What to do about the war in Afghanistan is posed as a question of military strategy, of defense expenditures, of logistical technicalities; of political climate, secret safe havens and effective counter- insurgency… but almost never a question of women. In the meeting rooms on Capitol Hill, in seminars held at think tanks and universities around the U.S., and on talk shows where experts dissect the latest in the saga of American warfare, a resolute silence has surrounded the issue of Afghan women.
Untouched and neglected, it has lain on the sidelines of a debate on war and exit, marred by the taint of having been used as a pretext for invasion by the neo-conservatives of yore.
Such was the status quo until last Thursday, when TIME magazine released its cover for the week of Aug. 2, 2010. Staring out at the world is the image of a brutally mutilated 18-year-old Afghan girl, her nose severed. The text reads, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan.”
The story inside reveals that Aisha was “punished” by a jirga headed by a Taliban commander. For being disobedient to her in-laws, her nose and ears were cut off.
The image is as jarring as the questions surrounding it. First to critique TIME‘s cover has been an American Left so committed to troop withdrawal that any pauses for consideration are instantly rejected as ploys to perpetuate occupation. On the Huffington Post, Derrick Crowe, political director of the Brave New Foundation, described the cover as “TIME’s epic distortion of the plight of women in Afghanistan,” calling it “rank propaganda,” and pointing out that Aisha was attacked while U.S forces were still in Afghanistan purportedly providing “security.” The Feminist Peace Network decried the tired use of “protecting Afghan women” as justification for continued occupation.
The Left’s framing is clear: Rescuing Afghan women was a pretext crafted handily by the Bush Administration so it could barge its way into Afghanistan and stay there. And that’s certainly true. Also true, as Crowe points out, is that Afghan women have continued to suffer during the American occupation, enduring both traditional patriarchal practices and newly-minted discriminatory laws. Indeed, assessing the performance of the 10-year occupation in the mutilated-yet-expectant features of a young woman serves as an appropriately graphic visual depiction of our failures in Afghanistan.
The problem with these arguments, however, is that they translate our inability to improve things thus far into a prescription for sudden abandonment of the very projects that women just like Aisha made the mistake of believing in: literacy and entrepreneurship initiatives for women, civil society seminars designed to encourage women’s participation and midwifery training projects to reduce Afghanistan’s sky-rocketing rates of maternal mortality. War is horrific, its misery recorded in lurid detail in the tragedy of Aisha’s mutilation. But withdrawing without a plan for safeguarding the women who chose to believe the American promises of empowerment, however deceitfully those promises may have been made, is to live in denial of a tragedy in which we are roundly imputed.
It also elides the United States’s own role in the initial rise of the Taliban, whose brutality and repression of women was unprecedented in Afghanistan’s history. Today, Afghan women are already retreating behind burqas for fear of Taliban reprisals in a post-U.S Afghanistan where the Taliban control the country. A recent poll shows that nearly 69 percent of Afghans think that the Taliban are the biggest threat to the country and 90 percent prefer current rule over a return of the Taliban.
The binary logic of war and peace that defines debate on the Left is one part of the problem. Another is advocating Afghan women’s self-empowerment in order to sidestep the necessity of committing to their security. Yes, as the Feminist Peace Network critique rightly intimates, the iconography of a maimed Afghan woman awaiting her American saviors is one that negates the possibility of internal resistance by Afghan women themselves. And as a Muslim woman born and raised in Pakistan, I am particularly sensitive to such depictions, and to the implicit condescension in suggesting that feminist awakenings everywhere must always mimic trajectories of the West.
At the same time, I find the sudden elevation of Afghan women’s agency at this juncture to be both self-serving and instrumental in denying just how badly the world has failed them. Saying that women ravaged by war for over three decades, whose capacity for resistance has been depleted by incessant meddling of foreign forces, can now independently empower themselves in the wreckage of the abandoned programs we leave behind is an argument meant only to pacify the travails of our own conscience.
As a recent report from Human Rights Watch recommends, no withdrawal from Afghanistan should be initiated without ensuring that women are consulted and represented in developing the peace and reintegration program. Not only is this a moral imperative arising from our involvement in the region, but it is also good policy reflecting a growing consensus in the international community. As Dr. Sima Samar, chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said in her testimony before Congress this year, “Neither peace and stability, nor development and security, can be achieved unless human rights and women’s rights are sustained and promoted.”
An urgent and unshakable responsibility lies on American shoulders to ensure that the very Taliban commanders who burned girls’ schools and ordered beatings and mutilations of women like Aisha aren’t installed as leaders–even if it impedes our timeline for withdrawal. And finally, mutual respect demands that we value Aisha’s immense courage in exposing her pain in a manner that forces us to contend with failures we are eager to abandon.
Rafia Zakaria is the first Pakistani American woman to serve as a Director for Amnesty International USA. She is a lawyer and Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Indiana University. This article was previously published at the blog of Ms. Magazine
“An urgent and unshakable responsibility lies on American shoulders to ensure that the very Taliban commanders who burned girls??? schools and ordered beatings and mutilations of women like Aisha aren???t installed as leaders???even if it impedes our timeline for withdrawal.”
I agree. Although I wonder the extent to which such a policy is possible. Can the US exert enough pressure over the government to affect who does and who doesn’t get appointed? More importantly, will the US do so if some of these misogynists are the very people the US needs to cooperate with to quell the violence? Perhaps what can be done, as part of a larger effort, is establish local human rights organizations that are connected to a domestic/international legal system in which certain crimes can be addressed without local mediation. I don’t know what such a program would look like but it seems to me that an effective system of accountability needs to be put in place.
I also agree that the cover of Time serves purposes well beyond the question of women’s rights in Afghanistan. The “women-hating Islam” expressed by the cover only reinforces some of the brutally true although incomplete picture of women’s lives in Muslim societies.
Given that this piece is on Altmuslimah, I would say that one thing we need to do, as Muslims, is play a greater role in doing what this author has done: public condemnation of the inexcusable actions of Muslims including the women-abusing thugs called the Taliban.
as an american muslim, i can honestly say that afghanistan should not and does not need america’s help to form a government. america went to war with afganistan on a lie and for ill and evil purposes. america doesn’t and never will care about the afghan people. america wants to and plans to wipe out islam anyway possible.
it is in the muslim’s best interest if america pulled out and left afghanistan. now where does that leave the afghan people? Allah knows best. but if america stays, they will place a secular and western minded muslim as their puppet in the government. and the puppet government will allow more american businesses and organizations. which will focus on the muslim women not acting or practicing islam. they will teach the muslimahs western ideology, methods, education and tactics. which go against islam, Allah and His messenger.
because the goal is to wipe out islam. how do you wipe out islam? by teaching the women that they are oppressed, islam is old and backwards, that women don’t have to live like this. this is not what God wants for you. christian women/western women are treated better than this. etc..
i believe that muslims should form an islamic state and govern the country based on shariah. stop having the western countries bail the muslims out. stop asking the western countries for help. they do not believe in Allah (swt)or prophet muhammad (sws). they protest, degrade, belittle, badmouth, and attack islam and the muslims constantly.