>Why silence then? Why preoccupation now?
Not sure whether you're asking me or the ideological-state apparatus. You know quite well why the ISA was silent then - the acid-throwers were the heroic enemies of communism, the gravediggers of Bolshevism. They were wretched then, and they're wretched now. It's not news to me or anyone else on this list that Bush & Co don't really care about the status of women, either in Afg or the US or anywhere else, and that their talk of liberating women from their living shrouds is a lot of crap. But in some ways you sound like their mirror image - they were bad when they were fighting the Soviets, but now that they're on the side of the U.S. they're what? Not exactly good guys, but not worth condemning either? Anti-imperialists under very deep cover?
By the way, Ahmed Rashid argues in his book that U.S. feminists had a lot to do with the Clinton administration's turn away from supporting the Taliban (though the embassy bombings in 1998 helped too). Anyone know more about this?
Doug