From The Independent:

More than half of Afghanistan is back under Taliban control and the Nato force in the country needs to be doubled in size to cope with the resurgent group, a report by the Senlis Council think-tank says. A study by the group found that the Taliban, enriched by illicit profits from the country’s record poppy harvest, had formed de-facto governments in swathes of the southern Pashtun belt. […]

Yesterday’s Senlis dossier coincided with an Oxfam report saying that Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian crisis in which millions face “severe hardship comparable with sub-Saharan Africa”. It highlights the fact that US spending on aid in the country, $4.4bn since 2002, was only a fraction of its military expenditure of $35bn in 2007 alone.

“As in Iraq, too much aid is absorbed by profits of companies and subcontractors, on non-Afghan resources and on high expatriate salaries and living costs,” said the report. “Each full-time expatriate consultant costs up to half a million dollars a year.”

Meanwhile, Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said civilian casualties caused by military action has reached “alarming levels” this year. “These not only breach international law but are eroding support among the Afghan community for the government and international military presence, as well as public support in contributing states for continued engagement in Afghanistan,” she said.

The over 50% figure put forward by this think tank is subject to dispute; the fact that the Taliban is controlling much of Afghanistan cannot, alas, reasonably be disputed at this point.

I went to a reading by Khaled Hosseini last night, at the bay area Book Group Expo. Khaled read from a section of his new book A Thousand Splendid Suns, which someone described as being the history of Afghanistan viewed through the eyes of two women.

The reading was fascinating/frightening: it detailed the search of a pregnant woman and her surrogate mother for a hospital that would take them in while she gave birth. Women had been banned from all the hospitals in Afghanistan, bar one, and that one lacked water, electricity, and basic medical supplies. When the woman’s baby turned out to be in the breech position, the doctor apologized for the lack of anasthetic, and then continued to do a cesarian section anyway.

Khaled Hosseini is a physician who has worked internationally; consequently, the medical details had a frightening heft. He described the way in which the pregnant woman’s mouth stretched back and frothed with pain.

As he passed into this description, the audience, which was full, began to shift. The demographic was mostly women, but with more men than last year (I’d make a guess at 25-30%). Everyone was uncomfortable. As Hosseini described the doctor’s whispered apologies, I heard people exclaiming to each other “There isn’t going to be any anasthetic…!” Everyone appeared to find the idea shocking, unthinkable. Hosseini himself said that when he had gone into Afganistan as a physician, hoping to lend aid, he’d been shocked to hear from doctors that the sheer number of injuries that had been incurred by the war when the warlords entered Afghanistan meant that physicians were constantly running out of basic supplies. A doctor told him that it had, during the war, become expected to perform cesarian sections, and even amputations, without anasthetic. “As a doctor from the west,” said Hosseni, “the idea was wild…”
Read the rest of this entry »

Heart at Woman’s Space: The Margins reports* a great list of ways for people to take concrete steps to help Malalai Joya, who has been suspended from the Afghan parliament for insulting warlords.

Here are some of her suggestions, but make sure to check out her post!

YOU CAN do so in the following ways:

- Write to Afghan officials and file your protest for expelling and prosecuting Joya, while the terrorists and human rights violators in the parliament were provided immunity before any court for their past crimes last month.

- Express your concern for Joya’s security during the court sessions as the fundamentalists currently hold key positions in Afghanistan’s judiciary.

- Circulate this letter and ask lawyers and defenders of human rights in your area and country to come forward and help Joya during her court proceedings and defend her.

- Donate to Joya’s security fund online at www.malalaijoya.com/donor/donor_info.php to help improve her security with necessary equipment and facilities, while she is now deprived of all official facilities.

Letters of protest can be sent to the following sources:

President Hamid Karzai
khaleeq.ahmad@gmail.com
president@afghanistangov.org

Supreme Court of Afghanistan
aquddus@supremecourt.gov.af

Afghanistan’s Parliament
hasib_n786@yahoo.com

Interior Ministry
moinews@gmail.com
wahed.moi@gmail.com

Justice Ministry of Afghanistan
info@moj.gov.af
hidayatr@moj.gov.af

We thank you for your prompt action and support and hope you will forward a copy of your letters to mj@malalaijoya.com.

–

*edited to fix an error.

From WIMN’s Voices: Malalai Joya is Suspended from Parliament.

A few excerpts:

Twenty eight year old intrepid Afghan MP, Malalai Joya, has just been suspended from Parliament for comparing warlords in power to donkeys. Joya is the youngest and most outspoken member of Parliament and has survived 4 assassination attempts for denouncing warlords, many of whom were funded at various times by the US government in the fight against the Soviets (1980s) and the Taliban (post-9-11).

…It is clear that the US’s post-Taliban experiment in Afghanistan intended to fool Americans into believing that Afghan women were being liberated. We were convinced by the Bush administration and the mainstream media that “democracy” and “women’s rights” were the new buzzword in Afghanistan. But the US government did several things that ensured women’s political, economic and social rights would never be realized: they empowered the misogynist pre-Taliban warlords who now sit in government, they installed a pro-warlord puppet President into office (Hamid Karzai), and they have fought a futile war in the countryside against “Taliban remnants” that has achieved nothing but a legitimizing and strengthening of the Taliban. How could women possibly have any rights in such a situation?

…Today women in the Afghan Parliament have two options: they can remain silent and betray the people they are supposed to represent, thereby ensuring their personal safety. Or they can speak out in defiance of the blanket of silence surrounding the war criminals, and risk their lives like Malalai Joya. In such a context do words like “democracy” and “women’s rights” have any meaning?

Read the rest.

–

Headline fixed per a correction provided by Lu. Thanks, Lu!

Different people observe the changing seasons in different ways. For gardeners spring means planting things, for sports fans it means the beginning of the cricket season,* for students spring means avoiding studying for exams, and for Wellington activists spring is celebrated by protesting the conference of the New Zealand Defence Industry Association.

Every year the New Zealand Defence Industry Association holds a forum. To quote from their website:

NZDIA organises the New Zealand Defence Seminars, generally held annually in October/November. This Seminar brings together Australian and New Zealand commercial companies, Asian, Australian and New Zealand Defence purchasing interests together with high level New Zealand Ministerial involvement.

Isn’t nice that they manage to leave off references to the purpose of the ‘defence’ industry is to kill people, and the current wars.

Now obviously on a global scale New Zealand arms trade is insignificant. One of the members of the NZDIA makes grenates in his garage. But that doesn’t make them any less repsonsible for the products they produce. Rakon (while not part of NZDIA), is the most used example of a New Zealand company that makes products to kill people. Their GPS crystals are used in US made Smart bombs, some of which were dropped on Palestine and Lebanon this year (more here.

For the last few years the Defence industry has been held at Te Papa (New Zealand’s national museum. This has angered some people even more - Te Papa’s branding is ‘Our Place.** The Defence Industry conference has become one of the focal points of peace organisation, the other being the war against Iraq. Organising against the New Zealand defence industry brings the links between capitalism and war home.

I’ve been protesting the defence industry conference since 2001. I have to admit that I haven’t had a huge amount of enthusiasm for the protests for the last few years. You organise small protests at things year after year, and in the end you just don’t have the energy to do it again.

So I can say that yesterday’s protest was truly fantastic without blowing my own trumpet (all I did was turn up).

The police were really worried about protesters and had put up blockades all around Te Papa. This made it really easy for protesters outside each entrance to stop those going to the conference getting in or out. There were over 200 people there for most of the afternoon (people came and went), and every entrance to Te Papa was blockaded

In order for this to work the police closed the museum for the afternoon. Which shows where the priorities are, it’s more important that the weapons conference goes ahead than that people can actually use the museum.

What was really amazing about the protests was that no-one got arrested. The trick at a protest is to know your strength. The vast majority of people who have been arrested on protests I’ve been at have got off - they hadn’t done anything wrong. But police arrest people on protests because they can - if the crowd is big enough they don’t arrest anyone because it’ll just make more trouble. It’s often really hard to judge your strength - I’m always very cautious. But this time people knew exactly when to back down - when we were weakening. It was an incredibly well organised and effective action.

*Or not - I could be wrong about either of these facts, since I know slightly more about sports than I do about gardening.

** Personally I don’t think it matters that much where it’s held and I occasionally find the arguments against it being held at Te Papa a little bit precious. It’s not like the museum doesn’t have problems of its own: Women? Kind of absent. Work and the people who do it? Not so much. Struggle over these things? Five minutes in one film.

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA vet who specialized in studying bin Laden, answers six questions for Harpers. The bit that will be quoted the most, I think, is this: “In the long run, we’re not safer because we’re still operating on the assumption that we’re hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we’re hated because of our actions in the Islamic world.”

I’m posting a couple of excerpts, but it’s worthwhile to read the whole thing.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Kitchen Cabinet’s Lily Malcolm links approvingly to an anti-feminist screed by Kay Hymowitz, “Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam.” The article gives a broad overview of the horrifying conditions women live under in “Islamic fundamentalist” countries, and has a good sidebar on Islamic feminism.

I’m glad conservatives are finally paying attention to how women are abused under Sharia law - but the article’s critique of feminism is nonsense. Ms. Hymowitz’s critique consists mostly of the usual recycled antifeminist cliches (a dab of Who Stole Feminism, a riff on pomo academic feminists, etc). That fluff aside, Hymowitz does float a (relatively) new antifeminist claim: According to her, feminists haven’t said a word about how women in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia suffer under Sharia law; feminists never mentioned the women sentenced to death in Nigeria, feminists have never objected to honor killings. Instead, we’ve all been worrying about if women can golf at Augusta.

Ms. Hymowitz’s thesis is ridiculous. Not only have feminists (including the academic feminists Ms. Hymowitz disdains) been speaking on these issues for decades, until recently feminists have been almost the only Westerners speaking. There have been literally thousands of feminist speaking (in books, websites, articles, fundraisers, letter-writing campaigns, conferences, etc) about women under Islam and Sharia law.

Let’s address one of Ms. Hymowitz’s specific claims:

[Feminists] have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

Have feminists paid more attention to Augusta and lacrosse than to the oppression of women under Sharia law? I decided to search the websites of the two largest feminist organizations in the US; how many hits would I get for Sharia versus Augusta?:

Contrary to Ms. Hymowitz’s accusation, feminists overwhelmingly pay more attention to women under Sharia than to women golfing. Her entire argument is based on a factual mistake - and one that she could have easily have corrected herself, if she had bothered to do fifteen seconds of research. (That feminists pay more attention to the plight of women in Saudi Arabia than the plight of women excluded from Augusta is no surprise; conservatives have been far more obsessed with Augusta than feminists. Body & Soul has an excellent post about the “feminists-only-pay-attention-to-Augusta” silliness.)

(Of course, none of the many right-wing bloggers who blogged this article checked to see if Ms. Hymowitz’s thesis was true, either.)

Statistics aside, there’s a deeper issue here: Is it ridiculous for American feminists to be concerned about American problems when women elsewhere have it worse?. Ms. Hymowitz wants us to answer “yes,” but the same criticism could be applied to Ms. Hymowitz’s work. In the mid-1990s, when the Feminist Majority Foundation was gearing up their campaign against the Taliban, Ms. Hymowitz was trying to show that Sesame Street doesn’t help kids learn to read. By her own standards, shouldn’t she have been ignoring that issue, concentrating instead on more urgent educational problems faced by Afghani children (especially girls)?

Well, yes - but Ms. Hymowitz wouldn’t dream of living up to the standards she measures feminism by, because those standards are ridiculous. It’s human nature to pay more attention to what’s going on in our own culture; and if anything, feminists have been less insular than most Americans. (Even Ms. Hymowitz has to admit that the Feminist Majority Foundation was focusing on the Taliban years before 9/11).

Perhaps it would be better if Americans paid less attention to American issues, and more attention to people who have things objectively worse abroad. But is it fair for Ms. Hymowitz to hold feminists to a standard she doesn’t hold anyone else - including herself - to?

Let me make a prediction: Five years from now, Ms. Hymowitz will have moved on to some other issue-of-the-moment; but feminists will still be working to help women under Sharia law (alongside the thousand other issues feminists worry about). Feminists were almost the only Westerners who gave a shit about women under Sharia law before 9/11 (Dworkin was writing about it in the 1970s), and we’ll still give a shit when it’s no longer fashionable.

The truth is, feminists haven’t been silent; Kay Hymowitz just hasn’t been listening.

Update: Boy, am I late! Off the Kuff and The Sideshow were covering this question back in September.

Second Update: There’s a little discussion of this going on over on Eschaton (whose post on this subject sums up what’s happening well). The funniest comment comes from Carpeicthus: “Ah yes, how well I remember my pre-9/11 college days, when the Young Republicans were constantly holding rallies and passing out flyers decrying the Taliban.” Hee hee.

Update the third: Body and Soul picks up the ball (is it a golf ball?) and runs much further with it; if you liked this post, you’ll love Jeanne’s.

Via Barroom Philosophy comes this Guardian article by Katharine Viner.

Just as he bombed Afghanistan to liberate the women from their burkas (or, as he would have it, to free the "women of cover"), and sent out his wife Laura to tell how Afghans are tortured for wearing nail varnish, so now Bush has taken on the previously- unknown cause of Iraqi women - actually, look at the quotes, it’s women everywhere! - to justify another war. Where next? China because of its anti-girl one-child policy? India because of widow- burning outrages? Britain because of its criminally low rape conviction rate?

At home, Bush is no feminist. On his very first day in the Oval office, he cut off funding to any international family-planning organisations which offer abortion services or counselling (likely to cost the lives of thousands of women and children); this year he renamed January 22 - the anniversary of Roe vs Wade which permitted abortion on demand - as National Sanctity of Human Life Day and compared abortion to terrorism: "On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life… Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life."

[…]"feminist" George Bush has abandoned the women of Afghanistan: where is his concern (or Laura’s, or Tony Blair’s, or Cherie Blair’s, who was also wheeled out by her husband) for the very many Afghan women who live in fear of the marauding mojahedin who now run the country and are in many ways as repressive as the Taliban? Where were their protests when Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s women’s affairs minister and one of only two women ministers in Hamid Karzai’s western-installed government, was forced from her job this summer because of death threats?[…]

And in the west, feminists are left with the fact that their own beliefs are being trotted out by world leaders in the name of a cause which does nothing for the women it pretends to protect. This is nothing less than an abuse of feminism, one which will further discredit the cause of western feminism in the Arab world, as well as here. When George Bush mouths feminist slogans, it is feminism which loses its power.

Of course, anything bad for the Taliban is wonderful for the world. But helping the women of Afghanistan requires more than overthrowing the Taliban; it requires a level of commitment and follow-through that the US is lacking.

(Cartoon I drew last December which is unfortunately still relevant.)