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tulipsandroses

(5,092 posts)
Thu Aug 19, 2021, 01:02 AM Aug 2021

Liberating women and girls is just another lie

These women were used to justify war and the lie was was repeated over and over to make us feel good about this 20 year abomination. Yes trump is a buffoon, but to convince him to send more troops into Afghanistan after he was elected, he was shown pictures of women in miniskirts and told that is what life was like for women. before the Taliban. Trump may be a buffoon but the evil doers that got us into this mess were not buffoons. They used similar tactics to convince us. The "oppressive burqa".
][link:https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hr-mccaster-donald-trump-afghanistan_n_599c6105e4b06a788a2c2026|
President Donald Trump was reluctant to send more troops to Afghanistan after years of saying the war was “wasting our money.” So national security adviser H.R. McMaster used a 1972 photo of Afghan women in miniskirts to show the president that the country had once adopted Western values and to convince him to escalate the war, according to The Washington Post.

McMaster reportedly showed Trump a black-and-white snapshot of bare-legged women in Kabul to illustrate that the region might be able to embrace Western ideals again. Miniskirts were replaced by full-body burqas in the mid-1990s, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, banned Western clothing and rolled back women’s rights. The Taliban now controls only parts of the country, but many Afghan women still choose to wear traditional burqas because it makes them feel safer from violence and judgment in a society where gender-based violence is rampant.



There are so many threads to pull on in this horrible saga. I posit this is one of them that needs closer examination.

Someone posted an article of women in Afghanistan crying after the fall of Kabul. At the bottom of the article is a tiny blurb about the women in rural areas who are conservative. A tiny blurb, when 76% of women live in rural areas. So how much liberating were we really engaged in?

While I empathize with the women who may see their gains erased, it boils my blood that this liberation was a lie to keep the war going. Just like the support the troops mantra. They will come up with another slogan eventually to tug at our heart strings to support their atrocities.

I was watching a guest on MSNBC a few days ago, talk about the plight of the rural women. She said those rural areas were often bombed. Women lost their children, sometimes whole families. They are dirt poor despite the trillions of dollars we poured into Afghanistan. We even spent 6 million dollars on special goats for crying out loud. The goats died shortly, there after. War is ugly, its brutal. The powers that be knew for many years this was a clusterfuck.
One can google and find numerous articles about what a failure this was. So what did we think would happen to these women after we left? We have been demanding that our troops come home for several years. What did we really think would happen?
Smarter people than I knew what would happen. But they kept repeating this lie, using these women and playing on American heartstrings.
Note they are not saying they did not expect the Taliban to come back. They are only " surprised at how fast it happened".
This was always going to be the outcome. The Taliban coming back 6 months, or one year from now would not have changed the possible future of these women.
We did not care about the women we liberated in cities like Kabul. We knew all along this would be a temporary change. We definitely did not care about the women that lived in the rural areas.

Instead of economic, social, and political empowerment, Afghan women in rural areas—where an estimated 76 percent of the country’s women live—experience the devastation of bloody and intensifying fighting between the Taliban and government forces and local militias. Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generates not only psychological trauma for them, but also fundamentally jeopardizes their economic survival and ability to go about everyday life. Widows and their children are thus highly vulnerable to a panoply of debilitating disruptions due to the loss of family men.

Not surprisingly, the position of Afghan women toward peace varies greatly. Educated urban women reject the possibility of another Taliban emirate. They dream of a peace deal in which the Taliban are a weak actor in the negotiations and is given some political and perhaps government representation, but not the ability to shape the rewrite of the Afghan constitution and the country’s basic political dispensation. Rather than yielding to the Taliban, some urban women may prefer for fighting to go on, particularly as urban areas are much less affected by the warfare than are rural areas, and their male relatives, particularly of elite families, rarely bear the battlefield fighting risks. For them, the continuation and augmentation of war has been far less costly than for many rural women.

By contrast, as interviews with Afghan women conducted by one of us in the fall of 2019 and the summer of 2020 showed, peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms.9 This finding was confirmed in a recent International Crisis Group report. The Taliban already frequently rule or influence the areas where they live anyway. While rejecting a 1990s-like lockdown of women in their homes that the Taliban imposed, many rural women point out that in that period the Taliban also reduced sexual predation and robberies that debilitated their lives.

SNIP




[link:https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-fate-of-womens-rights-in-afghanistan/|


These are excerpts from an older article, but still relevant - Its long but definitely a good read.
What Afghan Women Want
Western politicians, generals and do-gooders cite women's rights as a key benefit of keeping the Taliban out. But the women of Kampirak don't hold many grudges against the Taliban, who ruled their village from 1997 until 2001. The single most important event of the last 15 years of their lives was the Hezb-e-Wahdat raid at the beginning of the U.S.-led occupation that orphaned, widowed and violated them. To them, that morning remains the main legacy of the war Westerners often claim to be fighting in their name.
SNIP
International donors have contributed more than $60 billion to Afghanistan since 2001. Some of this money was supposed to bring free healthcare, deep-water wells, schools, and electric power to villages like Kampirak. Because of mismanagement and kleptocracy, it barely has. The absence of the most basic necessities is one explanation for why Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality and the fifth-lowest life expectancy in the world.

[link:http://|][link:https://pulitzercenter.org/pt-br/node/11777|

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Liberating women and girls is just another lie (Original Post) tulipsandroses Aug 2021 OP
Interesting article. I wonder if they care one bit about the women and children or if they Raine Aug 2021 #1
Afghanistan has its urban liberals and its urban and rural conservatives, Hortensis Aug 2021 #2

Raine

(30,540 posts)
1. Interesting article. I wonder if they care one bit about the women and children or if they
Thu Aug 19, 2021, 04:40 AM
Aug 2021

ever have. It certainly doesn't seem like it.

Hortensis

(58,785 posts)
2. Afghanistan has its urban liberals and its urban and rural conservatives,
Thu Aug 19, 2021, 05:14 AM
Aug 2021

similar to other nations. Unlike western nations, its overall culture is extremely conservative and religious and frequently compared to that of 14th century Europe's medieval times. Islamic religion is involved in virtually every aspect of life. Fear is growing, and anger, as loss of water and climate crises are destroying farmland and forcing migration to the cities.

Afghanistan is changing, but it's mainly due, not to our presence, but to the very large forces affecting most of humanity, even trickling into Afghanistan: urbanization, population growth, technology, new freedoms for women, the internet, solar power, climate crises and loss of fresh water, mass displacement of people, new possibilities and both increased expectations and increased fear.

New attitudes toward women seeping into Afghanistan aren't a complete lie, but the way America's own far right is still raging and reacting against equality for women should have been a clue to where Afghanistan is really at. Btw, anyone remember how the 2018 "Year of the Women" was followed here by unthinking eagerness of some to toss women out of office so black men could take their places? Male supremacy/female subordination (at best) is baked deep everywhere, but possibly nowhere more than Afghanistan.

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