Touché. Yes these are real contradictions. I was quite conscious of the criticisms that can be made of the Afghan regime for gender oppression when I wrote my piece.
But I would say
1) the oppression of sexes, classes and other groups within a community, does not necessarily justify oppressing that community as a whole, or show that is in the interests of the working people of the world.
2) it is more democratic and better to help that community to solve its own problems democratically without violence. Indeed in the case of Afghanistan you can see a country torn apart by super-power rivalry. The Taliban would not have existed in this form had the US not intervened so strongly for its own interests.
3) It is this sort of case that really is a touchstone of whether progressive people in the "christian" west can think in an unprejudiced internationalist way. To immediately think of the excesses of a culture when you think of that culture devalues the men and women who subscribe to the culture for all sorts of reasons, and leads to indefensible double standards. For example public executions by some fundamentalist muslim states seem pretty abhorrent to me. But so do the mass of executions in the bastion of democracy, the USA. And if you accept the argument of Albert Camus, that executions are meant to intimidate the population so really they ought to be public if the state is going to employ them, then the USA should be vying with the fundamentalist states of islam to show in public its deep commitment to punish evil. At least in China the executions are often public.
4) The gut lack of sympathy for people coming from a wide spectrum of muslim culture in the west, was in my opinion one of the factors why the western powers played a two-faced game of supporting the Albanian's right to self-determination in Kosovo, and did not mind using them as ground troops so long as their supply of arms could not be traced, but fundamentally decided that the only solution to the contradictions there had to be imposed by condescending saviours from on high, like 30,000 feet.
5) Now in the case of Chechnya whatever caution we might have about western involvement, surely we ought to have an internationalist assumption that is is best that the people of Chechnya are able to live their lives the way they wish. They look as if they are just about to be conquered. I mistrust leftists who can find a way to analyse that as being progressive when within Russia itself left wingers had this as one of the charges for the impeachment of Yeltsin.
Chris Burford
London