is still a dreary, empty nothing. It’s not like the people will really notice our absence.

Undoubtedly, our presence breeds conflict at least as much – though likely more – than it breeds stability.

The narrative of US forces as peace-bringers, and defenders of the virtuous, is an archetypal story, a common form of wartime propaganda prevalent amongst warring populations intent on buttressing their efforts with some moral undergirding (also, often detached from reality – see, ie, US armed support for the “good guys” in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and elsewhere). It’s a good war, after all, and we are the good guys, defending the foreign born good guys, in pursuit of a common humanitarian good. While there are elements of truth to this characterization, the story begins to break down upon closer scrutiny – as touched on above. In truth, we fight wars to further our interests. Sometimes those align with local groups. If so, we champion their cause - often regardless of how “good” or “bad” that group is.

Not only is it the case that the continuation of our mission involves both intentionally and unintentionally killing thousands of actual Afghan people (that we are ostensibly there to protect), so too are the factions that we are championing far from the virtuous liberal-minded freedom fighters that the good guys vs. bad guys narrative demands. For example, Afghan women’s groups have complained that the warlords cobbled together to form Karzai’s government are every bit as brutal toward women as the Taliban.

The U.S. military may have removed the Taliban, but it installed warlords who are as anti-woman and as criminal as the Taliban. Misogynistic, patriarchal views are now embodied by the Afghan cabinet, they are expressed in the courts, and they are embodied by President Hamid Karzai.

Paper gains for women’s rights mean nothing when, according to the chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court, the only two rights women are guaranteed by the constitution are the right to obey their husbands and the right to pray, but not in a mosque.

These are the convictions of the government the U.S. has helped to create. The American presence in Afghanistan will do nothing to diminish them.

The staggering level of criminality and corruption rife in the Afghan government, in addition to proving a stubborn impediment to winning the population’s support, serves as a reminder of the moral ambiguity in terms of our allies and adversaries. While it requires extra effort to keep track of these nuances from a distance, the Afghan people are confronted with these realities on a daily basis. The results from a poll of Afghans commissioned by Britain’s Department for International Development are telling of the divergent views of this war and its moral justifications depending on one’s proximity to the violence:

Respondents could not understand why the Coalition forces were in Afghanistan. They reasoned that their objectives were clearly not to bring security to local populations, as their mere presence exacerbated violence and increased the numbers of civilians killed in air strikes. They also rejected the idea that Coalition forces were serious either about democracy or, separately, development. Democracy could not be an aim as the Afghan population had never been consulted about the occupation in the first place. And although western publics had been consulted about the recent surge ordered by President Obama the Afghan parliament and people had not (‘So if this is western style democracy we don’t want it’). The development efforts of international agencies was seen as delivering only very small projects which didn’t have significant impact and employed few people (demand for projects that created local employment was huge). The lack of clarity on US and Coalition motivations led to speculations about ‘real’ motives.

Further:

10. All respondents had ideas about what should be done to bring security. The responses were remarkably consistent across all groups and can be summarised as follows:

• The government should formally bring the Taliban and Hizb-i Islami into the democratic process and allow the leaders to stand for election. The leaders must first come off the UN black list (on the basis that some very violent warlords and abusers of human rights were already in government yet some on the black list were not guilty of such crimes). As one respondent said: ‘Even though the Taliban have a restricted idea of Islam and women’s rights they didn’t commit crimes against humanity but the Northern Alliance did, and many who committed such crimes are now in government.’ And: ‘If there are trials then it should be for both parties’.

• The military objectives of foreign forces should be made publically known. Two quotes reflect the general sentiment: ‘They say there are here to root out Al Qa’eda and Osama but we all know that these people are not in Afghanistan’. ‘There should be a legal agreement between the Coalition forces and the government which specifies what they are here for and what they are allowed to do – currently they have no legality from the government or the people of Afghanistan. This ambiguity about their mission and objectives has created a lot of suspicion in the minds of the public – some say they are here for revenge, some say they are after historical relics, some say it is oil or uranium. If their mission is known and people can understand their mission then it would be a lot easier for them as well as the people of Afghanistan’…

Obviously unaddressed in this post are our strategic interests for prolonging our occupation of Afghanistan. Rather, this piece was intended to question some of the moral assumptions that are taken for granted when analyzing our mission in the region, and as a reminder that the situation on the ground looks vastly different to the Afghan people whose cause we are supposedly championing – at least those groups of Afghans that we are not actively trying to destroy (or end up killing mistakenly).

(See, also, conservative foreign policy wonk, Jim Henley)

Ingrates Abound

Eric Martin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:39:09 +0000

Some Afghan women don’t seem to appreciate all the freedom and democracy that we’ve been bringing:

The U.S. invasion has been a failure, and increasing the U.S. troop presence will not undo the destruction the war has brought to the daily lives of Afghans.

…[T]he tired claim that one of the chief objectives of the military occupation of Afghanistan is to liberate Afghan women is not only absurd, it is offensive.

Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women’s rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté…

Here are the facts: After the invasion, Americans received reports that newly liberated women had cast off their burquas and gone back to work. Those reports were mythmaking and propaganda. Aside from a small number of women in Kabul, life for Afghan women since the fall of the Taliban has remained the same or become much worse.

Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children.

Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan.

In the past few years, some cosmetic changes were made regarding Afghan women. The establishment of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs was one celebrated example. In fact, this ministry is so useless many think that it should be dissolved.

The quota for 25 percent women in the Afghan parliament was another such show. Although there are 67 women in the Afghan parliament, most of them are pro-warlord and are themselves enemies of women’s rights. When the famed marriage rape law was passed in the parliament, none of them seriously raised their voice against it. Malalai Joya, an outspoken feminist in the parliament at the time, has said that she has been abused and threatened by these pro-warlord women in the parliament.

The U.S. military may have removed the Taliban, but it installed warlords who are as anti-woman and as criminal as the Taliban. Misogynistic, patriarchal views are now embodied by the Afghan cabinet, they are expressed in the courts, and they are embodied by President Hamid Karzai.

Paper gains for women’s rights mean nothing when, according to the chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court, the only two rights women are guaranteed by the constitution are the right to obey their husbands and the right to pray, but not in a mosque.

These are the convictions of the government the U.S. has helped to create. The American presence in Afghanistan will do nothing to diminish them.

Sadly, as horrifying as the status of women in Afghanistan may sound to those of us who live in the West, the biggest problems faced by Afghan women are not related to patriarchy. Their biggest problem is war.

More than 2,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2008. And disastrous air strikes like the one in Farah province in May that killed an estimated 120 people — many of them women and children — are pushing the death toll ever higher. Afghans who survive these attacks often flee to cities, where overcrowded refugee camps strain to accommodate them. Living in tents without food, water and often blankets, the mortality rate soars.

For those who do not flee, life is not better. One in three Afghans suffers from severe poverty. With a 1 in 55 chance of mothers surviving delivery, Afghanistan has been, and still, is the second most dangerous place for women to give birth. Afghan infants still face a 25 percent risk of dying before their fifth birthdays. These are the consequences of war.

…To make matters worse, corruption in the Afghan government has never been so prevalent — even under the Taliban. Now, even Western sources say that only pennies of every dollar spent on aid reach the people who need it.

If coalition forces are really concerned about women, these are the problems that must be addressed. The military establishment claims that it must win the military victory first, and then the U.S. will take care of humanitarian needs. But they have it backward.

…The first step toward improving people’s lives is a negotiated settlement to end the war.

In our conversations arguing this point, we are told that the U.S. cannot leave Afghanistan because of what will happen to women if they go. Let us be clear: Women are being gang raped, brutalized and killed in Afghanistan. Forced marriages continue, and more women than ever are being forced into prostitution — often to meet the demand of foreign troops.

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is doing nothing to protect Afghan women. The level of self-immolation among women was never as high as it is now. When there is no justice for women, they find no other way out but suicide.

There, there, that’s nothing that 45,000 more troops and a few decades more of war can’t solve. But seriously, the authors do highlight one of the primary obstacles to creating a liberal-ish government that will safeguard women’s rights in Afghanistan: there are no major political factions, or constituencies, that would push for – or even support – such a government.

Even our ostensible allies – the warlords that we back in order to fend off the backwards Taliban – espouse views of women and women’s rights that are in essence, and in many instances, literally, indistinguishable from the Taliban. And in pursuit of propping up this corrupt, warlord dominated, misogynistic government, we are killing thousands of Afghans – including and especially women and children. In addition to creating conditions that lead to more and unspeakable hardships for those same women.

Wars have a tendency to do that. Even the “good” ones.

[UPDATE: Via Rob Farley, some more magical thinking with respect to the appreciation people have for being bombed, and those that drop them:

What we don’t know is if a successful Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would discredit the regime to the point that it would be forced out of power or if such an attack would be used to discredit the opposition, causing Iranians to close ranks behind their extremist leaders.

Actually, “we” do know how the Iranian people would respond to an attack by Israel. And it wouldn’t be to give the Israelis a free pass while blaming their own government for…getting bombed by a country that the Iranians don’t exactly hold in high regard. Even if it was the US doing the bombing, there would not be a collective, “Thank you sirs, may we have another.” But with Israel on the delivery end of the ordnance, it’s the ultimate no-brainer. But hey, maybe we can blame them afterwards for showing insufficient gratitude.