‘I would rather die for the dignity of women than die for nothing’
Afghanistan at war with Afghan women.
For women and girls across Afghanistan, conditions are worsening – and those women who dare to publicly oppose the traditional order now live in fear for their lives. The Afghan MP Shukria Barakzai receives regular death threats for speaking out on women’s issues. Talking at her home in central Kabul, she closed the living room door as her three young daughters played in the hall. “You can’t imagine what it feels like as a mother to leave the house each day and not know if you will come back again,” she said, her eyes welling up as she spoke. “But there is no choice. I would rather die for the dignity of women than die for nothing. Should I stop my work because there is a chance I might be killed? I must go on, and if it happens it happens.”
A brave woman. There is a choice of course – but she’s refusing to make it. An extremely brave woman.
Barakzai receives frequent but cryptic warnings about planned suicide attacks on her car, but no help from the government. Officials advise her to stay at home and not go to work, but offer nothing in the way of security assistance, despite her requests. She said warlords in parliament who received similar threats were immediately provided with armoured vehicles, armed guards and a safe house by the government.
Really. Male warlords get massive protection, women who work for women’s rights are left hanging out there with no protection. Bastards, bastards, bastards.
Afghan women are feeling increasingly vulnerable as the security situation worsens and a growing number of western and Afghan officials call for the Taliban to join the government. “We are very worried that, now the government is talking with the Taliban, our rights will be compromised,” said Shinkai Karokhail, an outspoken MP for Kabul. “We must not be the sacrifice by which peace with the Taliban is made.”
Really. I’ve been flinching for weeks as people talk about negotiating with the Taliban – pointing out cheerily that the Taliban is not Al Qaeda. No, it’s not, but it’s not a cocker spaniel puppy, either!
Afghan women who defy traditional gender roles and speak out against the oppression of women are routinely subject to threats, intimidation and assassination. An increasingly powerful Taliban regularly attacks projects, schools and businesses run by women…Talking to the Guardian at a safe house on the outskirts of Kabul, Mullah Zubiallah Akhond, a Taliban commander from the southern province of Uruzgan, said the group’s attacks on women were always political and not based on any desire to target or punish women specifically.
Oh right, no of course not, certainly not, no indeed those ‘political’ attacks on women obviously have nothing to do with any desire to target or punish women specifically – they’re just based on a desire to keep women confined, invisible, helpless, and enslaved, and to kill or burn any woman who resists.
[T]here had also been a sharp increase in rapes by men who claimed they could not afford to pay the dowry needed to marry. After the public shame of an attack, the victim is usually outcast and the rapist is then the only man who will have the woman as his wife. It is crimes like this that make many Afghans nostalgic for the harsh justice of Taliban rule. Barakzai countered: “Women were safe, in one sense, under the Taliban – but they were kept as slaves, they were not allowed to do what they wanted even in their own home.”
Here’s a daring ambition – for Afghan women to be both safe and free. Imagine that.
Remember, back in October (or was it September), I said that it was outrageous that Malalai Kakar (I think that’s who it was), the policewoman, was not given sufficient protection. She was being driven to work, unaccompanied, by her 15 or 16 year old son. This continuing neglect of women in authority is outrageous! If women in positions of authority are not protected, than no women are protected, and there is something systemic about that.
If Barack Obama thinks it is important to carry out, and bring to conclusion, the NATO mission to Afghanistan (I notice that CNN refers to American and NATO troops, as though there is a distinction here), then he must do something about the protection of women. CIA drones over the Northwest Frontier are all very well, but routine protection for women in positions of authority (or not) is more important. This is not only about protection for America or the West! This is a country that has been under NATO attack since 9/11! It’s time to shit or get off the pot!
A horrible thought enters my mind. Obama gets bogged down in Afghanistan like Johnson got bogged down in Vietnam. And year after year more and more Americans and others are killed, and in the end, the land is ceded to the Taliban, and everything returns to “normal”, and women are still buried up to their necks and stoned to death. And Obama goes down in history as the first African American President, the one who failed in Afghanistan, and the new dream of the Great Society goes down to defeat. There must be a better ending than this!
So far its all speculative. If the media and (damn, whats a non-negative word meaning ‘progressive forces’?) progressives are willing to fund bodyguards for women out of American lives and treasury, it may not be all bad. America might develop the habit of winning humanitarian wars.
In their own country the US, authorities won’t provide police security for women in known serious danger, and the courts have upheld this stance after it resulted in their murder.
Well Eric it’s not as if I thought it was a good thing that Malalai Kakar was not given protection.
The Johnson scenario is most unlikely. Johnson was very progressive in a lot of ways (far more so than JFK was), but he was also ruthlessly concerned with himself. I think Obama is better able to distinguish the importance of thousands of lives from the importance of his own reputation.
You may be right, OB. (And, of course, I never suggested you didn’t think Malalai was not adequately protected.) However, Johnson was lured into deeper and deeper military engagement (especially in the north) by the idea that success was just one load of bombs away. (John McCain should understand this – though if he does, he never indicated that he did.)
War is seductive. In the past, wars in Afghanistan have been especially seductive. The Russians recently came to no good in Afghanistan, and the British in India were drawn into two wars in Afghanistan, where they won most of the battles, but left without any decisive issue. (Ring a bell?) Indeed, the Northwest Frontier (of Pakistan) was then and still is, a region of unsettled tribal warfare, needing recurrent armed measures of pacification, punishment and control. And Russia, of course, was, in the past, always a decisive factor. Settling the boundaries between British and Russian interests at the time was known as the Great Game.
The game is still being played, and Russia, as we know, is more active again. I have confidence in Obama, but I have less confidence in the vagaries of war. They often become other than was thought, and so I worry.