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If there's anything that the antiwar leftists agree on, it's feminism. One effect of the war in Afghanistan has been a substantial improvement in the lot of women there; in the liberated areas they actually now can walk where they want, and hold jobs, and educate their daughters past the age of 8. These are simple pleasures that the women of the US have enjoyed since before the founding of the Union. The women of Afghanistan in Taliban-controlled areas lived with a degree of repression unsurpassed in history; it was brutal and vicious and inhuman. Now their situation is vastly better because of the bombing. It's blatantly obvious now to everyone that the bombing, abhored by the anti-war left, is primarily responsible for the collapse of the Taliban and the liberation of most of the country. So this presents the anti-war left with a profound contradiction: the bombing (which they hate) resulted in a major advance in the feminist cause (which they desire). That would tend to suggest that they were wrong about the bombing, but actually to admit error is not acceptable. In fact, the nearly complete silence from the radical left about the success of the war and its contribution to the improvement of conditions for Afghan women has been deafening. They need to find some way to applaud the improvement of conditions for the women of Afghanistan without actually praising the US, and this article represents one attempt at that. It's thesis is that Yes, the Taliban oppressed its women, but we also oppress ours so fundamentally we're not really any better than they are. It's a convoluted attempt to justify moral equivalence. This gets them out of their dilemma: they don't need to praise the US for improving conditions for Afghan women because the US continues to oppress its own women. (Of course, the price they pay is to make themselves look ridiculous because of the nonsensical argument they make.) There's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin is complaining about how cold it is inside the house and wants to turn up the heat. Dad takes Calvin out and sticks him on the front porch in the snow without a jacket and says "In a couple of minutes you can come back inside, and then it will seem toasty warm." (To which Calvin responds, "I'm going to tell the newspapers about you.") The fact is that the two women who wrote this article don't know what real repression is. I suspect that if they went and spent a month living in Taliban-dominated Kandahar and then came back here, they'd feel a tremendous liberation. Suddenly the US would be toasty warm. It's certainly not the case that the women of America have perfect equality with men, but they vote and can own property and can live alone and go where they want and wear whatever they feel like; they get advanced degrees and hold professional positions and even run large corporations. Many are extremely wealthy. By any standards the idea that American women are repressed in any sense comparable to what the Taliban did approaches hallucination. The real point of this article was to preserve a moral position that permits its authors to continue to criticize the US and the war despite the fact that it massively helped the women of Afghanistan. Its real goal is to try to find a way to avoid admission of error about the war. (discussion in progress) |
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