The Guardian: The war in Afghanistan. Two opinions.
If we betray Afghan women, we have lost                                            Editorial      The Observer,                                    Sunday 15 August 2010  British politicians rarely talk about victory in Afghanistan. It is no longer even clear what victory would mean.Kabul  fell in November 2001, within weeks of the US-led invasion. If the sole  purpose of occupation was to dismantle al-Qaida training camps, the war  was won years ago. If, however, the reason for military  intervention was to build a model democratic state and a beacon of good  governance in central Asia, victory is a very distant prospect.Nato's  war aims have become ever more modest. As far as the UK government is  concerned, the only reason for keeping troops deployed on Afghan soil is  to prevent terrorists there plotting attacks on British citizens. Any  explicit preference that occupation might leave the country with a  government that is honest and respectful of human rights has slipped from the agenda.Meanwhile,  there are constant reminders of what kind of government allied forces  ousted in 2001: the recent murder of 10 civilian medical workers;  reports last week of a woman flogged and shot dead for alleged adultery;  accounts of women fleeing rural areas to refuges in Kabul, having been  beaten and tortured in reprisal for the slightest resistance to cruel  religious fanaticism.The Taliban imposed a reign of terror, with  women in particular systematically victimised. The total abolition of  cultural and political freedom and the virtual enslavement of half a  country's population is a rare atrocity, justifying comparison with the  most notorious dictatorships of the 20th century. That the perpetrators  stand to gain if Nato's eventual withdrawal is premature or mishandled  is a moral as well as a strategic consideration. Repressive patriarchy  is not exclusive to the Taliban, nor is it simply foisted on Afghan  society by a minority religious junta. Many features of Taliban rule  that are most distasteful to western political sensibilities are common  also in areas controlled by tribal leaders and warlords loyal to  President Hamid Karzai.There is not a clear line where political  rights end and fundamentalist dogmas take over. There is not a clear  distinction between those Taliban who are driven by ideological Islamism  in the al-Qaida mould and those who have been recruited out of ethnic  Pashtun loyalty, as mercenaries or to serve some labyrinthine local  vendetta.As James Fergusson describes elsewhere on these pages,  aspects of Taliban practice are so rooted in Pashtun tradition as to be  immune from western-style reform. But while it would be a mistake to  ignore that background, it would be as great an error to value it above  other currents in Afghan history, including a seam of cosmopolitan  secularism.Forty years ago, Kabul was, by central  Asian standards, a permissive city of bars, cafes, pop music and jeans.  It is a dangerous kind of relativism that abhors the notion of western  values being "imposed", but would accept as culturally legitimate the  imposition of one narrow interpretation of religious law to the  exclusion of every other social and political trend.Simply  asserting the fact that some rights are universal and inalienable does  not bring the Afghan state any closer to recognising and defending them.  The constitution, adopted in January 2004, is profoundly deferential to  the country's Muslim traditions, but guarantees certain essential civil  rights, including freedom of expression and women's equality.In  practice, however, President Karzai has secured his power base by  accommodating different economic, religious and tribal factions,  ignoring the constitution when necessary. Last year, he signed a law  specifically for the country's minority Shia community, permitting rape  within marriage and giving husbands authority to forbid their wives from  leaving the home.It has long been clear that Mr Karzai is not a  reliable guarantor of political rights in Afghanistan. But then, he  presides over a country in a state of civil war and in partnership with  occupying powers which might at any moment cut and run. It is not  surprising that he trades power and favours with anyone who can shore up  his position, without vetting their credentials on sex equality.The  danger, though, is that, as Nato withdrawal inches closer, the scale of  those compromises grows and the tacit adoption of Taliban moral codes  spreads.In the Observer magazine this week, Shahla  Farid, a Kabul-based lawyer, speaks of her experience defending women's  rights. There is still, she says, "an atmosphere of terror", with the  Taliban retaining much cultural, if not legal power.Her testimony  is a warning against the increasing tendency in the west to see the  conflict in Afghanistan purely in terms of narrow security objectives.The  UK and US governments are carefully redefining and downgrading their  definitions of success in the war to encompass anything that looks like  stability after withdrawal. That might well include some explicit  agreement with elements within the Taliban. In fact, stability without  some accommodation with militant insurgents is impossible.The  clear trajectory is towards a model, familiar from many a cold war  puppet regime, in which Mr Karzai is propped up with military and  financial aid on the condition that he is loyal in counterterror  operations. Political rights are thus quickly forgotten.But,  ultimately, the neglect of civil and economic rights, combined with the  economic and cultural repression of women, will condemn Afghanistan to  underdevelopment, poverty and deep social dysfunction.Those  conditions, more than religious tradition, are what make the country a  breeding ground for terrorist ideology. In other words, the issue of  women's equality and political freedom is not peripheral to the security  objective of preventing terrorists operating inside Afghanistan. It is  absolutely central.Western governments are increasingly on the  hunt for some arrangement that will allow them to withdraw troops from  Afghanistan, leave it vaguely stable and not overrun by al-Qaida and to  call that victory.It will not be easy to build real commitment to  human rights into that settlement. But failure to do so after so many  years and so much blood spilled would surely be a most humiliating and  dangerous defeat.  Should British Soldiers be dying for the rights of afghan women? No.An expert who knows the Pashtuns intimately says we are wasting our time trying to change their society...     James Fergusson  The Observer,                                    Sunday 15 August 2010  The case of Bibi Sanubar, the Afghan widow brutally flogged and shot  dead by the Taliban for the crime of being pregnant, caused outrage in  the wes. Earlier in the month, Time magazine published a truly  shocking picture of Aisha, an 18-year-old girl whose nose had been cut  off because she had run away from her inlaws. With so much talk recently  of political reconciliation with the Taliban leadership, their attitude  towards women is fast becoming as urgent and emotive a topic as it was  when they first came to power in the mid-1990s.However nauseating  the treatment of Bibi or Aisha, it would be a mistake to let our  stomachs rule our heads. However much westerners would like to see  change in Afghan society, this was never the reason our military went to Afghanistan – and nor does it justify our staying there now. The US commander in Afghanistan, David Petraeus,  is wary of mission creep and sought to clarify this point in November  2009. "Let us not forget why we are in Afghanistan," he said. "It is to  ensure that this country cannot become once again a sanctuary for  al-Qaida." Women's rights are important, but they have no direct bearing  on the threat from al-Qaida.This does not mean the west should stand by in silence. On the contrary, it is our duty to go on arguing the case for gender equality  and to keep Afghans engaged in that old debate. But we have no right to  be shrill and it will do no good to dictate. If social change is to  come, it must come from within, which, eventually, it will.It  might help if we understood the Taliban better. The harshness of the  punishments they sometimes mete out only seems incomprehensible to the  west. The strict sexual propriety the Taliban insist upon is rooted in  ancient Pashtun tribal custom, the over-riding purpose of which is to  protect the integrity of the tribe, and nothing threatens the gene pool  like extramarital relations. "The Pashtun must breed well if he is to  breed fighters," wrote the poet Ghani Khan in  1947. "The potential mother of the man of tomorrow is the greatest  treasure of the tribe and is guarded jealously... death to those who  dare to risk the health of the tribe. It is treachery and sabotage which  you also punish with death." The system, as Ghani Khan acknowledges, is  "hard and brutal", but it works. The Pashtuns are, famously, the  largest tribal society in the world. Some 42m of them are divided into  about 60 tribes and 400 sub-clans and they are intensely proud of their  culture which has survived three millenniums of almost constant invasion  and occupation.The maltreatment of women is by no means  exclusive to the Taliban, nor even to Pashtuns. It is practised all over  Afghanistan, including by the state that Nato troops are currently  dying to support. Witness the police chief, General Abdul Jabar, who  remarked after Bibi Sanubar was killed: "This was not the way she should  have been punished. She should have been arrested and we should have  had proof that she'd had an illegal affair. Then she should have come to  court and faced justice." As a contributor to arrse.co.uk,  the informal Army Rumour Service website, remarked last week: "I'm  guessing a guilty verdict by the Afghan courts would be followed by a  stoning? What exactly are we fighting this war for?" The emotive  observation on Time magazine's ghastly cover – "What happens if  we leave Afghanistan" – was spurious, because it is happening anyway,  while we are still there.I am certain, after 14  years of encounters with the Taliban, that they are not beyond  redemption. It seems a paradox, but in the 1990s the Taliban leadership  did not see themselves as oppressors of women but as their defenders.  Westerners forget the historical context in which the Taliban emerged in  1994, although no Afghan ever will. The Taliban's first purpose was to  bring law and order to a country that had been devastated by five years  of vicious civil war and in those areas that came under their control,  they succeeded brilliantly. "The real source of their success," the US  assistant secretary of state Robin Raphel told a closed UN session in  New York in November 1996, "has been the willingness of many Afghans,  particularly Pashtuns, to tacitly trade unending fighting and chaos for a  measure of peace and security, even with several social restrictions."  To many Afghans, including many Afghan women, oppression was a small  price to pay in exchange for an end to the wholesale rape and slaughter  of the preceding years. The Taliban appeared the lesser of two evils,  and – in a year when 1,250 civilians have so far been killed in the  fighting with Nato – to many they still do.Shukria  Barakzai, a Pashtun MP and a leading women's rights campaigner, thinks  the west has always misread her country. "I changed my view [of the  Taliban] three years ago when I realised Afghanistan is on its own," she  said recently. "It's not that the international community  doesn't support us. They just don't understand us. The Taliban are part  of our population. They have different ideas – but as democrats we have  to accept that." Her view is all the more remarkable considering that in  1999, Barakzai was beaten by the Taliban's religious police, the  infamous Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of  Vice, for the "crime" of going to the doctor's unaccompanied by her  husband. If even she is now in favour of political compromise with the  Taliban, what choice does the west really have but to listen?The  west views gender equality as an absolute human right and so we should.  But no country, certainly not Britain, has yet managed unequivocally to  establish that right at home; and we tend to forget both how recent our  progress towards it is, as well as how hard the struggle has been. Full  women's suffrage was not granted in Britain until 1928. With such a  track record, is it not presumptuous to insist that a proud, patriarchal  society that has survived for 3,000 years should now instantly mirror  us? That, in effect, is what well-meaning western experts did when they  helped to draw up Afghanistan's 2003 constitution. The stipulation that  at least 25% of MPs should be women is plain hypocritical. Even after  the 2010 election in Britain – a parliamentary democracy that has had  rather longer to mature than Afghanistan's – women MPs account for just  22% of the total.Women's suffrage in Britain was achieved not by  imposition from abroad but through long internal social debate, which is  as it should be in so obviously sovereign a matter. Emmeline Pankhurst  would not have succeeded had she been a foreigner. Social change will  come eventually to Afghanistan, but it must come from within, and at its  own pace. Our soldiers shouldn't die for it.