Aletho News

White Men Rescue Brown Women From Brown Men..

Introduction by Lila Rajiva | August 10, 2010

The media is, again, drumming up support for expansion of the war in Afghanistan by appealing to women’s rights. This was precisely the same strategy employed during the war in Iraq, when statistics about female kidnapping, honor killings and so on were massaged to argue that further American intervention in the area was needed, when, in point of fact, the opposite was true – it was the US intervention that had  provoked the deterioration in the general economic picture and, as a consequence, the treatment of women. This is in keeping with the old colonial strategy described by post-colonial feminist critics –  “White men rescuing brown women from brown men…”. Bretigne Shaffer has an excellent analysis:

“The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission reported in March of 2008 that violence against women had nearly doubled from the previous year, and a 2009 Human Rights Watch report concludes that “(w)hereas the trend had clearly been positive for women’s rights from 2001–2005, the trend is now negative in many areas.” Other reports (including one from Amnesty International in May of 2005) call the first part of that statement into question:

Says Ann Jones, journalist and author of Kabul in Winter, “For most Afghan women, life has stayed the same. And for a great number, life has gotten much worse.”

Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, says “the attacks against women both external and within the family have gone up. Domestic violence has increased. (The current) judiciary is imprisoning more women than ever before in Afghanistan. And they are imprisoning them for running away from their homes, for refusing to marry the man that their family picked for them, for even being a victim of rape.”

Anand Gopal, Afghanistan correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, says “The situation for women in the Pashtun area is actually worse than it was during the Taliban time. …(U)nder the Taliban, women were kept in burqas and in their homes, away from education. Today, the same situation persists. They’re kept in burqas, in homes, away from education, but on top of that they are also living in a war zone.”

“Five years after the fall of the Taliban, and the liberation of women hailed by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, thanks to the US and British invasion,” wrote The Independent’s Kim Sengupta in November of 2006, “such has been the alarming rise in suicide that a conference was held on the problem in the Afghan capital just a few days ago.”

The US military has made life worse for women in Afghanistan, not better. Is it possible that a US exit will result in their lives becoming even worse than they are now, as Bret Stephens and Time magazine fear? Of course it is possible. But what is certain is that the occupation has had a harmful effect on the lives of the vast majority of Afghan civilians – not a positive one as the promoters of war as a vehicle for social change assert. Also indisputable is that the Taliban has grown in strength since the occupation began, and it only continues to do so. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has looked closely at the motives for terrorism. Even US intelligence agencies have acknowledged that the US occupation of Iraq has strengthened Islamic fundamentalism and .”..made the overall terrorism problem worse.”

To call for even more certain death and destruction as a defense against imagined, possible worse bloodshed reveals a curious kind of moral reasoning. For let’s not forget what it is that Time magazine (despite its protestations to the contrary) and Stephens are defending: The indiscriminate killing of innocent men, women and children, in the pursuit of what they believe to be some greater good.”

August 10, 2010 - Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering