Many who opposed the war in Iraq supported the invasion of Afghanistan. They followed the Bush administration’s lead, heralding women’s rights and pursuing the terrorists who caused Sept. 11. This is a mistake as it legitimizes the broader war on terror and upholds right of the U.S. to police the world. Furthermore, after three years of war and occupation in Afghanistan, hindsight offers the strongest case against the war. Women’s rights have been addressed only nominally, the safety and well-being of the local populations has diminished, and the world is a more dangerous place as long as the U.S. can use Afghanistan as a success-story springboard to up and invade Iraq, and if Barack Obama gets his way, Iran.
To begin, let’s look at who is ruling Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai is the president, but outside of the capitol city of Kabul, you wouldn’t know it. The rest of the country is controlled by local warlords, including the Taliban in the provinces of Zabul and Oruzan. The fighting that occurs between these warlords is so commonplace that NATO international security forces don’t leave Kabul for fear of being shot. The crisis for Afghans is almost unimaginable. John Pilger, an American journalist and filmmaker recently returned from the country. He described the country like this: “In a lifetime of making my way through places of upheaval, I had not seen anything like it. Kabul is a glimpse of Dresden, post-1945, with contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue.”
One look at these local rulers raises some important questions about the United States’ legitimacy in Afghanistan. The guiding ideology that Bush claims to be at war with, militant Islam, is actually a product bred by the U.S. to counter the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s. Beginning under Carter and continued by Reagan, the U.S. recruited, funded, and trained militants such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Osama bin Laden, and much of the Northern Alliance. At the time, Hekmatyar was described by the state department as “definite dictatorship material” and was fittingly given unusually large amounts of aid by the United States. Today, the Northern Alliance ravages the country with American approval.
The claim that women’s rights justify the invasion of Afghanistan is problematic for two reasons. The first is that women’s rights haven’t improved. Many accounts tell the opposite, that life is even more difficult than under Taliban rule. Dr. Sima Samar, the former women’s affairs minister of the new government said, “For the past 23 years, I was not safe, but I was never in hiding or traveling with gunmen, which I must do now.” She went on, “There is no official law to stop women from going to school or work; there is no law about dress code. But the reality is that even under the Taliban there was not the pressure on women in the rural areas there is now.” Further, in cities like Herat less than 1 percent of women give birth with the aid of a medical assistant and 11 percent of all women outside of the capitol die in childbirth. As Amnesty International reports, “The risk of rape and sexual violence by members of armed factions and former combatants is still high. Forced marriages, particularly of girls and children, and violence against women in the family are widespread in many areas.”
The second problem is the precedent that this war set for feminists in this country. Bush heralding women’s rights to invade Afghanistan is as hypocritical as Bush deposing Saddam Hussein for his brutal prison system and the use of the death penalty. Just as no serious proponent of prisoners’ rights trusts Bush running Abu Ghraib, no feminists should believe Bush’s claims to liberate women. Unfortunately dozens of mainstream feminists lined up with Bush against the millions of women currently terrorized by Afghanistan’s rulers.
So while Bush trumpets Afghanistan as the first victory in a war against terror, the real story is quite different. The life expectancy for Afghans has declined from 46 years in 2001 to 43 in 2004. In some kind of cruel joke the yellow food packets dropped by the U.S. look similar to many of the unexploded cluster bombs scattering the countryside, and 400 children die each month because of landmines. The point is that the U.S. is incapable of waging humanitarian efforts. The people of Afghanistan need the freedom to organize themselves against their local warlords and for women’s liberation. To do that we need to keep the U.S. — the biggest warlord of them all — out of Afghanistan.
Chris Dols ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in civil engineering.
