Pentagon no friend to Afghan women
By Joyce Chediac
U.S. newspapers have recently printed photos of smiling
Afghan girls on their way to school in Kabul for the first time
since the Taliban outlawed education for girls in 1996. The
establishment media's message is: "Thanks to the U.S. invasion,
the women of Afghanistan are finally on their way to democracy
and human rights."
Working people here have been told that the Bush
administration is helping women in Afghanistan. This is not
true. From the cities to the refugee camps, the women of
Afghanistan are suffering greatly. No one is more responsible
for their past and current suffering than the U.S.
government.
U.S.-imposed rulers
no friends of women
The Bush administration defeated the Taliban in December and
installed the Northern Alliance in Kabul. But the Northern
Alliance, a loose coalition, contains many groups that are as
bad on women's rights as the Taliban.
The media here barely mention that Northern Alliance forces
ruled Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996. According to one British
newspaper the Northern Alliance "was a symbol of massacre,
systematic rape and pillage. ... The Northern Alliance left
[Kabul] in 1996 with 50,000 dead behind it. Now its members are
our foot soldiers." (The Independent, Nov. 14, 2001)
Even Sima Samar, the new Afghan Minister of Women's Affairs
and one of two women used as a fig leaf by the interim Afghan
government, says there is no real security on the streets of
Kabul and roads of Afghanistan. "Just because the Taliban are
gone, it does not mean the situation is solved. We still have
to bring a lot of changes in society," she said. "I keep
telling people that the situation of women is not the product
of the Taliban. It's a product of 23 years of war." (The
Guardian [London], Jan. 17)
Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, most of whom are women
and children, may die of starvation and exposure before spring.
Many of these refugees survive on UN food rations. The recent
massive U.S. bombing, however, has destroyed many roads used to
transport these food rations and other vital elements of the
infrastructure.
The refugees were displaced from their homes by the recent
U.S. invasion and by the past 23 years of war.
CIA war erased women's gains
Citing statistics gathered by the U.S. Department of Defense
itself, this newspaper has pointed out in the past that the
only government that brought significant gains to Afghan women
took power in 1978, and sought to build socialism in
Afghanistan. Working under difficult conditions in one of the
poorest countries of the world, the women and men in this
government achieved the following: feudal laws restricting
women were abolished; women became professors, attorneys,
judges and government ministers; 70 percent of the teachers, 50
percent of the government workers and 40 percent of the doctors
were women.
But this progressive government was overthrown in 1992 after
13 years of vicious war financed by the U.S. and organized by
the CIA.
The establishment media has remained mum on these
accomplishments. If it mentions some of these gains, it never
attributes them to the socialist government. With this in mind,
it is interesting to note what Time magazine of Dec. 3, toward
the end of a special issue devoted to Afghan women, had to say
about this period when there was a progressive government:
"[W]omen's rights were protected--even advanced to a degree
that alienated some in Afghanistan's tradition-bound society.
More women were introduced into government, given an authority
that many men found unnerving."
Time says that even the person "responsible for collecting
information on the jihad warriors" was a woman.
Opposing this government from day one, Washington courted
the very feudal elements who found women's new authority
"unnerving." For its own ends, Washington exploited their
misogyny as much as their anti-communism. These rural rulers,
with a medieval view of economic and social relations and of
women as property, would have been swept into the dustbin of
history had they not been given a new life, and over $3 billion
in weapons, by the U.S. Osama bin Laden was a key distributor
of these U.S. arms. This Saudi businessman helped organize the
CIA's war against both the progressive Afghan government and
the Soviet troops that it had invited in to try and stop the
foreign-funded counter-revolution.
Soviet intervention to aid the progressive government has
been scorned in the press here. Nor does the media dwell on the
fact that the 23 years of war in Afghanistan, including civil
war among U.S.-armed groups, were funded, fueled and abetted by
Washington. This prolonged war has hurt Afghan women the
most.
The U.S. government has played it both ways. Beginning in
1979, Washington used the gains made by women under a
progressive Afghan government to agitate reactionary forces.
Today, for domestic consumption, it claims it is "rescuing"
Afghan women from the very same reactionary forces it armed and
empowered.
Washington has not invaded Afghanistan to help women. U.S.
motives are the same today as they were when Washington began
arming feudal forces in 1979: to expand U.S. corporate
domination in the strategic and oil-rich areas of the Middle
East and South/Central Asia. U.S. imperialism can never be
trusted to help any oppressed group, here or abroad.
Reprinted from the Feb. 7, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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