Pentagon no friend to Afghan women

By Joyce Chediac

Feb. 7, 2002--U.S. newspapers have recently printed photos of smiling Afghan girls on their way to school in Kabul for the first time since the Taliban outlawed education for girls in 1996. The establishment media's message is: "Thanks to the U.S. invasion, the women of Afghanistan are finally on their way to democracy and human rights."

Working people here have been told that the Bush administration is helping women in Afghanistan. This is not true. From the cities to the refugee camps, the women of Afghanistan are suffering greatly. No one is more responsible for their past and current suffering than the U.S. government.

U.S.-imposed rulers no friends of women

The Bush administration defeated the Taliban in December and installed the Northern Alliance in Kabul. But the Northern Alliance, a loose coalition, contains many groups that are as bad on women's rights as the Taliban.

The media here barely mention that Northern Alliance forces ruled Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996. According to one British newspaper the Northern Alliance "was a symbol of massacre, systematic rape and pillage. ... The Northern Alliance left [Kabul] in 1996 with 50,000 dead behind it. Now its members are our foot soldiers." (The Independent, Nov. 14, 2001)

Even Sima Samar, the new Afghan Minister of Women's Affairs and one of two women used as a fig leaf by the interim Afghan government, says there is no real security on the streets of Kabul and roads of Afghanistan. "Just because the Taliban are gone, it does not mean the situation is solved. We still have to bring a lot of changes in society," she said. "I keep telling people that the situation of women is not the product of the Taliban. It's a product of 23 years of war." (The Guardian [London], Jan. 17)

Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, most of whom are women and children, may die of starvation and exposure before spring. Many of these refugees survive on UN food rations. The recent massive U.S. bombing, however, has destroyed many roads used to transport these food rations and other vital elements of the infrastructure.

The refugees were displaced from their homes by the recent U.S. invasion and by the past 23 years of war.

CIA war erased women's gains

Citing statistics gathered by the U.S. Department of Defense itself, this newspaper has pointed out in the past that the only government that brought significant gains to Afghan women took power in 1978, and sought to build socialism in Afghanistan. Working under difficult conditions in one of the poorest countries of the world, the women and men in this government achieved the following: feudal laws restricting women were abolished; women became professors, attorneys, judges and government ministers; 70 percent of the teachers, 50 percent of the government workers and 40 percent of the doctors were women.

But this progressive government was overthrown in 1992 after 13 years of vicious war financed by the U.S. and organized by the CIA.

The establishment media has remained mum on these accomplishments. If it mentions some of these gains, it never attributes them to the socialist government. With this in mind, it is interesting to note what Time magazine of Dec. 3, toward the end of a special issue devoted to Afghan women, had to say about this period when there was a progressive government:

"[W]omen's rights were protected--even advanced to a degree that alienated some in Afghanistan's tradition-bound society. More women were introduced into government, given an authority that many men found unnerving."

Time says that even the person "responsible for collecting information on the jihad warriors" was a woman.

Opposing this government from day one, Washington courted the very feudal elements who found women's new authority "unnerving." For its own ends, Washington exploited their misogyny as much as their anti-communism. These rural rulers, with a medieval view of economic and social relations and of women as property, would have been swept into the dustbin of history had they not been given a new life, and over $3 billion in weapons, by the U.S. Osama bin Laden was a key distributor of these U.S. arms. This Saudi businessman helped organize the CIA's war against both the progressive Afghan government and the Soviet troops that it had invited in to try and stop the foreign-funded counter-revolution.

Soviet intervention to aid the progressive government has been scorned in the press here. Nor does the media dwell on the fact that the 23 years of war in Afghanistan, including civil war among U.S.-armed groups, were funded, fueled and abetted by Washington. This prolonged war has hurt Afghan women the most.

The U.S. government has played it both ways. Beginning in 1979, Washington used the gains made by women under a progressive Afghan government to agitate reactionary forces. Today, for domestic consumption, it claims it is "rescuing" Afghan women from the very same reactionary forces it armed and empowered.

Washington has not invaded Afghanistan to help women. U.S. motives are the same today as they were when Washington began arming feudal forces in 1979: to expand U.S. corporate domination in the strategic and oil-rich areas of the Middle East and South/Central Asia. U.S. imperialism can never be trusted to help any oppressed group, here or abroad.