Terrorism Against Women On-going in Afghanistan; Bush Administration Stifles a Yawn

Terrorism Against Women On-going in Afghanistan; Bush Administration Stifles a Yawn (posted 29 October 2002, 11pm)

Here's a pretty old legacy post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 22 years ago, in 2002, on the World Wide Web.

Lest you fear, gentle reader, that I have lost myself in the Bush administration’s house of mirrors and can no longer talk about anything but the damned war, I would like to take this time to mention the fact that, contrary to the claims of the Right’s war marketing gurus, women in Afghanisan continue to face brutal attacks, and it turns out that women’s liberation was not particularly served by bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and imposing a puppet government dominated by jihadi thugs (you know, the jihadi thugs who chased out the old jihadi thugs… who in turn had chased out the jihadi thugs that we put back in power).

Over the past several weeks, eight terrorist attacks have targeted girls’ schools with bombs, arson, and gunfire. In Kandahar, the site of the most recent bombing, hand-written pamphlets were distributed back in April threatening violence if women took jobs or attended school. The city was also recently the site of the attempted assasination of Gul Agha Shirzai and Puppet-in-Chief Hamid Karzai. Thanks to the US, the country is no longer in the iron fist of jihadi dictatorship; instead, it is now being blown to hell all over again by a whole host of self-appointed holy warriors and straight-up marauders and goons.

Afghan women have been crying out for more security, but the Bush administration is too busy figuring out its next war for liberation to do a damn thing. Given the fact that the US government put Afghanistan in this horrible mess, and most Afghans (other than the warlords themselves) are begging for us to help restore peace and stability, it seems to me that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. government ought to consider expanding the presence of international peace-keepers outside of just Kabul. Indeed, it would be nothing less than evil to carelessly skip around the globe spreading death and destruction while ignoring the mess that was already created by the war for regime change in Afghanistan.

Take Action!

Stand in solidarity with the women and girls in Afghanistan who are facing constant attack from the self-appointed holy warriors of the male supremacist counter-revolution. You can help support embattled girls’ schools in Afghanistan by donating money and/or school supplies to RAWA and the Afghan Women’s Mission. These attacks on Muslim women cannot be allowed to stop girls’ education again.

Second, contact the Bush administratin to demand that the U.S. government live up to its claims to support a safe and free Afghanistan, by responding to the Afghan people’s requests for an expansion of international peace-keepers beyond Kabul.

5 replies to Terrorism Against Women On-going in Afghanistan; Bush Administration Stifles a Yawn Follow replies to this article

Lisa Waldner /# 4am • 13 May 2003

Will this be happening all over again in Iraq? Where does the dictator Bush get off spouting claims of freedom of speech? when nobody is permitted to speak out against him? ie even his own citizens and fellow Texans the dixie chicks!

Follow Up
Lisa Waldner /# 4am • 13 May 2003

Will this be happening all over again in Iraq? Where does the dictator Bush get off spouting claims of freedom of speech? when nobody is permitted to speak out against him? ie even his own citizens and fellow Texans the dixie chicks!

Follow Up

— 2009 —

Nick Manley /# 11am • 26 Apr 2009

Charles,

I am confused. Do you agree with RAWA that a coalition of nations or the U.N. can send peacekeepers to Afghanistan? Doesn’t that violate your opposition to statist war?

Just curious. I know this post is older. You may not have been an anarchist when writing it.

Follow Up
Rad Geek /# 2pm • 26 Apr 2009

Nick,

When I wrote this post 7 years ago, I believed that the ideal thing to do would be to offer as much solidarity and material support as possible to grassroots non-governmental women’s organizations, particularly RAWA, who were willing to stand up to the warlords; but that an expansion of U.N. peacekeeping forces (ha, ha) was a second-best solution in a sorry situation that seemed more politically viable. I no longer believe that; I think that the kind of practicality I was thinking of at the time is actually a sucker’s bet, and also that, even setting aside considerations of strategery, absolutely the only thing that the U.S. government and NATO and the UN can do for Afghanistan is to leave as soon as possible (and for their political leaders to start paying reparations out of their own pockets; but don’t hold your breath). I do still strongly support material support to RAWA and non-governmental grassroots opposition, to the rape-legalizing Afghan government, to the warlord thugs that the U.S. government has armed and politically empowered, and to the Taleban thugs that the U.S. government has been taking out by massacreing civilians who happened to live in the same neighborhood; but I don’t waste my breath anymore on NATO peacekeeping.

At the time I wrote this post, I working a lot with the Feminist Majority Foundation (who were supporting our campus group in Auburn). I was influenced by the policy proposals coming out of their Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls (formerly Campaign Against Gender Apartheid, re-named after the American War, ugh, in the name of governmental diplomacy). I was more or less an anarchist by this time, but a relatively new one, and hadn’t thought through a lot of this stuff yet. I opposed the war on Afghanistan from the start, and I recognized the gynocidal nature of the U.S. government’s warlordist Northern Alliance allies, so I was trying to sort through a nasty problem that I didn’t know an obvious solution to, and by way of political inertia I tended to go along with proposals from other politicos around me, that would at least disarm them, without paying enough attention to the way that the occupation actually operates. Within a few months of when I wrote this, I became deeply involved in anti-war organizing in Auburn, had made up my own mind on a lot more issues, saw my mistakes, and became much more root-and-branch on a lot of things.

Follow Up
Nick "Natasha" Manley /# 6am • 18 May 2009

“The only way our people can escape the occupant forces and their obedient servants is to rise against them under the slogans of: “Neither the occupiers! Nor the bestial Taliban and the criminal Northern Alliance; long live a free and democratic Afghanistan!””

http://www.rawa.org/rawa/2009/05/07/lets-rise-against-the-war-crimes-of-us-and-its-fundamentalist-lackeys.html

Thought you’d want to hear about this, Charles. RAWA isn’t a violent organization, so this won’t amount to a secularist insurgency against NATO forces or anything.

What I’ve learned about conventional political structures from the lack of aid to RAWA is that people like groups with guns~trappings of traditional authority. The U.N.’s structure is much closer to that of a private warlord army ~ same lack of grassroots mobilization.

Comments?

Follow Up

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