Over the last twenty years Afghan women have made considerable advances in terms of participation in the body politic. Thanks in part to the 2004 constitution, which mandated that 27 percent of seats in the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) and 17 percent in the Meshrano Jirga (upper house) be reserved for women, there have been unprecedented numbers of female representatives in Afghan National Assembly. In the words of Belquis Ahmadi, a senior program officer at the United States Institute of Peace, the share of women that turned out to cast ballots in the 2018 parliamentary election represented “one of the few bright spots” in an otherwise challenging electoral process.
The origins of the aforementioned gender-inclusive political measures are tied (at least in part) to the 2001 US-led military invasion, which did help bring to the world’s attention the disregard for women’s rights under the Taliban regime of the 1990s. After the Taliban was routed in late 2001, a job that by most accounts took only a few weeks, per the Bonn Agreement a team of Afghans and foreign legal experts set out to draft a new constitution. After toiling for nearly a year the new social contract helped lay the groundwork for the legal equality of men and women, and a more gender inclusive political regime and society. In remarks at a press conference only a few months after the constitution was signed, then-president George W. Bush proudly announced: “Today, we witness the rebirth of a vibrant Afghan culture. Music fills the marketplaces, and people are free to come together to celebrate in open.”
Yet framing the advances in Afghanistan in terms of gender rights and political participation as a product of these efforts alone would be misleading at best. At worst it belies the impressive work of Afghan women (and men) that have challenged gender barriers and fought for women’s empowerment long before 2001 (and the Taliban). Queen Soraya Tarzi (1926–29) encouraged and promoted female education and advocated for women’s employment rights. The 1964 constitution, which served as a template for the 2004 constitution, favored statutory law over Hanafi sharia law and legally enshrined Afghan women’s right to vote. Although the ulema––the Muslim clergy––viewed these changes as an unwelcome harbinger of Afghanistan’s Westernization, many urbanites embraced these new opportunities for their daughters. By mid-century, females––primarily hailing from the leftist urban elite––were being educated en masse at Kabul University and abroad in countries like Turkey. And by the 1970s women were employed in the legal, education, public administration, and healthcare sectors. Roughly 50 percent of university students were women. There were women in parliament.
During the 1960s and 1970s thousands of Afghan women, particularly those among the urban educated, participated in various protests and rallies in support of female education, women’s rights, and gender security. Fast forward to the post-9/11 era, when Malalai Joya, a female political delegate involved in the 2003 constitutional loya jirga, protested provisions she argued would politically empower warlords. In May 2005, hundreds of Afghan women marched through the streets of Kabul in protest of the kidnapping of a female Italian aid worker. A similar protest occurred in Kandahar in January 2008 after the kidnapping of a female US aid worker. The current women-led protests in response to the Taliban’s announcement of an all-male government are indeed representative of the long history of urban and educated Afghan women willing to take to the streets in the face of political and social injustices.
As politicians and pundits continue to debate the legacy of the last twenty years, the challenges facing Afghan women are sobering. As the Taliban continues to roll out plans for its new caretaker government, to be helmed by Mohammad Hasan Akhund, it should be hardly surprising given the group’s reputation that there are no women among the list of new cabinet members. Indeed, while political participation approximating anything akin to democracy moving forward is uncertain, women are likely to lose the most by the US withdrawal and the subsequent (and swift) Taliban takeover. The Taliban is assassinating women’s rights advocates and politicians, murdering schoolgirls, and appears determined to wipe out electoral processes and women’s rights, wholesale.
The National Resistance Front, which emerged only weeks ago, has declared the Taliban regime illegitimate and has aspirations for its own parallel government. The UN secretary-general expressed grave concerns for increased human rights violations under the rising caretaker government. The emerging complexity of the situation currently unfolding in the wake of the hasty withdrawal of US forces in August thus highlights a critical challenge for the United States: what to do with a Taliban government in power.
On the one hand, pressing the Taliban government to protect the rights and fundamental humanity of women and girls implies the United States acknowledges the existence of at least de facto authority. On the other hand, a blanket rejection presumably limits any influence the United States may have on the matter. Given US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s comments, it appears the United States will favor the former; but at what cost? Under the Taliban, Afghan women stand to lose nearly a century of momentum in terms of advancements in their rights and political participation. What does the future hold for women’s rights and empowerment under a Taliban regime? Is gender inclusiveness even possible when those historically committed to waging war against women reign in Kabul? These are sobering questions without easy answers. But the United States must make a decision about how to move forward: either seek to influence the Taliban regime to protect women’s rights and accept the attendant risks of appearing to recognize the regime’s legitimacy, or refuse to do so and face the risk of watching women’s hard-earned advancements—from the past twenty years and before—evaporate. In the meantime, and in the face of surging violence, Afghan women in Kabul continue to fight for their fundamental human rights.
Joel Blaxland is an assistant professor of political science in Western New Mexico University’s Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: 后生
This is the kind of wishful thinking that lead to our defeat in Afghanistan.
I fail to see the strategic or tactical perspective in this; instead, I see a foreign policy article at best. Of course this isn't the first time that a DoD-oriented venue has drifted into State's lane. Strange way to approach "Modern War".
In order to better understand the attack against the rights of women — not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world today — one must come to better understand:
a. How such things as the political, economic, social and/or value "changes,"
b. Demanded by such things as the market economy and governments working for same since approximately the 1980s,
c. How these such "change" demands have led to (a) a worldwide backlash and revolt against these such changes and, indeed, (b) a worldwide atavistic movement — to return to such things as "traditional values."
As evidence of this such worldwide phenomenon, consider the following:
"While the on-the-ground policy reversals are not always as dramatic as the language employed by these leaders, they do have a real impact. In 2017, for example, Russia decriminalized certain acts of domestic violence. Poland’s right-wing populist government has sought to limit the sale of emergency contraceptives and slashed the budget of the Office of the Ombudsman for Human Rights, which focuses in part on gender equality. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government continues to oppose the criminalization of spousal rape.
It is also worth noting that women’s rights organizations and women human rights defenders are dramatically affected by antidemocratic governments’ efforts to restrict independent civil society activism. In addition to office raids and denial of funding, women activists face graphic threats of sexual violence, physical attacks that can include sexual assault, and smear campaigns that mischaracterize their personal behavior and their work as threats to the family and to national values.
In the Philippines, for instance, the Department of Justice filed a court document labeling more than 600 people, including many prominent women human rights defenders, as members of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, putting them at risk of attack and extrajudicial killing. The list, which included UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, served to falsely accuse, intimidate, criminalize, and silence women activists who had expressed dissent. Globally, Front Line Defenders reported that 44 women human rights defenders were killed during 2017, up from 40 in 2016 and 30 in 2015. These challenges are magnified for women who are also affiliated with another vulnerable group, such as indigenous people, marginalized economic or caste groups, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people, people with disabilities, or ethnic or religious minorities.
The combative narratives promoted by these and other antidemocratic leaders have popular appeal in part because they take advantage of widespread anxiety about political, socio-cultural, and economic change. Over the past several decades, trends associated with globalization have included increased education for women, higher rates of female participation in formal employment, the relative decline of male-dominated manufacturing jobs in many industrialized countries, increased political power and representation for women, and the arrival of immigrants in higher numbers or from new source countries. A significant share of voters are receptive to politicians who promise to push back against one or all of these trends—often blurring the distinctions between them—and restore a sense of control and power."
(See "The Real World Damage" and "The Nationalist Connection" sections of the June 18, 2019 "Freedom House" article "Why Strongmen Attack Women's Rights: Authoritarian Rulers Around the World are Leading Attacks on Women’s Rights" by Colleen Scribner.)
Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:
As the recent effort to limit abortions in the State of Texas here in the U.S. might indicate, this attack on women's rights is not limited to either (a) authoritarian governments or (b) the Islamists.
Rather, it would seem that these such attacks might best understood as (a) a worldwide backlash and revolt against (b) the political, economic, social and/or value changes that (c) governments working for market forces have demanded over the last 40 or so years?
The following item, in this case from Walter Russell Mead (Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute), might also prove useful; this in:
a. Describing the — overall — worldwide "community" backlash and revolt; this, against
b. The political, economic, social and/or value changes demanded by "market-society" (and the governments working for same) over the last quarter century:
“Over the past quarter century, Western policymakers became infatuated with some dangerously oversimplified ideas. They believed capitalism had been tamed and would no longer generate economic, social, or political upheavals. They felt that illiberal ideologies and political emotions had been left in the historical dustbin and were believed only by ‘bitter’ losers’–people who ‘cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them… as a way to explain their frustrations,’ as Barack Obama famously put it in 2008. Time and the normal processes of history would solve the problem; constructing a liberal world order was simply a matter of working out the details.
Given such views, many recent developments–from the 9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism to the financial crisis to the recent surge of angry nationalist populism on both sides of the Atlantic–came as a rude surprise. It is increasingly clear that globalization and automation have helped break up the socioeconomic model that under-girded postwar prosperity and domestic social peace, and that the next stage of capitalist development will challenge the very foundations of both the global liberal order and many of its national pillars.
In this new world disorder, the power of identity politics can no longer be denied. Western elites believed that in the twenty-first century, cosmopolitanism and globalism would triumph over atavism and tribal loyalties. They failed to understand the deep roots of identity politics in the human psyche and the necessity for those roots to find political expression in both foreign and domestic policy arenas. And they failed to understand that the very forces of economic and social development that cosmopolitanism and globalization fostered would generate turbulence and eventually resistance, as ‘Gemeinschaft’ (community) fought back against the onrushing ‘Gesellschaft’ (market society), in the classic terms sociologists favored a century ago.”
(See the Mar-Apr 2017 edition of “Foreign Affairs” and, therein, the article by Mead entitled “The Jacksonian Revolt: American Populism and the Liberal Order.”)
Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:
As can be seen by this example also:
a. The atavistic, backwards movement today towards such things as "traditional values"
b. And the regression of women's rights in relations to same
c. This would not seem to be phenomenon limited to either (a) the Islamic World and/or (b) the Taliban.
'And they failed to understand that the very forces of economic and social development that cosmopolitanism and globalization fostered would generate turbulence and eventually resistance, as ‘Gemeinschaft’ (community) fought back against the onrushing ‘Gesellschaft’ (market society), in the classic terms sociologists favored a century ago.”'
I am still trying to decode the above-quoted paragraph, but I couldn't agree more about the power of identity politics which was mentioned in relation to it. Identity politics has always been a weapon of choice for the purposes of agitation and propaganda. From the advocacy of KKK-style racial supremacy all the way across to the exponents of cancel-culture tyranny and the 'trained Marxists' of BLM, identity politics is a cornerstone of community-based outrage whether 'national socialist' or just plain 'socialist' in character and effect. But to give credit where it's due, the radical Left are much better at it than the radical Right. The Left also have the decided advantages of an educated gift of the gab, a breathtaking ability in the veiled and abstract use of language, and – best of all – an ideological security of tenure in the West's leading universities.
Any careful study of communist subversion reveals that the dedicated communist draws no distinction between civil rights activism on the one hand and the advancement of a civil rights-denying Marxist agenda on the other. Hence the ideological paradox of 'peace' activists who voiced their opposition to the Vietnam War by serving the propaganda interests of one of the belligerents and then celebrating the fall of Saigon when it was vanquished by conventional military force of arms.
While the military defeat of an abandoned South Vietnam was greeted with celebratory joy by the social-justice loving Left. The problem facing the Left with the fall of Kabul is how to celebrate yet another much-desired humiliation of American global power while at the same time taking a stand for the rights of Afghan women. One possible means might be to shift the focus from the plight of women in Afghanistan (as indicated in Prof. Blaxland's article) to some supposedly globalised threat to the rights of women in Western society. As previously stated, identity politics (often coupled with a textbook 'united front' scam) has been the defining hallmark of leftist revolutionary strategy since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. A genocidal Bolshevik-style arousal of 'class hate' was the classic example of its deployment up until the era when the Chinese Communist Party made the surreally hypocritical discovery that it was possible to finance a civil rights-denying Marxist dictatorship with a capitalist economy.
Women's rights in the West must be defended and guaranteed and I'm sure in that regard it would be educative to clarify the meaning of terms like 'western elites' and 'market society' and where women's rights stand in relation to it all. But mindful of Prof. Blaxland's article, I don't believe that right this minute the women of Afghanistan could give a rat's rear end about that particular line of sociological inquiry. Their hopes for just a fraction of the West's freedom and civil liberties have been betrayed as egregiously as the people of South Vietnam were betrayed from 1972 to the final and appalling disgrace of April 1975.
In the space of a few weeks, a pseudo-woke American president has facilitated beyond redemption a near-terminal reversal of the rights which the women of Afghanistan have gained over the past 20 years. By the time this reply is published many of those women will either be dead or living in fear for their lives while the Left celebrate the concomitant weakening of US power which was needed to protect them. Prof. Blaxland need no longer worry, therefore, about how the US might use its influence to moderate the Talban's mistreatment of Afghan women. The US no longer has any influence to use! With the US having — yet again — shot its international credibility through the foot, can it seriously be believed the Talban will regard US diplomacy with anything other than the derisive contempt which it deserves?
That is why I believe the women of Afghanistan whose necks have been thrown beneath the Talban blade aren't too fussed right now about whether the Gemeinschaft (community) are fighting back against the Gesellschaft (market-society) or, for that matter, whether I have developed a Kopfschmerzen (headache) in a futile attempt to understand what any of that means. Right now, as far as influencing the Talban is concerned, where ideas were once negotiable, convictions are now in urgent need of shooting to be cured. Unfortunately it is the Talban who have the guns and feminist convictions which will be subjected to the cure. To redress that tyrannical imbalance you need soldiers not 'sociologists' — classical or otherwise. More importantly, it requires an intellectual Western 'elite' with enough integrity to put a genuine defence of women’s rights ahead of their own anti-Western propaganda and agenda.
David Kilcullen also seems to be discussing this (Western-driven?) Gesellschaft (market-society) versus Gemeinschaft (community) clash, for example, re: our efforts in the Greater Middle East:
From David Kilcullen's "Counterinsurgency Redux:"
"Politically, in many cases today, the counter-insurgent (often backed by the U.S./the West) represents revolutionary change, while the insurgent fights to preserve the status quo of ungoverned spaces, or to repel an occupier – a political relationship opposite to that envisaged in classical counter-insurgency. Pakistan's campaign in Waziristan since 2003 exemplifies this. The enemy includes al-Qaeda-linked extremists and Taliban, but also local tribesmen fighting to preserve their traditional culture against twenty-first-century encroachment. The problem of weaning these fighters away from extremist sponsors, while simultaneously supporting modernisation, does somewhat resemble pacification in traditional counter-insurgency. But it also echoes colonial campaigns, and includes entirely new elements arising from the effects of globalisation."
(Item in parenthesis above is mine.)
Bottom Line Questions — Based on the Above:
Given the specific Greater Middle Eastern case provided above, should we not say that:
a. The effort to provide for (the Western idea of) "women's rights," this falls more into the Gesellschaft (market-society) camp? And that:
b. The effort to provide for (the more-traditional idea) of "women's rights," this falls more into the Gemeinschaft (community) camp?
If such indeed is the case, then should not the Afghan women — and we ourselves — be significantly interested in, and concerned with, this particular line of sociological inquiry?