An article I want sadia mujahid, khawateen and others to read with an open mind. Please read each and every word.
The Vilification of Taliban or the Victimization of a Nation
The Hidden Agenda Behind the Feminist Majority Campaign
By Jahan Stanizai
The Afghan women are safe behind the burqa, but it is the Feminist Majority that remains in the dark on this side of the veil and the cultural divide.
The Feminist Majority accuses the current regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan with violations of civil liberties and has launched a vicious campaign under the name of the so-called "gender apartheid" against them. With connections in high places in the media, like Jay Leno, the Feminist Majority has made some headway with this issue.
The Feminist Majority view in the American cultural context represents as limited and narrow perspective on the lives of women in Afghanistan. This is partly due to the complexity of the issue where regional political and economic interests play an important role calling into question the integrity, survival, and sovereignty of several states in the region. In that context the Feminist Majority's position is not only out of context, but also very simplistic.
The Taliban are successful in keeping peace in 95% of the country and that is the major factor, among others, in their popularity and acceptance by the Afghan nation. In the remaining five percent of the country, in the north, a war is imposed on the people through foreign military and political intervention where the Russians supply weapons and munitions to the opposition in the hopes of preventing the construction of a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan for a more accessible port on the Indian Ocean. By doing so, the Russians will accomplish thee goals: 1) Keeping the Taliban from succeeding to political power in Afghanistan, 2) keep the hands of American oil companies off from the region, and 3) keep the gas supply in the region which will make Russia the beneficiary. The Russians want to compensate their early military loss with political and economic gains by means of interference in the domestic affairs of a neighboring country.
As an alternative route, Iran also wants to prevent the gas pipeline to go through Afghanistan. It is therefore no surprise that the Iranian government would support and even sponsor opposition speakers to come to the United States and speak on the women rights in Afghanistan while they deny the same to women in their own country.
This is why the Feminist Majority, perhaps without their comprehensive understanding of the issue, is employed in an anti-Taleban campaign.
A further evidence of the Feminist Majority's shallow position is that they were silent during the atrocities of the Soviet occupation and the pre-Taliban regimes: When they deprived the Afghan women not only of their education, but also stripped them of their social support by taking the lives of their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, engaging them in a self serving war, while looting their homes raping their daughters, mothers, and sisters for sixteen years.
After the installation of communist government in Afghanistan in 1978, most of the educated intellectuals were either imprisoned or killed. A few were successful to flee the country, among the millions who became refugees in Pakistan and Iran.
The threat of communism forced Afghanistan's neighbors and friends including the US to support the freedom fighters, the Mujahideen.
In 1989, the Mujahideen succeeded not only in the overthrow of the communist regime in Afghanistan, but also in the break up of the USSR and the whole East bloc in the same year making the United States of America the only Super Power.
In return the United States turned its back on the people of Afghanistan at this very critical moment when the politically inexperienced Mujahideen succeeded to power. As a result, the Russians continued to fuel the lost war by pitting brother against brother, deliberately and specifically, targeting the women, well aware of the sensitivities of the Muslims in this regard. Not only millions of lives were lost, but also homes were looted, women's public bathing houses were attacked, women were raped and many were forced into marriages against their will.
Suicide rate among young girls was on the rise, depression was a common illness among women. The country's economic, social, political and educational infrastructure was totally destroyed. As one journalist had put it there is not an inch of the country that does not have a bullet hole in it. Although schools were open in name, no one could attend for the past 23 years. There was lack of teachers and curriculum.
The Feminist Majority refers to some of these atrocities in their literature, and blaming them on Taliban who were not even the political arena at that time.
When the Afghan people were fed up with war, hunger, poverty, starvation, looting, attacks, and killings, they begged their sons, who had escaped Afghanistan during the war as children and were now young men with some religious education to take over the country and end the civil war. Having Afghan blood in their veins, the young students (Taleban) finally, entered the political arena in 1994 at the behest of the Afghan people, mostly composed of women since the majority of men lost their lives in the war.
As terrible as they may sound through the waves of American media and through the eyes of Feminist Majority, the Taleban are a ten-fold improvement on the statuesque-ante and will not allow the disintegration of Afghanistan.
The Taleban are devoted Muslims who stand firm against terrorism, and against the production and sale of illicit drugs and its use. They believe in the education for all Afghans men and women alike, and they consider the term gender apartheid as a term used for their vilification.
In the spirit of cultural pluralism that we advocate at home, the United States, as the self proclaimed world leader, must not dictate to other sovereign nations what is best for them. If dealt with fairly, the Taliban will make every effort to resolve any political differences that may create a friction between Afghanistan and the world community. On the other hand, if we label, criticize and antagonize the Taliban for our political agenda, we will achieve nothing but to push them into the hands of extremists.
We, the people of United States, must remain fair, objective and independent in our worldview. We must come out of our ethnocentric cocoon and believe in other cultures as different, not inferior. We must bring to the attention of our government to practice and redefine the terms, terrorism, drug dealing and human rights as they are, not as we want them to be.
Terror is defined in Webster as, creating intense fear, violence committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands. Terrorism is the systemic use of terror as means of coercion.
We must firmly stand against terrorism, from the bombing of Hiroshima to the missile attack on Afghanistan, from the invasion of Afghanistan to the suppression of Chechnya from the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to the killing of unarmed civilian protesters in Palestine, from the massacres in Rwanda to the occupation and suppression of Kashmir, from the bombing of the World Trade Center towers to the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma….
Terrorism is an act of cowardice. History has proven that the people of Afghanistan are brave. They sacrificed nearly 2 million lives, more than 10 percent of their entire population to liberate the world from the menace of communism. It is a shame that the Western media have equated the name of Afghans and Afghanistan with terrorism by interference or indifference while no Afghans has ever been involved or implicated in any act of terrorism.
Drug production and trafficking is a problem that has overwhelmed even the most powerful government in the world. We must realize, that alcohol and tobacco are also drugs and are the main cause of mental illness and social malaise in our society. They take the lives of more than half a million Americans every year. If we in America are subsidizing the liquor and tobacco industry for tax benefits, how can we, in good conscious, blame the Taleban's alleged involvement in drug trafficking?
The Afghan farmers have limited options in the productions of crops on their meager farmlands. In spite of this, however, the Taleban have placed a ban on drug production. This may be an uphill battle in view of the circumstances since the Afghan nation is on the verge of starvation. Massive landmines, severe drought, extensive military campaigns, and US-led UN imposed economic embargo have all impeded agriculture and severely affected the economy of the country. Threats of US missile attack further ads salt to the injury.
Afghan women have proven their strength by defending themselves against the Red Army of the former USSR. The women living in Afghanistan are the wives, daughters, sisters and mothers of Taleban. They do not need the help of the Feminist Majority in dealing with their own brothers, fathers, sons and husbands, especially when such help is mere gesturing promoting Feminism on the American political stage. This remote controlled sympathy extended to the Afghan women is irrelevant to their lives at this time, particularly when it is offered with little or no understanding of the cultural, religious, social, and political values of a society half a world away.
No government in the world can guarantee civil liberties in times of national emergencies and natural catastrophes. It is even more difficult for a government like the Taleban that has come to power after a brutal military invasion and a deadly civil war devastating the country's economic structure and political institutions. With no standing army and police force, anarchy that became the order of the day for too long has to be replaced with law and order. Nation building in such cases is an insurmountable challenge and civil liberties may be temporarily curtailed. That temporarily is currently prolonged by those who fuel the war by machine of the opposition military campaign. The statues quo victimizes the most vulnerable---the children, the elderly and the women. The road to a hell is indeed paved with good intentions.
The prerequisite for any democracy is political stability. Those who want civil liberties restored now should allow for the establishment of a stable, strong central government in Afghanistan, which is now possibly only through the Taleban. Only then, we can demand democratic reforms.
The Taleban realize that the education of men and women is a legal, political as well as religious obligation. Unfortunately, the current economic, social and political circumstances have forced them to prioritize their affairs differently.
Afghanistan is in process of evolution not revolution. Only time will bring the necessary changes that will make Afghanistan once again the Switzerland of Asia.
Today's students should be weaned away from the parochialism and ethnocentrism of yesterday. Their views must reflect a broader worldview in which we all can live in peace, regardless of our political, religious or ethnic inclination.
I call upon the US government to help lift the UN sanctioned economic embargo on the Taleban regime, and instead impose an arms embargo on all warring parties in Afghanistan. This way we would send food and medicine to a poverty-stricken nation, and ban weapons; both of which would prevent further loss of life.
I call upon the Feminist Majority to rethink its position in light of what have been said above.
Finally, I call upon our students to think globally and learn not only to think, but also to actively practice liberty and justice for all.
BY JAHAN STANIZAI
Jahan Stanizai is a doctorate student of Psychology at the California Graduate Institute.
We are the Taleban-Resistance is Futile
Sin: Osama Bin Junior
