Afghanistan, Iraq and women's rights

The Bush administration has shamelessly propagandized its recent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq as “liberation”—and boasted that these brutal acts of aggression would free the women there.

Bush and company hired Madison Avenue spin-doctors to saturate the media with the idea that the lives of the women in these underdeveloped countries would be better because of U.S. “intervention”—that is,
invasion.

The Bush government promised to save Afghan women from the terrors of the Taliban. But this group came to power with funding, training and encouragement from the U.S., which used reactionary feudalist groups like the Taliban to overthrow a progressive pro-socialist government in a long and devastating war. That government, set up by a revolution in 1978 and led by the People’s Democratic Party, had begun to implement land reform, literacy and health programs, and equal rights for women—reforms crushed by the reactionaries and eventually by the Taliban.

After almost 30 years of U.S. manipulation and the 2001 invasion of their country, what is the fate of women in Afghanistan today?

On March 21, Afghan women leaders announced at a press conference in Washing ton, D.C, that gender inequality was rising in their country. The delegation of non-profit leaders told of a dramatic increase in the trafficking of women, rape, forced marriage, domestic abuse, illiteracy and lack of health care. Their fear? That so-called economic “reforms” brought by imperialism will actually undermine women’s rights in the country.

Economic reforms under imperialist control invariably mean enhancing the extraction of profits by transnational corporations. Any benefits gained from this kind of “modernization” accrue only to a thin layer of collaborators and administrators on the top.

Human rights advocates say from 60 percent to 80 percent of marriages in Afghanistan are still forced on women sold for their “bride price.” The 2004 Human Development Index from the United Nations shows one Afghan woman dying from pregnancy-related causes every 30 minutes. The bride price had been abolished over a quarter century ago by the young revolutionary government, which had also sent medical teams of women into the countryside to improve rural health.

Similarly, in Iraq, under the secular nationalist governments that followed the expulsion of British colonialism in 1958, women benefited from redistribution of some of the country’s oil wealth to the people.

There was free education through the university level for all, encouraging families to keep daughters in school and not pull them out for early marriage. The Iraqi government guaranteed jobs for women who wanted to work, equal pay for equal work and free health care, including pre- and post-natal care for mothers. Working women were guaranteed six months paid maternity leave, with subsidized daycare available in most workplaces. Basic food and housing were subsidized.

The 12 years of U.S.-led sanctions followed by invasion obliterated this system of support for women, while it murdered thousands of women along with their families. Now, under the current U.S. puppet government in Iraq, women are actually losing legal rights that had been theirs since the late 1950s.

U.S. imperialism has nothing to give the women of the world but more misery. The vast majority of women are fettered by poverty, violence, illiteracy and ill health. The struggle for national liberation of oppressed nations and the struggle for socialism are essential to the struggle of women to liberate themselves.