Tweet
In the Spring of 1978, Afghan minister of social Affairs, Anahita Ratebzad, wrote, "Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country … Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention." Soon afterward, the United States spent about a billion dollars to help keep her vision from coming to light.
Anahita Ratebzad was one of the founders of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It was socialist, anti-clerical, anti-multi-national, and very pro-education. During its brief ascendance, the upward trajectory of women’s rights in Afghanistan reached its peak, only to rapidly decline as the battle between Soviet forces and their puppet Afghan government on one side, and covert U.S. forces and resurgent Muslim fundamentalism on the other side, ended in chaos. From that chaos emerged the Taliban.
The United States, in backing the fundamentalist Mujahidin, spent about a billion dollars to defeat the only regime in Afghan history that mandated equal educational rights for Afghan women.
One might hope that TIME Magazine, in an article on the plight of Afghan women, might make a passing reference to Anahita Ratebzad. It might have added depth to their incredibly shallow article, had they considered interviewing Ratebzad, who is 80, and from what I can tell, still alive.
The only reference by TIME Magazine to Ms. Ratebzad dates back to the time of Charlie Wilson’s War, which Time applauded, in a hit piece on the puppet government of Babrak Karmal:
Karmal, a 50-year-old bachelor, went into hiding with other members of the Parcham group. Among them was his longtime mistress, Anahita Ratebzad, who had been packed off as Ambassador to Yugoslavia.
Most references to the relationship between Karmal and Ratebzad are more kind, calling them "lovers" or "longtime companion[s]." TIME, whose love of Charlie Wilson’s War extended to their review of the Tom Hanks-Julia Roberts movie, giving the slick propaganda production a 1,100-word review. Some of TIME‘s praise for this bio-pic about the guy who thwarted the movement for women’s rights in Afghanistan:
The result, Charlie Wilson’s War, is that seemingly impossible object these days: a picture about war and politics that has manages to be both rational and inspirational. It is also the year’s funniest smart movie.
The December 2007 review by Richard Corliss, as lame as it is in some ways, is actually less shallow than this coming week’s cover story there, by Aryn Baker.
Most criticism of TIME on the story so far has been in their choice of a cover, showing a young Afghani woman who has been awfully mutilated by the Taliban for her leaving an abusive home environment.
More importantly, though, are articles critical of the viewpoint of the article itself. Here at The Seminal, Derrick Crowe’s brutal analysis of TIME‘s misrepresentation of the real situation in Afghanistan merits wide note. For instance:
This is something that folks who put together TIME’s cover better understand right now: the fox is already in the hen-house. There is a very powerful set of anti-women’s-equality caucuses already nested within the Afghan government that the U.S. supports. These individuals and groups are working to reassert the official misogyny of the Taliban days already, independent of the reconciliation and reintegration process. Given the opportunity, these individuals and groups in the U.S.-backed government will manipulate the reconciliation and reintegration process and leverage armed-opposition-group participation in the process to push through policies they’d prefer already as compromises with their "opponents." This is why the propaganda of TIME’s cover is so pernicious: the women of Afghanistan are caught in a vice already, stuck between their opponents in the insurgency and in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. If one is concerned about the rights of women in Afghanistan, the question is, how do we give women the most leverage possible in this situation?
The post-invasion erosion of women’s rights in Iraq was, along with the dispossession of almost 100% of Iraqi Christians, one of our salient failures there. Before our invasion, women in Iraq were more highly educated than in any other Middle Eastern nation but Israel. Christians there had an important role in government, politics and civil administration (as did women). Though the U.S. Government purports to care about this, they are lying.
Afghanistan is even worse. TIME magazine’s disgustingly meretricious story on this is so shallowly dishonest, it may even evoke a favorable tweet from Sarah Palin.
52 Comments
Thanks to you and Derrick for these diaries.
Thank you.
I, like any good American, am totally ignorant of Afghan history (and I read the Michener).
Okay. But prior to that, what was the status of women in Afghanistan? Weren’t there efforts, going back to the ’20s, to ‘modernize’ their status?
I think the prevailing view here is that Afghan women have always been the burkha-wrapped, subservient property of the domainant males. Though it hardly seems likely that Malalai Joya could be a product of that.
And Edward, when was the last time you heard/read ANYTHING about how women’s role in Iraq has been undermined and degraded?
The neo-con allies in the Great War On Terror are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Human rights and women’s rights are not allowed in either. US “pressure” on these dictatorships results in more US taxpayer assistance to these dictatorships. There are also millions of refugees of the Afghan Quagmire with many women and children. Most displaced children have no schools, but some of them go to Madrasses where they learn how to kill Americans. The US gives Pakistan military assistance that goes to the Taliban. But US taxpayers do not support schools for war displaced children.
Here’s a link to a very brief look at figures in women’s rights in Afghanistan in the 20th century and early 21st. It omits mention of Anahita Ratebzad. I suspect it is intentional, as its description of the socialist period is badly biased, and she was representative of that period’s strengths and flaws.
RAWA ascended under the Soviets.
http://www.rawa.org/rawa.html
Great closing line. Thanks for the reminder of Anahita Ratebzad.
It seems, as always, that secularism is what best advances women’s rights.
I’d like to echo PW’s sentiments and say ‘Bravo’ to you and ET…! 8-)
Thanks. Busy today with my mom’s 92nd birthday fest down here in Seattle. Otherwise, I might have done a better editing job on the diary. Sorry about that, pups.
And that can be another form of dogmatic fervor itself, as it sometimes shows no toleration of the predominant belief systems when imposed and insisted on by outsiders.
Rawa is an organization of Afghan women. They are secularists. However, you are right that secularism as it has existed in the ME is often intolerent of free expression Islam. That is certainly a problem with Kemalism it Turkey.
Gah! Can’t get edit to work. Wanted to add that lack of tolerance for the free expression of Islam is a weakness of Kemalism in Turkey. Agreed.
OT: Checking in from the tip of Homer Spit in Kachemak Bay. Congrats to your mom! Sorry we couldn’t connect here in AK. Doubly impressed by your creative and citizen-journalistic productivity out here. I’d just be spending all my time staring at glaciers and stuff. Do let me know if/when a NYC trip is in the offing for you.
ciao
edgepalm
Time Magazine’s grandstanding on women’s rights saddens me greatly. More troops, more years, being pissed away “for” a principle the US doesn’t really support.
hank you for that. Enlightening and confusing at once.
Looking at it now, I can’t see where you could push that wouldn’t make it worse.
Back around aught two I actually wrote Laura Bush a letter, instructing her on what she had to do to advance women’s rights there. I don’t know what gets into me.
Damn I love your work, and I love your writing even more when ya cut loose.
Thanks for this read, and all you have done and will do.
Rcc’d of course!
Damn I love you work.
Agreed.
Hoss, that’s uncalled for.
Not to mention, it sounds ignorant given your large vision of world affairs I respect.
Stick to the present thread, and post yer own diary about a proclaimed lack of Iraqi consideration.
Yer killin me, Ube . . . . . you turn on our own.
What folly.
Frank, we the USA wreak havoc, murder and mayhem upon innocents in foreign countries. We kill civilians, women, children, and old people. Men too.
Why we do this is well documented, and sickening.
Your point is well taken, and aside from preaching to the choir . . .
Well, it’s just time to change this shit.
I wonder, am I advocating violence with my last sentence?
*G*
Thanks for all you post Frank, I always read your comments with great interest.
TIME has published some excellent historical material in the past:
that’s how they can get away with some occasional crap.
I wasn’t aware of the movement in the late 70s, but I’m glad you mentioned it.
We must ask why TIME decided to push this current load of propaganda.
It’s also worth remembering the sudden interested in the rights of Afghan women that filled the pages of Gannett publications during the 2nd week of July 2 months before 9/11/2001. The same publicists were already beating the drums for us to come to their rescue, and once again, why?
It’s a tradition of courtesy that goes back to the 50s.
In the case of James Reston, we at least have a few photos of his typewritten letters to indicate what was going on.
I posted them in my own DOGSPOT 5 years ago:
http://electromagnet.us/dogspot/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=383
The actual letters are in a library at the University of Illinois in Urbana.
Thanks, ET. Very important information about our government role in undermining equal rights, as usual.
Of course Time does care about women’s rights, but only so long as it helps keep a war that has been a disaster going. The reality is that Time- and even far too many others in the United States- could care less about the rights and conditions of women in this nation let along Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, etc.
It is time for us to really recognize what our nation has done in terms of equality and human rights by these two wars. Unfortunately, it is likely that no discussion outside the blogosphere is going to actually happen.
It certainly is not going to happen at Time.
I apologize in advance for going off topic, but would like to thank everyone at FDL for NOT going into full spin mode on the Clinton Royal Wedding like almost every other supposed progressive blog has online. Reading the comments it’s fairly easy to see who are the females (gushing mostly) and who are the males, who just can’t quite grasp why any ultrarich people would waste so much cash on a wedding that will probably not last. It’s convenience, like most movie star marriages. Honestly, if it was truly love, would there not be at least one politician or celeb that would marry someone with little $$$ instead of always being all star bashes. With the current economic climate in the US, this wedding should have been totally private. Media or no media, it’s like once again the rich shoving it in the face of the poor. $15000 portapotties? Good grief.
…while you go into full spin mode on the “Clinton Royal Wedding.”
Thanks for staying on topic.
First I apologized in advance, and secondly I will apologize again. Sorry for going off topic on your thread Edward. Your subject is truly depressing. In truth, nobody in the US gives a rat’s ass about Afghan women, not just Time magazine. Just like the fake Iraqi war, exceptionalism is alive and well in the US.
Especially when those belief systems require adultresses to be stoned.
Women’s rights in Afghanistan or any other forsaken country has never been anything more that an excuse for some reporter to bloviate, and as yet another excuse for the Ds to bomb yet another country.
Thanks for this.
Incredible Et thanks for this.
“The post-invasion erosion of women’s rights in Iraq was, along with the dispossession of almost 100% of Iraqi Christians, one of our salient failures there. Before our invasion, women in Iraq were more highly educated than in any other Middle Eastern nation but Israel. Christians there had an important role in government, politics and civil administration (as did women). Though the U.S. Government purports to care about this, they are lying.”
Do you hear, see any one in our MSM shedding the light on this? Hell no. You have to be gay in Ghana for Rachel Maddow to cover civil and human rights issues for days. Rachel has never touched the issue of what Iraq was like before the invasion and after for women and everyone else. Much much worse.
And as you point out ET in Afghanistan the U.S. was never really interested in the human rights of women in Afghanistan. Time Inc.
The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan indeed gets a bum rap in the US press. I attended a military gaming convention back a few years ago, and one of the featured speakers gave a talk on the DRA (which I unfortunately missed).
His abstract for his talk mentioned how most Westerners assumed that as Afghanistan was supposedly “Russia’s Vietnam” then DRA was analogous to South Vietnam and Thieu. But *no*–the DRA had wider popular support was far less corrupt, and in fact, the Soviets and DRA were to a large extent successful in creating an effective defense force (far more than we were in either Vietnam or in Afghanistan today). In fact, the DRA not only did not collapse after Soviet withdrawal, the DRA *outlasted the Soviet Union*, its supporter. That’s like South Vietnam surviving for a number of years after a US collapse!
Should we have intervened in Afghanistan back then? I say no. I have this hypothesis, you see–I have noted that ‘underdeveloped’ (there’s a western-ism if there ever was one) countries that fell under some sort of communist rule usually form more stable democracies or at least have better outcomes, once the yoke of communism is thrown off, then do similar countries that remained under our rule during the old Cold War. I think in part it’s because communist rule paradoxically might have better prepared countries for democracy by eliminating the old power structures and the vestiges of feudal rule. Moreover, even though they did not practice what they preached, they also taught an idea which is (I believe) a prerequisite for democracy, an idea previously foreign to such places–the idea of human equality. The political evolution that might truly be in our best interests might be for such countries to experience a hard tack to the left before returning to the European-model social democracy “center”.
This article, as I see it, supports this perspective.
StewartM
SecDef Robert Gates, abc This Week, Aug 1:
Gates: . . .But — but I would say that, again, we walked out on Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1989 and left them basically holding the bag. And — and there is always the fear that we will do that again.
later in the interview by Christine Amanpour she plays a video clip featuring VP Joseph Biden:
Biden: We are in Afghanistan for one express purpose — al Qaeda. The threat to the United States — al Qaeda that exists in those mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are not there to nation-build.
Gates: We are in Afghanistan because we were attacked from Afghanistan, not because we want to try and — and build a better society in Afghanistan. But doing things to improve governance, to improve development in Afghanistan, to the degree it contributes to our security mission and to the effectiveness of the Afghan government in the security arena, that’s what we’re going to do.
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-pelosi-gates/story?id=11298444&page=3
I was introduced to learning about the strengths and weaknesses of aspects of the Soviet model back in the early 1970s through the writings of Boris Schwarz (most notably Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia – 1917-1970), the activities of friends doing graduate work in the USSR, Soviet monthlies and quarterlies translated into English that dealt with the Soviet arts educational paradigm and establishment, and a couple of news interviews of Soviet figures I was involved in while working for KRAB FM in Seattle.
Socialist countries in the Soviet orbit back then are remembered now mostly for the qualities or lack of quality of their military establishments and equipment, rather than for the medical education, engineering education, arts education or civil administrative structures they built with Soviet tutelage. Equal rights for both sexes and full civil rights in complex societies were often made into primary goals of these young nations, through the Soviet model.
Americans should remember that our 1950s through mid-70s push for civil rights and women’s rights was partially fueled by the need to appear to be a modern society to countries for whose affections we were competing with the USSR.
“some sort of communist rule usually form more stable democracies or at least have better outcomes
once the yoke of communism is thrown off”
what does this say of “the yoke” of capitalism? I like your conclusion though and i think your correct. I think the prescription for us then is socialist (actual Marxist, not “American Socialist” – San Francisco Democrat) revolution.
somehow responded to 31 when i was trying to respond to 33.ahhhh ((((oh well)) i’ll get the hang of this internet thing one day… maybe
I’m commenting on how strong the Soviet model was in terms of attempting to educate populations in some ways. Our culture seems incapable of remembering that history; and how aspects of this were beneficial, including the realm of women’s rights. I don’t think a Marxist revolution in the USA would either work or be a positive experience.
There is an economic component as well. A shift in culture toward equality would not be possible unless the citizens had a reasonably comfortable economic situation. Who can worry about equality when everyone is hungry?
Funny you should mention that…a Russian general’s daughter who grew up in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan because her father was fighting in Afghanistan told me that Afghanistan was “our Vietnam”. Her words.
Interesting post, ET.
I liked the ironic counterpoint that you get when applying the equivalent distortion by suggesting that the Soviet puppets propaganda was sincerely driven by respect for the freedom of women.
As a native Southerner, I wholeheartedly agree. It didn’t sit well I’m sure with the new countries in Africa and Asia when our diplomats traveled over there to convince them that we were their friends when they couldn’t have that same discussion at a lunch counter in Mississippi. The Cold War competition in these new countries played a *huge* factor in causing the Federal government to once again push for civil rights.
A friend and I were talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly after it occurred. I still think the collapse of the Soviet Union was at best a bullet we dodged (so far). At the very same time that Bush I was arguing that we couldn’t invade Iraq because it might split up into various factions and countries, and that we had to keep Iraq together, US foreign policy was at the time promoting the independence of the Baltic States, which could if implemented lead to the breakup of the Soviet Union. They did this even though the history of Eastern Europe immediately after WWI with the emergence of new states harboring populations with age-old antipathies towards each other showed that the very first thing that happened was that they made war on each other. But this time they would/could have *nuclear weapons*!!
Why Bush I, supposedly the “foreign policy expert” president, seemed obvious to this bit of history and the dangers it entailed is beyond me, except to say that he wasn’t the expert he was posed as being. It seemed to me that the best US interests lay in keeping the Soviet Union together far more than in keeping Iraq together, and that our best interests was in the success of reform in the Soviet Union–leading perhaps to a unitary state, with a unitary foreign policy, but having a federal system where individual states like the Baltic States and others would be granted a wide degree of autonomy. The political reality is that independence for all these former Soviet states hinges on the success of democratizing the Soviet Union–if Moscow returns to Stalinist- or Ivan the Terrible-like tyranny and aggression, the plain fact is that the West is not going to fight WWIII to fight to keep them independent against a new Ivan or a new Stalin. Like it or not, their fate is tied to what happens in Moscow.
But my friend and I also remarked that, in the absence of even a false competition in terms of bragging rights to providing better living standards et al to the bulk of the population–as he put it, the banksters would be rubbing their hands together with glee exclaiming: “We can get away with ANYTHING now!!!” Sad to say, my friend’s remark was prescient. They have indeed gotten away with “anything” because there has been no “push” internationally from the other direction.
There is hope, though. In some recent surveys among young people in the US the word “socialism” is losing its bogeyman Word-of-Power status. I guess that they are concluding, like I do, like the “Marxists” in the role-playing game Paranoia*, that even thought they may not understand it, if Rush Limbaugh and New Gingrich and Sarah Palin and the banksters are so against something, it can’t be all bad.
—–
*- regarding the “Marxists” in the post-apocalypse game of Paranoia–”Paranoia” describes underground society of survivors which is run and maintained with Stalinist control by a computer. The computer, badly damaged by what it thinks was a nuclear strike (it actually was an asteroid impact) is made paranoid by the fact that its damaged memory banks contain old Cold War references from the 1950s about the vague and ill-defined threats of communism. The computer often interrogates players and interprets any failure or non-conformism to its objectives (often unattainable objectives) to “communist” infiltration or influence after which it usually immediately kills the involved players. (The gamemaster is encouraged by the rules to be HUGELY unfair and arbitrary, while the players know their missions are doomed to failure from the start and try mightily to be in position to blame the failure on another hapless player. It’s a great metaphor for Stalinism).
This underground society however has secret groups the players might belong to. One of them-the most dangerous of all–is the Marxists, because if a player is secretly a Marxist the computer will terminate him/her upon discovery. These “Marxists”, however, know no more about historical Marxism than does the computer–in fact,all they know is that if the computer is against it, it must be good, hence my remark. They secretly carry pictures and quote sayings of Groucho Marx, not Karl Marx, who they believe to be the founder of “Marxism”.
StewartM
I happen to have some female Afghani friends (US citizens now, but immigrated here somewhere in the 70s/80s). I’m not Afghani expert, but I’ve spent time living in NW India and have some idea of what life is like for many in that region.
Mr. Teller, you’re correct about the status of women in that time period. At least middle and upper class women in approx the late 60s – early 80s were being educated and working. Jobs ran the gamut to selling in shops, running beauty salons up through the professional level, with women serving in gov’t at all levels, esp in the larger cities.
What was really crappy about the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” (which had some accuracies in it and shed light on the USA’s role in that war, but in typical rah-rah USA, we are the greatest, fashion) was the part played by Julia Roberts – the uber-wealthy (first clue) Houston woman who manipulated Wilson into “messing around” in the conflict and toppling the gov’t. I have not bothered to research this, so I have no clue if Roberts’ character is fictional or a conflation of different wealthy people, but her character was *presented* in the film as being ever so concerned about the women & children of Aghanistan. I wanted to puke watching that load of jingoistic bunk. Whomever was behind all that could’ve cared less – as is the case today – about Afghani women and kids. Spare me the treacle, and pass the reality, please.
After the USA participated in toppling the gov’t, the plight of women and kids is well known to have been beyond horrific and dreadful to the point of being deadly for those same women and kids. Women who lost their “men folk” (husbands, brothers, fathers) in the war were basically left to die by the Taliban, who did nothing for them, denied them the right to work, denied their kids the right to education, etc.
Yeah: hooray for our side and the USA’s wonderful record in “supporting” the women and kids of Afghanistan. Afghanistan went from a nation with women gaining educationally and economically to being completely ground under by the Taliban, who WE (as in: your tax dollars and mind) armed and aided and abetted (much as WE are still arming, aiding and abetting them today thru one means or another).
I stopped reading junk like Time & Newsweek a long, long, long time ago for a simple reason: they seldom report the real story, and mostly it’s just rah-rah propoganda. No thanks. Not interested.
Thanks for the info on Ms. Ratebzad. I think I may have heard about her somewhere along the line, but I didn’t know much. It’s good to bring her story forward at a time like this. I hold little hope that many beyond the left blogosphere will ever learn the truth about women & kids in Afghanistan, much less the real story of someone like Ms. Ratebzad. Our corporate overlords, as always, are bent only on suppressing the truth and promulgating propoganda convenient for them and their “story.”
Laura Bush will be unhappy, should she come out of her fog to understand this.
Likely not, though.
One of the many things I found interesting in Three Cups of Tea was a story about a girls school that was being built and was in essence raided by a neighboring group of guys, using the rhetoric that the girls shouldn’t be schooled to vent and destroy (kind of like our destruction of Fallujah). The tribal leaders who Mortenson had worked with to put in the school convinced him to sit tight and let them handle things in their own way – which involved (they were Shi’ia as was the school destroyer) basically sending a person to Iran to petition to the Ayatollahs there. IIRC it took a couple of months, but when the answer came back – that the girls WERE entitled to be schooled under Sharia law as determined by the grand ayatollahs (or ??? I’m not familiar with the process) that pretty much cut off the maurader at the knees and there was no more trouble.
As we sabre rattle over Iran and wanting to scatter nuclear bombs across its countryside, we end up unable to work with and through institutions that might have been utilized to make life better for women. Contra to a lot of what we see and hear abuot Afghanistan, the interest in getting the schools that Mortenson was trying to get built and the pictures of proud fathers with their daughters in that book was something I, at least, needed to see.
A few things I think the TIME piece missed out on – really emphasizing that what happened to the girl on their cover happened just a year ago, while America has been in Afghanistan for most of a decade and spent billions;
explaining that with America there in Afghanistan, but devoted to an “there is no law in Afghanistan bc it is all a battleground, so we can deep six our political prisoners there without any court being able to have any say” it is not in a particularly great role model role from which to try to influence “rights” of any parties, since it is instrumental in guaranteeing that no one has any rights if they would be inconvenient for Obama;
being equally brave about putting up pictures of the pregnant women whose abdomens were carved up by special forces operators after the women were killed by those special forces; and
really focusing on the process by which what happened to the girl on their cover happened.
For the last, it wasn’t *just* a man gone beserk, but rather there was a whole tribal process involved, with the local elder in essence giving sanction to what happened. What we have done in Afghanistan still gives that girl no recourse and we don’t have any kind of game plan to really address the brutality that some local leaders agree to mete out to women and child brides even. Instead, if you listen to the complaints of the soldiers about the McChrystal policies, their concern was that they were being prevented from using tactics that would KILL (not protect) more women and children.
The only goals have been vis a vis troops and Taliban. Nothing to set goals of local leaders to give them support for treating women better, nothing to interact wtih institutions that had previously had some success with protecting women – and instead embracing the local policies of brutality (even with our “creeds” we abandoned a soldiers creed that focused on duty and honor over one that focused on being *warrior*) to try to terrify *their* warriors with *our* warriors.
What a horrible thing, for the poor girl on the cover. How much more horrible that we’ve spent so many billions on weapons and creating enemies and defiling law that after decades and billions and now eviscerated-by-action rhetoric about law and democracy we sit in de facto governance of Afghanistan and still provide no avenue of recourse for this girl – and how can we, when we are so concerned with protected men who kill preganant women and carve them up?
And tieing this to Jim White’s post on the panic and chaos, he linked this story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/01/AR2010080100490.html?hpid=topnews
about a protest, which included an interview with one of the women who participated in the protest – 26 you Samia
A sentiment echoed by the other, older, woman interviewed – one who had 3 nephews killed by the Taliban and still wanted the US out.
Here’s the cover I created for the version of this article at my blog. The young Afghani woman is surrounded by two images of kids from Falluja with severe DU birth defects, a kid who was burnt by white phosphorus during operation cast lead, and a kid who had his nose blown off by a drone in Pakistan last spring.
Good lord – it’s the point that has to be made, but that’s a very hard cover to handle. You have courage and principle and I wish that were common.
Three Cups of Tea was a great book. It made a good case that the interpretation of Islam (largely imported from wealthy muslim nations, particularly Saudi Arabian and wahabism) is the problem for girls’ schools, not the local folk who wanted their children educated.
Second that statement.
ET people need to see the reality. Brutal but necessary.
Thanks to one and all for this most informative post and thread. I’ve learned so much.
The current Time is sitting on a chair, unread, mostly because I watched part of the Charley Rose show interview with the author of the plight of Afghan women, whose plea for their safety, etc. made me want to shout, but what about the safety of American women and children and old people in this obscene economy. I want the Afghan war money to stay here to take care of our problems. Why can’t folks have compassion for the plight of Americans who have been so terribly screwed in the last couple of years and will continue to be screwed by Dems and Reps and others because of our crappy policies, ineffective programs (e.g. HAMP, etc.), revolting poor excuse for rational political discourse and complete refusal to assume adult responsibility for the endless disasters on our midst.
Thanks to FDL for continuing to educate me.
Blessings,
Total hypocrisy for the U.S., who I notice never invaded Saudi Arabia for its total subjugation of women.
I think this whole society, among the many pieces of bad karma (lacking any other term) it has accumulated, has yet to realize that it indulged in their anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan by supporting the very people it now fights. And in those earlier salad days of covert war support for the tribal warlords and Islamic radical fundamentalists, it was not a consideration that it meant a massive war against women in society, enforcing the veil/burka, raising the bride price (still an issue in Afghanistan), and closing schools to girls, etc. Who in America gave a shit at the time that women there would pay the price of this proxy battle? Now they do??? (At the time there were a few on the left who noted it, but they were marginalized, as it was mostly the far Marxist left, and the stray columnist, like Alexander Cockburn.)
Great diary, ET.
Thanks, Jeff.
One of the people who has presented a few genuine reports on the conditions of women in Afghanistan to US and English language viewers in recent years is Christiane Amanpour. Nobody is out there thanking her. Rather, Tom Shales, reviewing Amanpour’s debut in her new responsibilities at ABC, writes in the WaPo:
While it wasn’t done from a political point of view, it really did show how the Saudis rushed in to fill the void with wahabi-based schools, while everyone else was sitting things out. Reading it with a hindsight perspective, there was a lot of portent to the part where he talks about returning and all the wahabi supported schools.