Afghan women will be forgotten when troops withdraw

Virginia Haussegger

November 28, 2009

Opinion

Comments 6

She's pint sized, but she goes like a rocket and talks like a thrashing machine. And for the past month Malalai Joya - dubbed by western media as “the bravest woman in Afghanistan' - has been raising her voice across North America to send a strong and unambiguous message to Barack Obama, ahead of his decision next week on Afghanistan. Her message is simple - pull out now!

Malalai Joya shot to international fame when she won a seat in Afghanistan's new Parliament, at just 27 years old. By 2007 her ranting against government corruption, misogyny and the presence of criminal warlords in parliament, eventually got her thrown out of office.

The US President has been accused of 'dithering' as he's taken several months to consider whether to commit the extra 40,000 troops General McCrystal has requested to fight the Taliban. He's under considerable domestic pressure to cease the inordinate spending – 100 million US dollars a day on the military alone – and is grappling to convince a disbelieving public that the war in Afghanistan is winnable, or worthwhile.

If he wants an easy out, Malalai Joys is certainly handing him one. She insists the “occupation” of her homeland by US, NATO and allied forces – including Australia – is doing nothing to help the most vulnerable and innocent victims of war - the women and children. In fact, she argues the reverse: that foreign troop occupation has destroyed many more civilian lives than it has helped. She blames the US and NATO for providing succour to criminal warlords, by propping them up with government positions and fattening their coffers with foreign money and resources. She also blames the US for the massive increase in poppy production since 2001, which now has Afghanistan supplying 93 percent of the world's opium.

Joya argues that “democracy cannot come from war” and that Afghanistan can never be “liberated” by foreign forces. She insists that only Afghans can find a way towards a peaceful and secure future. While she is stridently anti-American, and its imperialist allies, Joya nevertheless reserve her strongest bile for Afghanistan's warlords and fundamentalists who treat women like “caged” animals.

To hear Joya rail is compelling. I've sat before her myself and was struck by her youthful passion and fearless dedication to her country. Those darting dark eyes have a way of pinning you down, and making you listen. However, at this stage of the war there is a hole in her argument, and it starts with some simple numbers.

Yes, atrocious acts of war have killed innocent civilians. The cluster bombings in Farah province in May massacred at least 150, mostly women and children. It was a shocking act – for which the US later apologised. But women are dying across Afghanistan in much bigger numbers from basic neglect. They're dying because there is no government system that provides basic care and protection to help them when they're sick, when they're beaten, abused, or even when they're hungry.

The Karzai Government is criminally negligent in its failure to support its people. The UN's 2009 Human Development Index ranks Afghanistan at 181 out of 182 countries: almost the worst place in the world in which to live. By the time you've finished reading today's newspaper, another woman will have died from reproductive complications, due to a lack of health care. One dies every 30 minutes; that's 17,376 women a year. According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, 80 percent of those deaths are preventable. This is a human rights scandal, and yet the Karzai Government has not built a single hospital for women.

More than 70 percent of women submit to forced marriages, and according to UNIFEM more than half the female population marry before the legal age of 16. Female depression is widespread and the rate of self immolation has skyrocketed. Domestic violence is endemic, with one UK report suggesting it affects 80 percent of households. Yet the Karzai Government has not built a single shelter or welfare centre for women.

However, some gutsy Afghan women activists have stepped in where the limp and useless government won't.

Since 2003 six women's shelters have been quietly established by local women, with the financial backing of international NGOs and donors. One of the board members of the Afghan Women's Network, Orzala Ashraf, is clear about this when she told me “the opportunities to support women have increased tremendously with the resources available now through NGO supports”. During the Taliban regime Ashraf ran underground schools. Now she heads a large network of health and education programs for women and children: “Before we didn't have any grants or funds to do this work”.

Loosely networked, there is a plethora of small internationally supported women's advocacy groups doing vital work across Afghanistan. Should foreign troops withdraw, even Malalai Joya has conceded there will be civil war, before a new regime is established. With such instability and lack of security, it's most doubtful international NGOs and donors will stay the course.

As the world pulls away from Afghanistan, the support funds will dry up. Then, as history has proven, the women of Afghanistan will be forgotten – again.

6 comments

Virginia says: 'However, at this stage of the war there is a hole in her argument, and it starts with some simple numbers. '
Yet she then fails to justify this assertion.

Virginia's whole argument can be boiled down to a simple proposition: Imperialism can liberate conquered peoples. It hasn't worked in Iraq; it didn't work in Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded (using the same excuse Virginia uses about liberating women, among others).

I think Virginia really needs to go behind the lies of Bush and Howard, and now Obama and Rudd, to understand the imperialist reasons for this invasion - to encircle China, to show the world the power of the US army and to help cower other recalcitrant regimes (like Iran and Venezuela).

It has nothing to do with liberating the Afghan people. That is a smokescreen for the imperialist reasons and some fellow travellers, like Virginia, fall for it every time.

If the choice is between Malalai Joya, a brave Afghan woman opposing US imperialism, or Virginia Hauseggar, a comfortable middle class Australian woman supporting imperialism in the name of feminism, I'll go with Malalai everyday.

I reprinted an interview with Malalai on my blog a few eeks ago in which she called for the invaders to get out.

Commenter

John Passant

Location

http://enpassant.com.au

Date and time

November 29, 2009, 6:30AM
Malai Joya is the voice of not only the voiceless people of her ill-fated country, but the voice of all justice-loving and anti-war people all over the world. She knows that a power headed by Bush, Dick Cheney, Rice and other war criminals who trampled democratic values in the US, will never bring freedom to the women and men of Afghanistan. America is there in Afghanistan to make it a base to achieve her sinister economic and political goals in Asia. It is not going to eliminate the Taliban and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan/Pakistan. As Robert Dreyfuss has shown in his Devil's Game, the US had and has common interests with the fundamentalists. It did remove the Taliban, but replaced them with the dreaded Northern Alliance misogynist criminals. And nowadays, Obama
is trying to persuade "moderate Taliban" and even notorious Gulbaddin to participate in the regime of Karzai a puppet whose brothers are drug lords exposed in the NYT. For the US, democracy in Afghanistan has always been a non-issue. To perpetuate her presence in the country, the US administration will not refrain even to collaborate with the Iranian regime. Moreover, the disastrous situation in Iraq is a good enough example of what really the US occupation means. Malalai Joya is representing Afghans aspirations for breaking the chains of the US as well as its fundamentalist and so-called technocrat agents. As the "pretty hands" of the US, most of the NGOs and their board members in Afghanistan are hostile to Joya because their fortunes and big salaries in the most corrupted government of the world will end as soon as American troops withdraw. Freedom-loving people should listen to Joya and not to the vultures of the mafia-dominated land.

Commenter

adamd

Date and time

November 29, 2009, 2:47AM
Of course Karzai's government hasn't acted and won't. It's composed of men with the same mentality as the rest of the country - the mentality that created this situation for Afghan women in the first place.

Commenter

Louise

Date and time

November 28, 2009, 10:24AM
It isn't only Malalai Joya who in speaking for women in Afghanistan asks for the troops out, the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan RAWA, a feminist organisation that runs schools and orphanages, agrees. They say they already have two enormous problems for women - the Taliban and the War Lords, and that is enough. They don't need foreign troops as well.

Commenter

Geraldine

Location

Clifton Hill

Date and time

November 29, 2009, 6:13AM
And Passant comes to the rescue with Ad Hominem and Strawmen arguments. A truly compelling argument devoid of all fact and reason.

Virginia makes the valid point that aid for women and children is only possible because of the presence of US troops. Passant accuses her of warmongering and makes false comparisons (the situation with the Soviet Union is rather different) - completely failing to address her argument.

He also makes the farcical argument (and oft repeated) that armchair commentators are inherently inferior to those involved. This is similar to people claiming food critics can't cook therefore their opinions are invalid. Objectivity is suprisingly useful.

Commenter

RexRox

Date and time

November 29, 2009, 2:14PM
But Virginia, we are doing out bit for the Afghan women. We have them arrested and jailed in Malaysia and Indonesia, we send cops to Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent anyone from leaving and trying to come here and those who actually make it we call "boat people" and lock them up on Christmas Island with their kids.

Never mind that only the last 150km of a harrowing 8300 journey is by sea, call them "boat people" then anything can be done to them without a murmur. Like years in jail, shooting them, anything it takes to keep out the "boat people".

Meanwhile 12 million Afghans are starving. And 17,500 women die in childbirth every year leaving their babies orphans, girls are stolen and sold, the governments pay the murdering warlords and call it the "guv'mint" and we can sit back and ask "why do the "boat people" come here"?

And if they dare to bring their kids, we call them dangerous cowards, if they leave their kids behind we call them dangerous cowards so they can't win.

Next time Evans and co. claim "we have stopped x number of people smuggling exercises", remember they are really only have innocent refugees jailed because no-one has ever been smuggled to Australia.

They come out in the open looking for land and help.

Commenter

Marilyn

Date and time

November 28, 2009, 12:55PM