Bushes And Burqas...

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 byinvasion and fratricidal conflict. They are among the most oppressed, illiterate, shell-shocked and abusedwomen on the planet. While many aspects of their oppression are of ancient origin (the burqa was noTaliban invention, but has been customary female garb at different points, over many centuries, from Byzantiumto 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 Afghanistanannounced a range of measures designed to build a secular, modern society. These included bank reform, landreform, 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 withthe existing land arrangements, their own feudal prerogatives, and the chattel-like condition of theiruneducated womenfolk. Nor did the prospect of local, state-run clinics, in which doctors might view theirwives' and daughters' forearms and ankles, or worse. Of the grounds for local magnates' disgruntlement withthe new government, none generated so much passion as the radical change in women's status that it sought toimplement.

Thus was born the Mujahadeen, with some helpful midwifery performed by the CIA. By mid-1979, the Carteradministration (yes, that most "human rights"-oriented of U.S. administrations, which also supportedthe Shah of Iran right up to the end) was funneling aid via the CIA into the hands of Afghanistan's holywarriors, urging them to view their fight as an anti-communist jihad. President Carter's nationalsecurity adviser, Zbigniew Bzrezinski, was delighted to endorse the most vicious and backward of warlords, andexploit their determination to retain patriarchal control; "We now," he told Carter, "have theopportunity 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 theMujahadeen went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, identified by the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA;see their excellent website) as the vilest of all thewarlords. (Now back in Afghanistan, having turned on his former sponsors-and they on him-Hekmatyar dodges CIAmissile 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 aUN-brokered agreement. (That agreement required the cessation of both Soviet and U.S. aid to the rivalfactions in the ongoing civil war. The U.S. refused to sign it.) Remarkably, the regime in Kabul, whichencouraged women's education and employment and discouraged the wearing of the burqa, endured untilApril 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 hisfirst decrees was to mandate the wearing of the burqa by Kabul's relatively well-educated andsophisticated 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 busyelsewhere, trying to impose "peace" on Somalia and the Balkans, intermittently bombing Iraq, tryingto 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 fromthe 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 theCIA, principally concerned with restoring order in Afghanistan and the protection of Pakistan's trade routesinto Central Asia. (They were abetted by Pakistan's female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, in power 1988-90and 1993-96). The ISI recruited Talibs from the religious schools it subsidized in the Afghan refugee camps inPakistan. But the founder of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, developed his own power base within Afghanistan from1993, acquiring a reputation as a man of high moral integrity prepared to take action to end the factionalfighting, in which the abuse of women (and boys) was a staple feature. In the spring of 1994, Taliban membersattacked the base of a commander in Singesar who had abducted and raped two teenage girls. They freed thegirls, 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 theNorthern Alliance warlords.

The Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, immediately seizing, castrating and hanging Najibullah. (He washanded over by his
own intelligence chief, Rashid Dostum, a turncoat many times over, now largely in charge of northernAfghanistan.) Once in
power, they continued the prior government's basic policies towards women, mandating the burqa, and denyingwomen educationand employment. Once in power, they continued the prior government's basic policies towardswomen, 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 tohealth 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 inKabul before being shot in the head as crowds cheered. The award-winning documentary "Behind theVeil," made by the Anglo-Afghan filmmaker Saira Shah for the BBC's Channel Four last summer, damninglyexposed the anti-woman features of the regime.

At that time, Afghanistan was not on a U.S. "enemies list." The Wall Street Journal, whichclosely reflects official thinking, had offered the Taliban limited praise: "The Taliban," accordingto the Journal, were "the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they were crucial tosecure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and othernatural 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 numerousoccasions, 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 "Ministryfor 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 theSaudi regime. The U.S. had never made an issue of that ministry, or the Saudi laws that are asmisogynistic as any on earth. Or for that matter, the chattel slavery practiced in the harems of the Kuwaitielite 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 Talibanregime 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 timecustomarily allotted to her (rather less articulate) spouse, in order to (as she put it) "kick off aworld-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaeda terrorist network andthe regime it supports." A politically rather intelligent move, actually. Time Magazine hadreported that 100 civilians were killed in the bombing of Karam October 11; the mainstream press had reportedthe 8 killed in Kabul and 21 in Tirin Kor October 21; 25 in Doori and 10 in Herat October 24; the 10 or so buspassengers near Kandahar two days later; 13 more in Kabul October 28; the 25 plus in Chowkar-Karez villagelate 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 brutaloppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists. Long before the current war began, the Taliban andits terrorist allies were making the lives of children and women in Afghanistan miserable. Women have beendenied access to doctors when they're sick. Life under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even smalldisplays of joy are outlawed --- children aren't allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings forlaughing 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 theirhomes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. Yet the terrorists whohelped rule that country now plot and plan in many countries. And they must be stopped. The fight againstterrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women I hope [that this Thanksgiving] Americans willjoin our family in working to insure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women andchildren of Afghanistan."

(At the time, Bush was hitting up American school kids to donate money for their Afghan counterparts, andU.S. planes were dropping food packets to sustain the hungry and win Afghan friends. 70% of these ruptured onimpact; of these, 90% contained spoiled food; lots of children ate the packages of desiccant and get sick totheir stomachs. As a report by retired Special Forces officers matter-of-factly put it: "Food packetsthat make people sick is just one more reason to hate the United States in an already hostileenvironment" 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 NorthernAlliance regime, hoisted to power by U.S. assistance, did nothing to alleviate it. Between 1978 and 1992, atleast in Kabul, the succession of Soviet-backed regimes made some headway in advancing women's rights, butduring most of that time Ms. Bush's father in law was vice president in a regime determined to topple thatregime, 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: SharbatGula. You probably won't recognize the name, but this is the woman whose face, featured on the cover of NationalGeographic in 1985, was among the most widely replicated of all the photos featured in that magazine inits long history. The photo (sometimes called "hauntingly beautiful") showed a teenage girl withwide green eyes who had plainly seen her share of terror. With some fanfare, National Geographic announcedlast spring that the hitherto nameless subject of the photo had been found in the Tora Bora region ofAfghanistan, 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, "lifeunder 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 camerawithout a burqa, talking to Americans, with every incentive to endorse "Operation EnduringFreedom." Instead she indicates a preference for the status quo of the recent past. Her stance is not, ofcourse, an argument for Mullah Omar; but it is an argument against bombing, disorder, and there-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 inAfghanistan concluded that the forces led by (the now lionized) Ahmed Shah Massoud systematically raped andkilled Hazzara women in Kabul in March 1995: "Massood's troops went on a rampage, systematically lootingwhole streets and raping women." Since their return to power, Northern Alliance forces have returned totheir old habits; on February 24 Boston Globe reporter David Filipov documented the widespread rape ofPashtun women in Mazar-e Sharif by Abdul Rashid Dostum's militiamen. A March 8 Human Rights Watch reportdocuments 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 forfear 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 anddancing in the streets--doesn't get it. The head-to-toe garment is a protection from rape, as well as anemblem 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 aprovisional government in Afghanistan, two women were included in the cabinet. These were Sima Samar, aHazzara and member of the Hazzara-based Hezb-I-Wahdat (Party of Islamic Unity), who became minister of women'saffairs and a deputy prime minister; and Suhaila Siddiqi, a former member of the Parcham faction of thepro-Soviet People's Democratic Party that had ruled Afghanistan from 1978 to 1992. Siddiqi had held high rankunder the Najibullah regime, then served as chief surgeon in a Kabul hospital under the Northern Alliance, andhad even been allowed to practice under the Taliban.

The RAWA (whom I respect, as an organization serious about confronting fundamentalism and promotingfeminism) denounced both of these women for their histories and political associations. Nonetheless, theirpresence in the 30-person interim administration was used to put a female-friendly face on what was in essenceanother collection of Northern Alliance warlords. But that face faded during the Loya Jirga in June. Themajority of delegates, including the small female component, wanted the former king, Zahir Shah, to serve ashead of state rather than Hamzid Karzai, who is seen as a puppet of the Americans and pawn of the warlords. USenvoy Zalmay Khalilzad effectively vetoed that proposal, shooing in Karzai, the U.S.'s man, while thugs in thewarlords' 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 sheturned down the position in favor of a lesser human rights post. (She had already stated, June 11, "Thisis a rubber stamp. Everything has already been decided by the powerful ones.") The Jirga concluded June19 (following a walkout of half the delegates two days earlier, in protest of foreign manipulation of theproceedings, 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 thegovernment her husband heads works actively to suppress those rights, and suffocate that dignity, by itsalliance with the same old Mujahadeen it sponsored in the 1980s. So don't expect Washington to help remove anyburqas soon, and don't expect the women who eventually do so to feel anything but contempt for theBushes.

Gary Leupp is an an associate professor, Departmentof History, Tufts University and coordinator, Asian Studies Program