"Afghan women laugh outright at the argument that further militarization of their society will bring them peace and security."

I would certainly hope that they're not alone in their reaction to that utterly ridiculous argument. They were much better off under the Soviet-sponsored regime.

U.S. imperial intervention never had anything to do with peace and security for any Afghan, male or female. Nor peace and security for Americans either for that matter. Anyone who thinks so is an incurably blind fool, and probably a willfully blind one at that.

The occupation of Afghanistan has absolutely nothing to do with human rights, democracy or the plight of women.

These elections are a sham, a laughingstock. How can you have free and fair elections in a country that is in chaos, occupied by foreign troops, and where the so-called central govt. barely controls Kabul?

Karzai is a hated figure who is deeply corrupt, his very survival depends on foreigners and foreign mercenaries. He made deals with warlords, complete with bribes.

The "Taleban" is likened to a cohesive group; in fact the taleban are a complex group of many tribal leaders and warlords. The Northern Alliance is every bit as brutal, corrupt and bloodthirsty as the "Taleban"

Most of what we see and hear on the MSM is a complete fiction only loosely based on any facts or reality.

This article should be branded on the back of every invader and USA and European Politician who supports the ethnic cleansing of Pastuns ( a.k.a. Afghan occupation) {statement is hyperbole}.

When I read these articles about Afghanistan about women and the Taliban, I am nowadays suspecting that the Taliban are only symptoms of what's wrong in Afghanistan. What I mean here is that like blaming the protesters opposing HR3200 at the Town Hall Meetings, the Taliban are being blamed for disrupting the elections. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I only know so much about foreign policy and am weak in it but reading these articles, here's what I think and please don't mind me comparing this to the health care reform fiasco here in the US. The pols in Washington take single payer off the table and whittle down reform first to "public option" which leaves Big Insurance in a win-win and insignificant reform for everyone else and it doesn't even start until 2013. Yeah, some "change you can believe in", huh? Now, even "public option" is out and the bill becomes further toothless. Similarly, in the case of Afghanistan and bringing democracy, if you can call it that, the options for leaving people to truly decide their own government was forced off the table by US and NATO. Then, in attempts to make it look like it was just the Taliban causing trouble, they bring in CIA puppets such as Karzai and a few other pro-US/NATO puppets for "election" while local Afghan candidates are drowned out. Then, like the staged rightwing protests at the town hall meetings, the Taliban from somewhere get sent in to do their worst and be the fall guys for disrupted elections. In the mean time, like Big Insurance/Pharma, Big Military US/NATO win. And in the meantime, the Afghan people who despite hardly having time or money to know what's going on are actually smart enough to smell something's not right in these elections. Like the phony "debate" on health care reform with single payer off the table, they detect a "fixed" election again where it's the case that no matter which candidate wins, the corporate and military interests win while the people lose. To me, that is so similar to the US elections where third parties are persecuted by the media, two parties, and the bots in both parties keeping 3rd parties off the ballots, debates, and even the air. Ok, sorry if I'm not getting this correct. Please feel free to correct me where I'm getting this wrong. Again, I'm weak on foreign policy since there's enough in the USA to be worried about but I am open to learning more.

The only way in which Afghan women will ever become free is by refusing sex en masse, and I mean en masse, by the millions. So-called help from the outside, especially fro the "Christian Outside" will be hugely counterproductive in Afghanistan.

In 1988 (the year before the Soviets pulled out) there were 245,000 women workers in Afghanistan. Women comprised 40 percent of the doctors and 60 percent of the teachers at the University of Kabul. Four hundred and forty thousand female students were enrolled in educational institutions and 80,000 more participated in literacy programs. Fifteen thousand women were serving as soldiers and commanders in the army. The All-Afghanistan Women’s Council had 150,000 members. Western dress was common in the cities and women enjoyed some real measure of freedom from the veil and subjugation for the first time in Afghanistan’s history.

When the mujahedin of the Afghan/Pakistan region — ‘spiritual’ progenitors of the Taliban — were being armed, trained and funded by the CIA to manoeuvre the USSR into yet another game of global ‘chicken,’ they enjoyed the whole-hearted support of many in the West. I remember these fundamentalist thugs being hailed as ‘noble Freedom Fighters’ even while they were murdering teachers who were trying to educate Afghan women and girls, or throwing acid in the faces of women who wore ‘immodest Western dress’ or fraternized openly with men to whom they were not related. I also remember the Afghan chauvinists of RAWA (“Donations using AMEX tax-deductible”) claiming that educating women, Western clothing and inter-gender fraternization were ‘contrary to Afghan culture.’ I remember a colleague of my father's almost salivating with delight as a news bulletin described how a Soviet soldier crawled burning from a shelled tank while the 'freedom fighters' riddled her body with high-velocity rounds from US-supplied weapons.

The ‘woman-question’ was pivotal in Afghanistan from the earliest days of the ‘current crisis,’ yet few in the West actually cared. Foremost in the minds of our political ‘betters’ was checking the ‘Evil Empire,’ even if they had to ally themselves with a motley crew of mediaeval fanatics to do so — what matter if a few women died in the process, especially since they were most likely ‘godless commies,’ functionaries or soldiers of the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or maybe doctors or teachers (female roles also ‘contrary to Afghan culture’)?

Now that the ‘danger posed by the Soviet Union’ is no more, Western leaders, media moguls and even quite ordinary folk have ‘discovered’ — shock, horror — that women in Afghanistan are actually being viciously oppressed. Now they have ‘realized’ that their precious Freedom Fighters weren’t kidding when they talked of recreating the world of the 7th or 8th centuries. Now it’s, “Gee whiz, maybe we put our money on the wrong dog!” However unexpected this discovery, however genuine this remorse. It avails little those who have already suffered brutality at the hands of the fundamentalist rabble — or those who will suffer in the future.

Much is made of the resistance to the murderous regime of the fundamentalists by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Though individual members are undoubtedly brave, as an organization RAWA limits itself to demands that it thinks the mullahs and warlords will allow or what is “popular” among “liberals" in the West. Formed in 1977, RAWA opposed the PDPA government from the start, denouncing the PDPA in crude anti-Communist terms as Soviet “stooges.” When the Red Army moved in, RAWA joined the imperialist-sponsored insurgency. RAWA founder Meena Keshwar Kamal declared at that time, “To fight against the Russian aggressors is inseparable from struggle against the fundamentalists. Nevertheless for the time being we should give priority to the former” (Arizona Persian Bulletin [Web site], 10 October 1977). In October 1981, Keshwar Kamal was invited to attend the congress of French imperialist president François Mitterrand’s viciously anti-Soviet Socialist Party as a representative of the “Afghan resistance,” and from there toured other European countries on behalf of the mujahedin.

RAWA said it was fighting for “the independence of our homeland” while the imperialists screamed about the Soviet Union’s violation of Afghanistan’s “national sovereignty.” This sanctimonious concern by the blood-drenched imperialists for “national rights” was bogus to the core. Afghanistan is not (and was not then) a coherent nation, but an artificial state whose borders include and cut across a mosaic of ethnic and tribal groupings. It was under the Soviet presence that the murderous ethnic and tribal differences started to break down, while among the mujahedin they intensified.

What did it mean to back the mujahedin? The tribal khans and mullahs that the RAWA feminists signed on with got billions of dollars from the US government. Favourite mujahedin targets were schools and teachers. By 1985, they had destroyed over 1,800 schools and by 1987 they had slaughtered 2,000 schoolteachers. The mujahedin committed blood-curdling atrocities against captured Soviet soldiers, hacking off limbs and genitals before murdering them. In the first four years of the war, only eight living Soviet soldiers were turned over to the Red Cross. In Pakistan, the “holy warriors” threw women and children into their jails and torture cells.

To secular-minded Afghan women who had finally gained a degree of emancipation following the Red Army intervention, RAWA would have had little appeal. RAWA’s secular pretensions are really a tissue-thin cover for flagrant conciliation of religious reaction. Tahmeena Faryal raved that the Soviet forces “were trying to give some rights to Afghan women that are obviously okay in Western societies, but are not acceptable in our societies ... For example, they wanted to give so-called liberties of having a boyfriend or dancing in a nightclub, which are not acceptable in our society” (Z Magazine, January 2002).

RAWA’s homage to Islamic strictures stands in contrast to the experiences of young women who came to adulthood and received an education during the Soviet period. “Life was good under the Soviets,” recalled Saira Noorani, a young woman doctor. “Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go wherever we wanted and wear what we liked” (Observer, 30 September 2001). Another account, in the 1988 book War in Afghanistan by journalist Mark Urban, who was far from friendly to the Soviet forces, powerfully testified to the stakes for Afghan women:

"There is no doubt that thousands of women are committed to the regime, as their prominent participation in Revolutionary Defence Group militias shows. Eyewitnesses stated that militant militiawomen played a key role in defending the besieged town of Urgun in 1983. Four of the seven militia commanders appointed to the Revolutionary Council in January 1986 were women.

By 1989, confronting the treacherous Soviet withdrawal, all PDPA women members were receiving military training and arms and some 15,000 women had joined the militias, taking up arms to defend not only the rights they had won but their very lives."

How many of those women still live?

DCBeltway's comment that "Afghan women were better off under Zahir Shah" is only partially true.

In the early part of the 20th century, a modernizing king, Amir Amanullah Khan, did attempt to carry out measures aimed specifically at liberating women. Friendly to the Soviet Union, and the first king to visit Moscow, Amanullah was deposed and driven out by the social equivalent of the contemporary mujahedin. The last decade of Zahir Shah’s reign, from 1963 to 1973, was a period of some political ferment. But the slender rights achieved then were won through struggle, not the “good offices” of this reactionary monarch. In 1968 when Zahir Shah’s parliament threatened to prevent women from studying abroad, hundreds of young women protested. In 1970, when Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — later one of the most barbaric mujahedin leaders and the recipient of the largest amount of CIA funding — sprayed acid at unveiled women and shot at their legs, 5,000 young women took to the streets in protest. The Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the Democratic Organization of Women of Afghanistan (DOWA) campaigned for the right to vote, to study abroad and to work outside the home, and four women from the DOWA were elected to government in the 1970s.

In 1973, officers loyal to the left-nationalist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) played a major role in overthrowing the monarchy and participated in the newly installed Daud government. When Daud moved right and tried to crush the PDPA in 1978, mass demonstrations of students and government workers erupted in Kabul.
The PDPA military faction outgunned Daud’s forces and he was killed. This was the so-called “April Revolution,” essentially a left-wing military coup with popular support among intellectuals and government workers.

In power, the PDPA embarked on a program of reforms — cancelling peasant debts, carrying out land redistribution, prohibiting forced marriages and lowering the bride price to a nominal sum. The PDPA’s measures, particularly those aimed at freeing women from feudal tyranny, threatened the mullahs’ stranglehold on social and economic life and immediately provoked a murderous backlash. Even the New York Times (9 February 1980) acknowledged, “It was the Kabul revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed Orthodox Moslem men in the Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up their guns.”

A decree allowing women to divorce was not officially announced because of the Islamic revolt. Most explosively, the PDPA made schooling compulsory for girls and launched literacy programs for women, building 600 schools in just over a year. The tribal insurgents denounced schooling for women as the first step in a “life of shame” and the earliest bloody confrontations were over women’s literacy, as PDPA cadres and women literacy workers were driven from villages and killed.

The PDPA could not quell the mujahedin insurgency, which was heavily backed by the US, Pakistan and Iran (where the Islamic theocracy under Ayatollah Khomeini had come to power in early 1979). Repeatedly and urgently, the PDPA asked the Soviet government for military aid, including troops. Concerned above all to pursue the chimera of détente with imperialism, the Kremlin temporized. But toward the end of 1979, the Soviet high command watched anxiously as US warships were positioned in the Persian Gulf and reports emerged that Washington might invade Iran. The US was already bankrolling the Afghan mujahedin and trying to foment Islamic counterrevolution in Soviet Central Asia.

In December 1979, fearing the PDPA regime was about to collapse and with Afghan president Hafizullah Amin reportedly making approaches to the US, the Soviet Union sent in 100,000 soldiers to combat the Islamic reactionaries. The imperialists seized on the Red Army intervention to launch a renewed Cold War drive. As the CIA undertook its biggest covert operation ever, Afghanistan became the front line of the imperialists’ relentless drive to destroy the Soviet Union.