>Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>>> But the Taliban - many of whom were not Afghans, and of those who
>>> were, were from an ethnic group representing well under half the
>>> population - forced women to wear the damn things. It's not like they
>>> were spontaneous expressions of home-grown patriarchy.
>>
>>Are you sure about that? My impression was that women wore, and still
>>wear, the burkha in rural areas controlled by the Northern Alliance
>>because their husbands demand it. I was under the impression the divide
>>was not foreign/homegrown so much as city/country -- kind of like with the
>>chador in Iran: the imposition of cosmopolitan city ways on the more
>>conservative countryside (in Iran by the Shah, in Afghanistan by Soviet
>>supported governments) contributed to a fundamentalist backlash that ended
>>up enforcing country customs on the city folk.
>
>There's a difference between wearing a burkha because one's husband
>likes it and because the state demands it under pain of severe
>punishment. Which isn't to say the first isn't an obnoxious form of
>coercion, but bringing in cops and vats of acid raises the coercion
>to a new level.
Anticommunist mujahideen were known for throwing acid on women (among other acts of atrocities), as memorably documented by William Blum in _Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II_ (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995):
***** His followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department officials I have spoken with call him "scary," "vicious," "a fascist," "definite dictatorship material".{1}
This did not prevent the United States government from showering the man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. His name was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was the head of the Islamic Party and he hated the United States almost as much as he hated the Russians. His followers screamed "Death to America" along with "Death to the Soviet Union", only the Russians were not showering him with large amounts of aid.{2}
The United States began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 despite the fact that in February of that year some of them had kidnapped the American ambassador in the capital city of Kabul, leading to his death in the rescue attempt. The support continued even after their brother Islamic fundamentalists in next-door Iran seized the US Embassy in Teheran in November and held 55 Americans hostage for over a year. Hekmatyar and his colleagues were, after all, in battle against the Soviet Evil Empire; he was thus an important member of those forces Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters"....
1. Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget (Warner Books, New York, 1990), p. 149.
2. Ibid., pp. 149-50.
<http://members.aol.com/bblum6/afghan.htm> *****
However, as Valentine M. Moghadam reminds us, few feminists and other leftists in the West vocally criticized anticommunist mujahideen and actively opposed U.S. support for them, much less supported the Soviet-backed Afghan socialist government:
***** As for Afghanistan, I am as frustrated today by the American feminist preoccupation with the Taliban's gender apartheid as I was by the total silence of feminists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Mujahideen, the precursors of the Taliban, revolted against the left-wing government. Some feminists even wrote sympathetically about the freedom fighters; I may have been the only one emphasizing the reactionary and patriarchal character of the Mujahideen.
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v013/13.1moghadam.html> *****
Why silence then? Why preoccupation now?
Moreover, anti-Taliban mujahideen (many of whom joined the Northern Alliance) committed more acts of violence against women than the Taliban, most of whom are boys & young men born too late to have fought against the Soviets & soviet-backed Afghan socialists, as Ahmed Rashid writes in _Taliban_ (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000):
***** The majority [of "some 20,000 Afghans and hundreds of Pakistani _madrassa_ students" who "had streamed across the border from refugee camps in Pakistan to join Mullah Omar"] were incredibly young -- between 14 and 24 years old -- and many had never fought before although, like all Pashtuns, they knew how to handle a weapon....Many of these young warriors did not even know the history of their own country or the story of the jihad against the Soviets. These boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to know during the 1980s -- men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages, remembered their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and recounted legends and stories from Afghan history. (p. 32) ***** -- Yoshie
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