From the ArcaMax Publishing, Ellen Goodman Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/ellengoodman/s-642827-657251
BOSTON -- It's been 11 years since I looked through a photo album
smuggled out of Afghanistan by a brave young woman. "This is a
doctor," she said, pointing to one picture. "This is a teacher." It
was impossible to tell one woman from another under the burqas
enforced by their Taliban rulers.
Back then, the world had turned a cataract eye on Afghan women. Under
virtual house arrest, they were forbidden from work, from school, from
walking alone or even laughing out loud. It was arguably the greatest
human rights disaster for women in history.
After 9/11, when we went after al-Qaeda and the Taliban who had hosted
these terrorists, many saw collateral virtue in the liberation of
Afghan women. Indeed, President Bush played this moral card in his
2002 State of the Union speech when he declared to thunderous
applause: "Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new
government." Mission accomplished.
Many women shed their burqas, opened schools, entered parliament.
Equal rights were written into the constitution. But slowly, as
America turned to the disastrous misadventure in Iraq, Afghan women's
freedoms were casually traded in like chits for power.
Now again, we're focusing on this beleaguered country and its sham
leader. The discussion is cast in military terms -- more troops, less
troops. Yet I keep thinking about the women who are once again pushed
to the outskirts of the conversation, as if they were an add-on rather
than a central factor.
Have you heard this old proverb? Whether the rock hits the pitcher or
the pitcher hits the rock, it's going to be bad for the pitcher. Women
are the pitcher in this story.
If we abandon the country, or even the countryside, don't we abandon
those girls who have gone to school even when risking acid thrown in
their eyes? If we prop up the deeply corrupt government of President
Hamid Karzai, are we just supporting warlord fundamentalists instead
of Taliban fundamentalists?
The options are so chilling that even Afghan women's groups are
divided. RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan, wants us out. WAW, the Women for Afghan Women, "deeply
regrets having a position in favor of maintaining, even increasing
troops" rather than "abandoning 15 million women and children to
madmen."
American women seem equally torn -- ambivalent is far too gentle a
word. The Feminist Majority, which championed Afghan women long before
it was popular, has stopped short of asking for more troops. Ellie
Smeal's anger at American funding of warlords is matched by the fear
that if we back out, it will create "terrible human suffering," the
return of the prison state. Ann Jones, the author of "Kabul in
Winter," confesses to agonizing about deserting Afghan women while
fearing that Karzai's henchmen and the Taliban are "brothers under the
skin." And Susannah Sirkin of Physicians for Human Rights says
ruefully, "I don't think if you ask women and girls that they would
easily say their lives are better since 2001. The best you could say
is that there is more cause for hope."
We shouldn't be surprised we have come to this pass. It happened on
our watch. We barely noticed when Karzai signed a law that would have,
among other things, allowed Shiite men to withhold food from wives who
refused sex. It didn't take a rigged election to show a shallow
respect for democracy. If by democracy, that is, you include half the
population that is female.
Today, one-third of the students are girls. Women now get health care
once denied them. Is that enough? How much are we willing to pay in
lives and treasure for hope? How much are we willing to lose in moral
suasion, in our own eyes and those of the world, if we abandon these
women?
I find this a bleak and demoralizing set of choices. The least
unbearable may be to protect the population centers while rebuilding
Afghan civil society, one city, one school, one health center at a
time. But this works only if we include women in a debate that has
been as militarized as war itself.
Afghan women are not the "add-on," the incidentals in this process.
Women are civil society. We've learned all over the world that
the only way to develop a stable society and economy is with the
education and inclusion of women. There is no democracy without women.
So, here we go. This is our last chance. And theirs.
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Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman1(at)me.com