Afghanistan
Watching all the news about the US retreat from, and the fall of, Afghanistan. Though the Biden administration is trying not to let it, it does seem reminiscent of the fall of Saigon in 1975 ...
There's been much in the news about the US evacuating those who helped the US military, like Afgha interpreters, but less about all the girls and women whose lives will be much worse off once the Taliban takes over.
The Biden administration's take seems to be "We couldn't force them to adopt our cultural norms. The Afghan people want to go back to how it was under the Taliban".
But that's not correct - things weren't always really awful for women in Afghanistan - that was not always their culture. Women were given the right to vote and were officially recognized as men's equals under the country's constitution (1964), and earlier rulers often made women's rights an issue. Here's a photo from Wikipedia: Afghan women in 1927, during the reform period of Amanullah Khan ...
And, Afghan women in Kabul entering a bus during the 1950s ...
During the communist era (1978-1992), there was a period of unprecedented equality for women in Afghanistan. The Communist ideology officially advocated gender equality and women's rights, and sought to implement it on all classes throughout both urban and rural Afghanistan.
When the conservative religiously extremist Taliban took over Afghanistan (1992), however, women's rights took a serious dive ...
The Taliban declared that women were forbidden to go to work and that they were not to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male family member. When they did go out, they were required to wear an all-covering burqa. Women were denied formal education and usually forced to stay at home ....
Several Taliban and Al-Qaeda commanders engaged in human trafficking, abducting women and selling them into forced prostitution and slavery in Pakistan. Time Magazine writes: "The Taliban often argued that the brutal restrictions they placed on women were actually a way of revering and protecting the opposite sex. The behavior of the Taliban during the six years they expanded their rule in Afghanistan made a mockery of that claim."
For the last 20 years, women and girls in Afghanistan were seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Now the Biden administration has turned its back on them.
More from Susan Glasser at The New Yorker ... “Not Our Tragedy”: the Taliban Are Coming Back, and America Is Still Leaving
The Biden administration's take seems to be "We couldn't force them to adopt our cultural norms. The Afghan people want to go back to how it was under the Taliban".
But that's not correct - things weren't always really awful for women in Afghanistan - that was not always their culture. Women were given the right to vote and were officially recognized as men's equals under the country's constitution (1964), and earlier rulers often made women's rights an issue. Here's a photo from Wikipedia: Afghan women in 1927, during the reform period of Amanullah Khan ...
When the conservative religiously extremist Taliban took over Afghanistan (1992), however, women's rights took a serious dive ...
The Taliban declared that women were forbidden to go to work and that they were not to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male family member. When they did go out, they were required to wear an all-covering burqa. Women were denied formal education and usually forced to stay at home ....
Several Taliban and Al-Qaeda commanders engaged in human trafficking, abducting women and selling them into forced prostitution and slavery in Pakistan. Time Magazine writes: "The Taliban often argued that the brutal restrictions they placed on women were actually a way of revering and protecting the opposite sex. The behavior of the Taliban during the six years they expanded their rule in Afghanistan made a mockery of that claim."
More from Susan Glasser at The New Yorker ... “Not Our Tragedy”: the Taliban Are Coming Back, and America Is Still Leaving
posted by crystal | 10:06 PM
2 Comments:
The Taliban sucks. But can we actually believe that being there another twenty years would make things different?
No, it probably wouldn't. It seems like we can't completely defeat the Taliban. But maybe we don't have to. While we were there, things were a lot better for women and girls - maybe it would be worth it to have a small force that simply kept the status quo, and allowed things of women to be better, though there's no over-all victory.
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