Nicholas Kristof complains about the treatment of women in Afghanistan in a story in today’s NY Times. Here’s an excerpt…
Consider these snapshots of the new Afghanistan:
• A 16-year-old girl fled her 85-year-old husband, who married her when she was 9. She was caught and recently sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment.
• The Afghan Supreme Court has recently banned female singers from appearing on Afghan television, barred married women from attending high school classes and ordered restrictions on the hours when women can travel without a male relative.
• When a man was accused of murder recently, his relatives were obliged to settle the blood debt by handing over two girls, ages 8 and 15, to marry men in the victim’s family.
• A woman in Afghanistan now dies in childbirth every 20 minutes, usually without access to even a nurse. A U.N. survey in 2002 found that maternal mortality in the Badakshan region was the highest ever recorded anywhere on earth: a woman there has a 50 percent chance of dying during one of her eight pregnancies.
• In Herat, a major city, women who are found with an unrelated man are detained and subjected to a forced gynecological exam. At last count, according to Human Rights Watch, 10 of these “virginity tests” were being conducted daily.
… Yet now I feel betrayed, as do the Afghans themselves. There was such good will toward us, and such respect for American military power, that with just a hint of follow-through we could have made Afghanistan a shining success and a lever for progress in Pakistan and Central Asia. Instead, we lost interest in Afghanistan and moved on to Iraq.
… Even now, in the new Afghanistan we oversee, they are being kidnapped, raped, married against their will to old men, denied education, subjected to virginity tests and imprisoned in their homes. We failed them.
The unspoken assumption in Kristof’s piece is that the U.S. has almost unlimited capabilities to effect social change in distant lands. Is this realistic? Consider our own nation. A lot of Americans enjoy marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs that are tough to buy. Many of the rest of us seem to like drinking alcohol and then driving cars. Despite a lot of effort and money spent over the decades these behaviors persist (see http://www.drunkdrivingdefense.com/consequences/bush-dui.htm for a fun article on how our leaders would have some trouble getting into Canada legally).
Getting back to Afghanistan. The problem of which Kristof complains is basically that half of the population of Aghanistan views the other half as personal property and is supported in this view by tradition and religion. Our military can perhaps prevent Afghanistan from being a military threat. We could also plausible chop the place up and give each resulting piece to a local leader who was friendly and/or beholden to the U.S. But given our spotty record of achieving social change within our own borders is it realistic to set ourselves the goal of turning Afghanistan into a land of sexual equality? If so, how would we do it?
So then why bother any nation building at all? Why all the games? Just go in, take out the threat, and get out.
<cite>half of the population of Aghanistan views the other half as personal property and is supported in this view by tradition and religion.</cite>
Maybe by tradition. Definitely not by religion.
Why would anyone expect anything different from the US? The Soviet Union spent a lot of time and money supporting the modernizing nationalist regime in Afghanistan, and the US did its best to support the most reactionary backwards elements they could find. If daddy did his best to put a backwards regime in power and killing off the liberal intelligensia, why would anyone expect baby boy to do otherwise? Besides, a generation of modernizing liberals are dead or in exile, just who /could/ do this modernizing?
At the end of the World War II, the U.S. military walked into Japan and within 6 months Japanese women were voting (and man too) for the first time in history. A photo of the Emperor was shown in newspapers – the Japanese ruler seemed unseemly small posing next to General MacArthur. Within 5 years DeBeers had 50% of Japanese young couples buy diamond engagement rings.
The culture and the mentality of Japanese are vastly different than those of Americans or Afghans. Is it also the case that a developed civilization (Americans) can subdue another advanced civilization much easier? The rationale would be that Americans have experts to deal with governments, media, democracy, public opinion, highway/electrical/phone infrastructure, etc. Americans do not know how to handle places without government, media, democracy…
“a woman there has a 50 percent chance of dying during one of her eight pregnancies”
This is an extremely improbable pair of statistics. If you have 2^8 women, then 2^7 will die in their first pregnancy, 2^6 in their second, etc. It would be pretty hard to have this average out to 8 pregnancies per woman.
Maybe there are some women in Afghanistan bearing 2^64 children to make these numbers work out, but I doubt it.
I live in a lower-income neighborhood in Minneapolis. I receive the police blotter for my neighborhood every 14 days. They pick up crack dealers with shotguns, a group of young boys intent on knocking over a local convienience store with a MAC-10, a guy trying to shoot his neighbor in his backyard, that kind of stuff. From the looks of it, the same two officers, Garcia and Keminski are doing all the work. Sometimes one of them is in the hospital. In a single 14 day period, Garcia and Keminski confiscated 24 illegal handguns in my neighborhood.
With so much peace-keeping needing to get done in my own backyard, the thought of changing another nation around for some purported reason seems like putting the cart before the horse. We all of us here in Fowel-McKinley have just detectives Garcia and Keminski. If for no other reason than to give these guys a break, bring our troops back home.
“a woman there has a 50 percent chance of dying during one of her eight pregnancies”
I think this is shorthand for “a) Afghani women have an average of 8 pregnancies, and b) half of all afghani women die in childbirth.”
As to the solution: Arm the women. Start with RAWA.
i think Afghanistan problem is that they all primintiv , they old fation , non democrats , and they all hate the usa.