Mick Hartley

Think the past twenty years in Afghanistan were a complete waste of time? Umair Haque – How the World Erased the Women of Afghanistan:

“We haven’t achieved anything in Afghanistan! So what difference does it make if we withdraw, anyways?” This is the attitude which prevails in America, and across the West. I’m here to try to teach you how misguided, how ignorant, this attitude really is. When I say “teach you,” I mean it, too. Have you met the Taliban? I have. I grew up among them. Their ilk have threatened my life on multiple occasions.

What did we achieve in Afghanistan over the last twenty years? One major, major accomplishment was the beginnings of the development of civil society. “Civil society” means what Westerners take for granted — the basic norms and institutions of a modern way of life. Let me make that clearer.

Over the last two decades, Afghani women started to become free. Until this week, 40% of students in Afghani higher education were women — a number that was steadily climbing. Women became journalists and lawyers. They became involved in politics. They became activists. They became YouTubers and bloggers. They became popstars and Olympians. Things that were not possible for them 20 years ago. That might not sound like much to you, but it is a major, major accomplishment. Why?

First, recognise that when people say “but we achieved nothing in Afghanistan!” it devalues, minimizes, and erases the huge, huge steps that women took. It insults the gains women have made.

Brave women. Incredibly brave. It’s not as if a hyper conservative society like Afghanistan was particularly friendly to women becoming lawyers and doctors and journalists. Especially not to becoming bloggers and YouTubers. They did it anyways.

Again, you might be minimising all that. “So what? Who cares?” You might say. You should care. You. Because one of the formative conclusions from decades of research into how societies democratise and become modern is that women’s rights play perhaps the most crucial role. When women are “allowed” to work, to speak, to become the vital parts of society they are and deserve to be — then societies progress by leaps and bounds.

How so? Societies with womens’ rights grow economically — they tend to have big bangs of growth. They develop norms and values of tolerance and equality and dignity. They tend to have more robust institutions of law, governance, media, and education. All that is development economics 101. You should know it….

What’s life under the Taliban like for women? It’s so regressive it’s almost unbelievable. Here’s a quick summary:

• • Women can’t be outside of the house, alone, without a blood relative.
  • Women can’t laugh too loudly in public, so men don’t become aroused.
  • Women can’t speak in public, in case a (male) stranger hears her voice.
  • Women can’t wear high heels, because men shouldn’t even hear their footsteps.
  • Women can’t have their pictures taken, and their pictures can’t be shown in media.
  • Women can’t be on their own terraces.
  • Women have to wear burqas in public, at all times.
  • Any woman or girl, from the age of 12 to 45, can be forced to marry a member of the Taliban.

Did you get some of those? Women can’t even speak in public.

For any of these, women can be beaten with sticks, or flogged in public. They can be maimed for life for laughing.

Decades of progress for women are going to simply go up in smoke. They are going to be forced to live like chattel, like objects, like property — women will go back to a less than medieval way of life. Because the Taliban doesn’t see women as people. To the Taliban, women are property. And that is a form of fascism — patriarchal fascism….

But of course with the West riddled through with self-doubt, arguing about pronouns, no longer able to see what it is that it's doing right, the women of Afghanistan will have to see their progress snatched away. “Hang in there sisters”: the callous and cynical advice of Yanis Varoufakis is the best we can manage.

A fine polemic.