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have sent into reverse what little progress women in the cities
had made since 2001, while most women in the countryside
have seen no progress at all, and untold thousands have been
harmed and displaced by warfare. All this has taken place on
Karzais watch and much of it with his connivance. Our government complains that the Karzai administration is corrupt,
but the greater problemnever mentionedis that it is fundamentalist. The cabinet, courts and Parliament are all largely
controlled by men who differ from the Taliban chiefly in their
choice of turbans.
If our government were truly concerned about the lives of
women in Afghanistan, it would have invited women to the
table to take part in decision-making about the future of their
country, beginning with the Bonn conference in 2001. Instead,
they have been consistently left out.
Our long history of woeful policies has put us and Afghan
women in a double bind. If we leave, the Taliban may seize
power or allow themselves to be bought in exchange for a substantial share of the government, to the detriment of women.
But if we stay, the Taliban may simply continue to creep into
power, or they may allow themselves to be bought (or reconciled) in exchange for bribes and a substantial share of the
government, all to the detriment of women, while we go on
fighting to preserve that same government. Secretary of State
Hillary Clintons assurance that reconciled Taliban will agree
to observe womens rights under the Constitution is either cynical or nave in the extreme. And the US pretense that somehow
womens rights will be preserved if only we stay long enough
to shore up the Karzai regime and the ragtag Afghan National
Army is at best a delusion. Yet the specter of the demon Taliban
somehow makes it seem plausible.
Before feminists and the antiwar left come to blows, we might
do well to consider that every Afghan woman or girl who still
goes to work or school does so with the support of a progressive husband or father. Several husbands of prominent working
women have been killed for not keeping their wives at home, and
many are threatened. Whats taking place in Afghanistan is commonly depicted, as it is on the Time cover, as a battle of the forces
of freedom, democracy and womens rights (that is, the United
States and the Karzai government) against the demon Taliban.
But the real struggle is between progressive Afghan women and
men, many of them young, and a phalanx of regressive forces.
For the United States, the problem is this: the regressive forces
militating against womens rights and a democratic future for
Afghanistan are headed by the demon Taliban, to be sure, but
they also include the fundamentalist (and fundamentally misogynist) Karzai government, and us.
ANN JONES
Ann Jones writes frequently for The Nation on Afghanistan.
The Nation.
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William Greiders latest on The AIG Bailout
Scandal reveals how the Federal Reserve used
taxpayer money to bail out the insurance giant, instead of
forcing the major banks to clean up the mess they helped
create. In doing so, the Fed may have set the system up for
an even bigger fall in the future.
Each week Nation contributors appear on GRITtv
to expand on their reporting for the magazine.
This week on The Nation on GRITtv: Betsy Reed on
how Republicans are voting in a bloc against any and all of
Obamas proposals, and A.C. Thompson on his investigations into post-Katrina vigilantism and the death of Henry
Glover in New Orleans.
We Have Yet to See the Biggest Costs of the
BP Spill, says Raj Patel. If we are to learn anything
from the disaster, we must confront the difficult question:
what are the true costs of our energy needs?
The healthcare victory was no accident, argues
Richard Kirsch in What Progressives Did Right
to Win Healthcare. The campaign to win healthcare
reform was several years in the making and was based on
a well-developed and -resourced plan. Kirsch presents the
key lessons for future progressive campaigns.
To mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of the atomic
attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Greg Mitchell takes a look at government secrecy and press censorship
in How the Truth Was Hidden About Nagasaki.
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