Kelley said:
imagine you were white in the south, in a country where people basically saw their states as sovereign, just as those in the european union see themselves as sovereign. what do you think of people who said back then, "well, it is a profoundly stupid idea to impose integration on them because it's not part of their culture. all kinds of violence will erupt and they will hate the US government and the north for imposing their ways on them, etc.?" (as if afghanistan hasn't experienced a taste of women's "lib" already. and where were you to denounce the soviet practice that helped encourage this misogynist backlash?) what about the same idiots who said the same thing in Boston?
do you think all the people subjected to violence in the past 50 years would have preferred that we slow change down to acclimate to the needs of whites? why the fuck should anyone in afghanistan--if women want to participate in politics--be expected to shut the fuck up and be quiet in the interests of protecting some asshole's ego and identity?
And I say:
I think that if slowing change down to acclimate to the needs of the whites would have been pretty damn necessary if the whites in question were all trained warriors armed to the teeth with a proven history of slaughtering people who opposed them in horrific ways, which is what every single damn faction with a claim to power in Afghan society is. If I thought that quick desegregation of the American South would fuel mass killings of blacks and destablize the entire friggin' region, I would certainly have been against it. And I suspect very much that massive promotion of feminism, as worthy a goal as it is in itself, would do nothing but worsen a situation which, IMHO, is already almost certain to slide into anarchy pretty soon anyway. I do not think that a bunch of blue helmets is going to do anything to stabilize Afgh. Stabilizing Afgh. with a foreign presence is mostly what the Soviets were trying to do. It doesn't work in tribal societies, especially heavily armed ones with a warrior culture. UN soldiers are going to get blown up constantly, just like the Soviets (who were not facing a "united Afghanistan," which never existed contrary to contemporary propaganda, but a legion of different factions).
I also suspect that a majority of Afghan women, who have after all been socialized in an extremely patriarchal system, would accept it themselves. People are not born wanting to be political. This is a completely non-Western, tribal culture. I doubt that a concept like "democracy" makes any sense at all to most Afghans, much less "equality of the sexes." And all this harping on the burka...the burka is a part of Afghan culture, I think a reprehensible part, not something imposed by those diabolical Talibs. Forcing people to give up centuries-old traditions overnight and at the point of a gun is not going to work, not to mention being hubristic and paternalistic as hell.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal
West's feminists under fire from female general (from These Times, I think)
FROM STEPHEN FARRELL IN KABUL
THE general leans forward in the gathering gloom, her eyes glinting with anger, and delivers a surprise attack on an unexpected foreign enemy. Not the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan, nor the Americans still bombing her country. Not the Pakistani-backed Taleban, nor yet their Arab legions, whose Wahhabi fundamentalism fuelled much of the regime's misogyny.
Instead General Suhaila Siddiq, 60, sighs with exasperation at Western feminists and their obsession with the burka, the all-enveloping veil whose forcible use symbolised for many outsiders the Taleban's oppressive rule.
"The first priority should be given to education, primary school facilities, the economy and reconstruction of the country but the West concentrates on the burka and whether the policies of the Taleban are better or worse than other regimes," she says dismissively. "Let these things be decided by history."
She believes that the burka, which was worn long before the Taleban and still is by most women around Kabul, is not the battlefield upon which to fight their war.
General Siddiq is Afghanistan's only woman general, a surgeon, hospital director and heroine to a generation of young women who remained in the country. Born in Kandahar the daughter of a powerful regional governor, she is that rare thing: an Afghan Pashtun who is not comfortable speaking her own language and prefers Persian, historically the language of the Kabul elite.
Now head of the Women and Children's Hospital in Kabul, she is scornful of exiled Afghan women's rights campaigners and Western feminists who champion their agenda. Her most withering comments are reserved for such vaunted women's champions as Emma Bonino, the former EU Commissioner, who brought the wrath of the Taleban down on Afghan women when a CNN crew accompanying her filmed women patients in Kabul in 1997.
Of Hillary Clinton, another supposed advocate, she simply says: "She cannot defend her own rights against her husband. How can she defend the rights of my country?" At the 400-bed hospital in Kabul, where she now heads a separate women's section, her colleagues speak reverentially of the woman who took on the Taleban on their own ground.
"General Siddiq, General Siddiq," repeated nine times, was the universal answer from women medical students asked to name the person they most admired in the world.