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July 16, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti-Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
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Ralph Nader
The Secret
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Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
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Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
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July
16, 2002
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression
of Afghan Women
by Gary Leupp
From the very beginning of the Afghan crisis,
which began with the Saur coup in April 1978, U.S. policy-makers
have capitalized on misogyny.
Women and girls today constitute some
60% of the Afghan population, the male population vitiated by
invasion and fratricidal conflict. They are among the most oppressed,
illiterate, shell-shocked and abused women on the planet. While
many aspects of their oppression are of ancient origin (the burqa
was no Taliban invention, but has been customary female garb
at different points, over many centuries, from Byzantium to Central
Asia), others are quite contemporary, and the U.S. bears significant
responsibility for them.
Soon after the 1978 coup, the newly-empowered,
pro-Soviet People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan announced
a range of measures designed to build a secular, modern society.
These included bank reform, land reform, mass education, and
the equality of women. Specifically, the new rulers intended
to promote universal, coeducational, primary schooling. None
of these propositions settled well with tribal leaders comfortable
with the existing land arrangements, their own feudal prerogatives,
and the chattel-like condition of their uneducated womenfolk.
Nor did the prospect of local, state-run clinics, in which doctors
might view their wives' and daughters' forearms and ankles, or
worse. Of the grounds for local magnates' disgruntlement with
the new government, none generated so much passion as the radical
change in women's status that it sought to implement.
Thus was born the Mujahadeen, with some
helpful midwifery performed by the CIA. By mid-1979, the Carter
administration (yes, that most "human rights"-oriented
of U.S. administrations, which also supported the Shah of Iran
right up to the end) was funneling aid via the CIA into the hands
of Afghanistan's holy warriors, urging them to view their fight
as an anti-communist jihad. President Carter's national
security adviser, Zbigniew Bzrezinski, was delighted to endorse
the most vicious and backward of warlords, and exploit their
determination to retain patriarchal control; "We now,"
he told Carter, "have the opportunity to give the Soviet
Union its Vietnam." (And if women get screwed, well,
who cares?)
As the proxy war continued under the
Reagan administration, fully half the $ 3 billion granted to
the Mujahadeen went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, identified by the
Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA; see
their excellent website http://rawa.false.net) as the vilest
of all the warlords. (Now back in Afghanistan, having turned
on his former sponsors-and they on him-Hekmatyar dodges CIA missile
attacks while, by some reports, cozying up to remnant al-Qaeda
forces.) The Mujahadeen won the war, thanks to U.S. and Saudi
assistance, which only increased after the Soviet pullout in
1989 following a UN-brokered agreement. (That agreement required
the cessation of both Soviet and U.S. aid to the rival factions
in the ongoing civil war. The U.S. refused to sign it.) Remarkably,
the regime in Kabul, which encouraged women's education and employment
and discouraged the wearing of the burqa, endured until
April 1992 when the Northern Alliance forces took the capital.
The last of the Soviet-backed rulers, Najibullah, took refuge
in the UN compound.
In May, a theology professor at Kabul University, a Tajik, Burhanuddin
Rabbani, became president. Among his first decrees was to mandate
the wearing of the burqa by Kabul's relatively well-educated
and sophisticated women, and to ban women newscasters from television.
The U.S. recognized his government, maintaining cordial relations
while soon detaching itself from the situation it had produced.
It was busy elsewhere, trying to impose "peace" on
Somalia and the Balkans, intermittently bombing Iraq, trying
to keep the lid on Israeli behavior in Lebanon, etc. Washington
retained some level of interest in Afghanistan (Dostum was invited
for talks in Washington in May 1995), particularly in the prospect
of an oil pipeline from the Caspian to the Indian Ocean through
Afghan territory. But as Afghanistan fell into chaos under Rabbani,
Hekmatyar, Dostum and other CIA creations, U.S. hopes for pipeline
construction faded.
Enter the Taliban, in part, the creation
of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), a cousin of the
CIA, principally concerned with restoring order in Afghanistan
and the protection of Pakistan's trade routes into Central Asia.
(They were abetted by Pakistan's female prime minister, Benazir
Bhutto, in power 1988-90 and 1993-96). The ISI recruited Talibs
from the religious schools it subsidized in the Afghan refugee
camps in Pakistan. But the founder of the Taliban, Mullah Omar,
developed his own power base within Afghanistan from 1993, acquiring
a reputation as a man of high moral integrity prepared to take
action to end the factional fighting, in which the abuse of women
(and boys) was a staple feature. In the spring of 1994, Taliban
members attacked the base of a commander in Singesar who had
abducted and raped two teenage girls. They freed the girls, hanged
the captain, and won widespread admiration for the deed. The
Taliban's reputation soared. However paradoxical it may seem
at this point, knowing what we do of Taliban policies after they
took power, they seemed at the time to be defenders of the physical
security of women against the rapist mentality of the Northern
Alliance warlords.
The Taliban took Kabul in September 1996,
immediately seizing, castrating and hanging Najibullah. (He was
handed over by his
own intelligence chief, Rashid Dostum, a turncoat many times
over, now largely in charge of northern Afghanistan.) Once in
power, they continued the prior government's basic policies towards
women, mandating the burqa, and denying women educationand employment.
Once in power, they continued the prior government's basic policies
towards women, mandating the burqa, and denying women
education and employment. But they were more "fundamentalist,"
more misogynist, more brutal. Most notably, they denied women
and girls access to health services, and applied Shari'a law
with greater severity. Public executions became mass spectacles;
women accused of adultery were forced to kneel in their burqas
in the foreign-built soccer stadium in Kabul before being shot
in the head as crowds cheered. The award-winning documentary
"Behind the Veil," made by the Anglo-Afghan filmmaker
Saira Shah for the BBC's Channel Four last summer, damningly
exposed the anti-woman features of the regime.
At that time, Afghanistan was not on
a U.S. "enemies list." The Wall Street Journal,
which closely reflects official thinking, had offered the Taliban
limited praise: "The Taliban," according to the Journal,
were "the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover,
they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment
route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other
natural resources." Supported by U.S. allies Pakistan and
Saudi Arabia, the Talibs even received U.S. economic assistance
(in exchange for implementing a successful opium eradication
program). On numerous occasions, they negotiated with Unocal
for oil pipeline construction.
Thus from Washington's point of view,
Kabul's misogyny was its own business. The Taliban's "Ministry
for the Promotion of Virtue and Punishment of Vice," charged
with the policing of proper female behavior, among other things,
was closely modeled on a Saudi Arabian institution in operation
from the inception of the Saudi regime. The U.S. had never made
an issue of that ministry, or the Saudi laws that are
as misogynistic as any on earth. Or for that matter, the chattel
slavery practiced in the harems of the Kuwaiti elite that Bush
I restored to power, through his heroic Operation Desert Storm,
in 1991.
But then came Sept. 11, the buildup for
war, and the satanization not only of al-Qaeda but the Taliban
regime depicted as its sponsor. On November 17, six weeks after
the bombs started falling over Afghanistan, First Lady Laura
Bush was trotted out to deliver a "Radio Address to the
Nation," using the time customarily allotted to her (rather
less articulate) spouse, in order to (as she put it) "kick
off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women
and children by the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the regime
it supports." A politically rather intelligent move, actually.
Time Magazine had reported that 100 civilians were killed
in the bombing of Karam October 11; the mainstream press had
reported the 8 killed in Kabul and 21 in Tirin Kor October 21;
25 in Doori and 10 in Herat October 24; the 10 or so bus passengers
near Kandahar two days later; 13 more in Kabul October 28; the
25 plus in Chowkar-Karez village late in the month; the 15 in
a Kandahar hospital October 31; the 128 in the village
of Shahagha, November 10. Perfect time to talk about brutality
against women and children!
And what did she teach us in her "Address to the Nation"?
"Afghan women know, through hard
experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: The brutal
oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists. Long
before the current war began, the Taliban and its terrorist allies
were making the lives of children and women in Afghanistan miserable.
Women have been denied access to doctors when they're sick. Life
under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small displays
of joy are outlawed --- children aren't allowed to fly kites;
their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud. Women cannot
work outside the home, or even leave their homes by themselves."
But thank God for American military
intervention!
"Because of our recent military
gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned
in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters
without fear of punishment. Yet the terrorists who helped rule
that country now plot and plan in many countries. And they must
be stopped. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the
rights and dignity of women I hope [that this Thanksgiving] Americans
will join our family in working to insure that dignity and opportunity
will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan."
(At the time, Bush was hitting up American
school kids to donate money for their Afghan counterparts, and
U.S. planes were dropping food packets to sustain the hungry
and win Afghan friends. 70% of these ruptured on impact; of these,
90% contained spoiled food; lots of children ate the packages
of desiccant and get sick to their stomachs. As a report by retired
Special Forces officers matter-of-factly put it: "Food packets
that make people sick is just one more reason to hate the United
States in an already hostile environment" See Boston
Globe, March 26).
Ms. Bush is a former librarian and school
teacher, and presumably has some basic research skills, but her
"address" indicates that she doesn't know jack-shit
about Afghan women and their undeniably "brutal oppression."
That oppression didn't begin with the Taliban, and the earlier
Northern Alliance regime, hoisted to power by U.S. assistance,
did nothing to alleviate it. Between 1978 and 1992, at least
in Kabul, the succession of Soviet-backed regimes made some headway
in advancing women's rights, but during most of that time Ms.
Bush's father in law was vice president in a regime determined
to topple that regime, using the scum of the earth to attain
that result.
Let us pit our First Lady against the
Afghan woman most familiar to the educated American public: Sharbat
Gula. You probably won't recognize the name, but this is the
woman whose face, featured on the cover of National Geographic
in 1985, was among the most widely replicated of all the
photos featured in that magazine in its long history. The photo
(sometimes called "hauntingly beautiful") showed a
teenage girl with wide green eyes who had plainly seen her share
of terror. With some fanfare, National Geographic announced last
spring that the hitherto nameless subject of the photo had been
found in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, by the original
photographer Steven McCurry, and then interviewed in a refugee
camp in Pakistan.
Sharbat Gula, now 28 or 29, perhaps shocked
her interviewers by opining, quite categorically, "life
under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order"
(see the April National Geographic issue). Think about
that. Here's a women whose visage is known all over the world,
a Pashtun, facing the camera without a burqa, talking
to Americans, with every incentive to endorse "Operation
Enduring Freedom." Instead she indicates a preference for
the status quo of the recent past. Her stance is not, of course,
an argument for Mullah Omar; but it is an argument against
bombing, disorder, and the re-empowerment of the Northern Alliance.
These U.S. allies are rapists. As early
as 1996, the U.S. State Department's own report on human rights
in Afghanistan concluded that the forces led by (the now lionized)
Ahmed Shah Massoud systematically raped and killed Hazzara women
in Kabul in March 1995: "Massood's troops went on a rampage,
systematically looting whole streets and raping women."
Since their return to power, Northern Alliance forces have returned
to their old habits; on February 24 Boston Globe reporter
David Filipov documented the widespread rape of Pashtun women
in Mazar-e Sharif by Abdul Rashid Dostum's militiamen. A March
8 Human Rights Watch report documents horrific abuses of Pashtuns
by Northern Alliance troops; Peter Bouckaert, senior researcher
for HRW, says, "Our research found that Pashtuns throughout
northern Afghanistan are facing serious abuse, including beatings,
killings, rapes, and widespread looting."
Even in Kabul, policed (in theory) by
international peacekeepers, women don't dare remove their burqas
for fear of attack. Laura Bush-and the commentators who scratch
their heads wondering why these Afghan women, newly "liberated"
from the Taliban, aren't revealing their happy smiling faces
to the world and dancing in the streets--doesn't get it. The
head-to-toe garment is a protection from rape, as well as an
emblem of oppression. And the rape threat now comes armed and
financed by Washington.
Much was made of the fact that in the
conference in Bonn last November and December, which established
a provisional government in Afghanistan, two women were included
in the cabinet. These were Sima Samar, a Hazzara and member of
the Hazzara-based Hezb-I-Wahdat (Party of Islamic Unity), who
became minister of women's affairs and a deputy prime minister;
and Suhaila Siddiqi, a former member of the Parcham faction of
the pro-Soviet People's Democratic Party that had ruled Afghanistan
from 1978 to 1992. Siddiqi had held high rank under the Najibullah
regime, then served as chief surgeon in a Kabul hospital under
the Northern Alliance, and had even been allowed to practice
under the Taliban.
The RAWA (whom I respect, as an organization
serious about confronting fundamentalism and promoting feminism)
denounced both of these women for their histories and political
associations. Nonetheless, their presence in the 30-person interim
administration was used to put a female-friendly face on what
was in essence another collection of Northern Alliance warlords.
But that face faded during the Loya Jirga in June. The majority
of delegates, including the small female component, wanted the
former king, Zahir Shah, to serve as head of state rather than
Hamzid Karzai, who is seen as a puppet of the Americans and pawn
of the warlords. US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad effectively vetoed
that proposal, shooing in Karzai, the U.S.'s man, while thugs
in the warlords' service moved in to silence and marginalize
opposition, including any posed by women. Sima Samar, nominated
to continue as minister of women's affairs, was sufficiently
intimidated by death threats that she turned down the position
in favor of a lesser human rights post. (She had already stated,
June 11, "This is a rubber stamp. Everything has already
been decided by the powerful ones.") The Jirga concluded
June 19 (following a walkout of half the delegates two days earlier,
in protest of foreign manipulation of the proceedings, and warlord
intimidation), without the appointment of a new Minister of Women's
Affairs.
Laura Bush asks us to "fight for
the rights and dignity of women" in Afghanistan even as
the government her husband heads works actively to suppress those
rights, and suffocate that dignity, by its alliance with the
same old Mujahadeen it sponsored in the 1980s. So don't expect
Washington to help remove any burqas soon, and don't expect
the women who eventually do so to feel anything but contempt
for the Bushes.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University
and coordinator, Asian Studies Program
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Today's Features
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti-Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
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