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Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman started her career as a researcher for Newsweek, and moved on to become a reporter for the Detroit ...
Read more about Ellen Goodman.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman started her career as a researcher for Newsweek, and moved on to become a reporter for the Detroit ...
Read more about Ellen Goodman.
What Option for Afghan Women?
Ellen Goodman
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.
========
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman1(at)me.com
Copyright 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
This news arrived on: 11/05/2009
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Posted Comments:
11-09-2009 23:52
JCE wrote:
What Hope for American Women?
What with the republicans voting for our women to be raped with impunity, and people like Palin making it so that women who said they were raped had to pay to prove it, and then the evangelicals taking away a womans right to have insurance companies pay for an abortion, what hope for our women? And some of our women vote for that kind of abuse.
What with the republicans voting for our women to be raped with impunity, and people like Palin making it so that women who said they were raped had to pay to prove it, and then the evangelicals taking away a womans right to have insurance companies pay for an abortion, what hope for our women? And some of our women vote for that kind of abuse.
11-07-2009 23:06
Catharyne Stauffer wrote:
To Ellen Goodman , It will take generations to remove the stain of violence against females within the Afghan society . Even more so when men feel it is their right and religious duty to beat rape or murder the female members of their society .
Domestic violence even in our own society is often passed down from father to son and women from these violent upbringings often marry a a man that treats them as their father treated their mother and so the cycle continues .
Domestic violence even in our own society is often passed down from father to son and women from these violent upbringings often marry a a man that treats them as their father treated their mother and so the cycle continues .
11-07-2009 17:01
JCE wrote:
The plight of the women, indeed, the plight of the whole world, doesn't change the facts. We can't win, have no business being there, and must take care of our country before we can help anyone else.
old cowboy So true.
JDB Agreeing with you could be happily habit forming.
Redneck In your useless defense of Bush, remember that his actions are still with us, and when he is brought up, truth is the best policy. Until we understand all he did, and why, it will be hard to get out of his mess. As he said, it will take a smart man a long time to figure out what really happened in the Oval Office. Sadly, when one must vote for one party or the other, it is like death by bullet or drowning. So we took the best choice this time. It sure wasn't ideal. But we voted against Bush and the republican disaster, and for hope. At least Obama is fighting the special interests.
Mykael Two things you should remember. One is that right now, with Obama actually fighting special interests, we as a nation are fools not to insure his success. Two, unless we as a people take control of our local politics, and then our states, we will never be able to take control of the federal politics.
old cowboy So true.
JDB Agreeing with you could be happily habit forming.
Redneck In your useless defense of Bush, remember that his actions are still with us, and when he is brought up, truth is the best policy. Until we understand all he did, and why, it will be hard to get out of his mess. As he said, it will take a smart man a long time to figure out what really happened in the Oval Office. Sadly, when one must vote for one party or the other, it is like death by bullet or drowning. So we took the best choice this time. It sure wasn't ideal. But we voted against Bush and the republican disaster, and for hope. At least Obama is fighting the special interests.
Mykael Two things you should remember. One is that right now, with Obama actually fighting special interests, we as a nation are fools not to insure his success. Two, unless we as a people take control of our local politics, and then our states, we will never be able to take control of the federal politics.
11-07-2009 02:45
Mykael wrote:
to: Old Cowboy
I too am critical of all sides in the current political battles. That is why I am not a member of any political parties. By their very nature, political parties are collectivist institutions, and, sooner or later, institutions become bureaucratic traps for fools. In my youth, I was opposed to American involvement in Vietnam. I also believed, and still believe, that the former Baathist regime in Iraq could have been undermined by methods which would have been far less costly . . . both in human and financial terms . . . than what the frequently incompetent Bush administration chose to pursue. That does not mean, however, that I have any illusions about the alleged "altruism" of our own country's enemies. During my previous years, I visited Marxist countries and LIVED in TWO of them. I have seen their kind of "democracy". I have first-hand knowledge of much of the Muslim world. Consequently, I know, from personal experience, that most "revolutionaries" are REALLY just wannabe "aristocrats" whose agenda is to replace one form of tyranny with an even worse one of their own making . . . and, of course, with themselves in control.
11-06-2009 19:33
old cowboy wrote:
to Mykael
I too traveled widely--namely Viet Nam. My son has also traveled widely to Iraq and Afghanistan. I had an uncle who traveled to Korea and never came back.
I have no idea where your travels took you but if you were not there in an ill conceived war you will never understand why I am so critical of all sides in the current political battles.
I have no idea where your travels took you but if you were not there in an ill conceived war you will never understand why I am so critical of all sides in the current political battles.
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