AbdulMalick - where do you get your information about the Taliban from? Newspapers, books, magazines? I ask because I think it maybe a bit biased. Below is an email I received a few months ago regarding the Taliban, I personally feel sorry for these organizations, they are trying to do something productive. While the media is busy sensationalizing and spreading rumors and half facts (sometimes honest reports), they lack the integrity or perhaps ability necessary to discuss solutions. These organizations on the other hand, despite tremendous pressure are working towards tangible solutions in a very turbulent environment, unfortunately backlash against the Taliban is having a toll on their operations:
"Several specialists on Afghanistan disputed some aspects of the picture painted by the Feminist Majority, notably about access to health care and education. They expressed concern that the Hollywood activists are distorting the reality of the current conditions, exaggerating abuses, and taking them out of a critical historical context.
Worse, some international relief officials fear that if the Feminist Majority's campaign is successful, it may end up harming those who most need help by encouraging donor nations to reduce their aid or cut it off completely.
"Those who are speaking out now are well-intentioned but they don't have the full story," says Andrew Wilder, director of the Afghan relief operation of Save the Children, in a phone interview from Pakistan. "It's misleading to the point where there's more and more of a movement from human rights groups and the Feminist Majority to say cut off all aid, which is a real misunderstanding of the situation and will only hurt the very groups these women want to help."
"This is a terrible snow job," says Judy Benjamin, head of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, who returned a couple of weeks ago from visiting Afghan refugee camps on the border with Pakistan. "It's amusing almost, but sad. With the Jay Leno connection they have struck it rich and gained Hollywood, but trust me, they're terribly misinformed."
In testimony before Congress earlier this month, Leno noted that the Taliban has "banned women from being treated by male doctors," and that "the few female doctors who are permitted to work are often harassed." During two days of interviews at the Feminist Majority offices, the impression left on a reporter is that health care is virtually unavailable to women in Afghanistan.
But Benjamin and Wilder and a U.N. official, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, all confirm that there are segregated women's wards in many Afghan hospitals, and that the Taliban has rescinded restrictions on women's health care. A much larger problem, they note, is the lack of medicine throughout the country and medical personnel particularly in rural areas.
Education for girls is formally banned by the Taliban. But nearly a dozen nongovernmental groups are conducting schooling for boys and girls, and home schooling is widespread in the capital of Kabul.
Where the abuses strike most viciously, it seems, is in cities like Kabul, which was increasingly Westernized, particularly under the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Under the Soviets, women were free to work and pursue an education, and many gained prominent roles during the civil war in the '80s and '90s as men were siphoned off to fight. For these women, the ban on employment and the deprivations of the burqa, the full-length shroud women are required to wear by the Taliban, are particularly demeaning.
But sweeping statements like those in the Feminist Majority's media advisory for tonight's event -- "In Afghanistan today eleven and a half million women and girls are prisoners in their own homes" -- are largely inaccurate, according to those familiar with the country.
Says Zalmay Khalilzad, a Reagan administration expert on Afghanistan now at the Rand Corp., "In the rural areas, what the Taliban is seeking to impose is not very different than what the norm has been."
Leila Helms, a Westernized, Afghan-born woman who is pro-Taliban, has just returned from a two-week tour of Afghanistan where she says she filmed six hours of interviews with women in five provinces. The burqa, she said, is not widespread in the countryside, and she met many women moving freely about, without male relatives as chaperons.
Says Helms: "I met 150 women. I asked every one if they were beaten or knew someone who had been. . . . There was one woman who'd been beaten once on her shoulders two years ago because her face was showing and she was talking to a man she didn't know. Every single other one hadn't been beaten, and did not know someone who had been beaten."
These prickly issues aside, the reason why Helms - a secular, pro-abortion American -- favors the Taliban is because for six years she witnessed the country's devastation when she and her husband worked in Afghan refugee camps at the Pakistani border from 1988 to 1994. For Helms, the admittedly repressive Taliban at least brought peace to the country, and Hollywood's sudden concern for Afghan women angers her.
She explodes: ** "Where were they when all these women were being raped, when women were being killed because they were not following the Muslim Brotherhood," the faction that ruled Afghanistan after the expulsion of Soviet troops. "Where were they before the war when women didn't have rights? Where were they throughout the war when women were rotting in the refugee camps?" **
She continues: "For nearly 20 years in Afghanistan there has been no law, no order. We lost almost 2 million people to the Russians. The women don't want to be saved by the Feminist Majority. Finally they have peace, and people in America find religion on the issue of women in Afghanistan?"
Lastly, there is Abdel Hakim Mujahed, the Taliban's representative in the United States, who calls the entire campaign "negative propaganda made against us intentionally," which is true enough. He says: "There is no doubt that we cannot make our society like American society, but I can tell you that the situation existing there is far more better than what it was."
For the first eight months or so of her involvement, Leno "came close to popping a blood vessel," she says. "I couldn't get anything rolling." Unocal, part of a huge oil consortium that was considering investing in Afghanistan, pulled out of its pipeline project; that was good. But the devastated economy of Afghanistan would disagree.
The dismal situation in Afghanistan is tied just as closely to the economic devastation brought on by 20 years of savagery. Says Benjamin, "Definitely women in Afghanistan are suffering tremendous abuses, their human rights are not being respected. ** But you need to put this in the context of what's happened to the country in the past two decades. Much of the grief and poverty is a result of conflict and war, not a result of the Taliban. There is suffering and poverty, but in most of Afghanistan people will say the Taliban have brought peace and security." **
Statement
The Feminist Majority with Leno want to help Afghan Women by asking business to stop doing business with Afghanistan. They are asking the United States to impose economic sanction on one of the poorest countries, where children are dying of malnutrition. Ask the FM, Where are these Jobs that they want women to work at? Where are the schools where they want to send afghan children? And where is the Medical Care?
** That provides another perspective I hope. ** Weather you agree with it or not is up to you.
Achtung ;)