Leaving the quagmire
by David Atkins
There's little to say about the horrific massacre of of 16 Afghan civilians by an unnamed American soldier that others haven't said better than myself. It's another demonstration of the enormous peril of foreign intervention in largely intractable situations. Stick enough armed men in war zones for long enough and people start to become dehumanized. These sorts of incidents are almost inevitable, which is why prolonged occupations anywhere are a terrible idea. Nothing the President can say to Hamid Karzai will make up for what happened. Nothing Karzai can say to the Afghan people will make up for it or bring back the dead, pointlessly killed. It's just another in a long line of reasons why America needs to get out of Afghanistan.
And this isn't the only massacre in recent days, either. There's also the Kapisa incident:
Adding to the sense of concern, the killings occurred two days after an episode in Kapisa Province, in eastern Afghanistan, in which NATO helicopters apparently hunting Taliban insurgents instead fired on civilians, killing four and wounding three others, Afghan officials said. About 1,200 demonstrators marched in protest in Kapisa on Saturday.
This simply cannot continue indefinitely. It has to stop.
The darker side of all this, of course, is that the hardline theocratic conservatives in Afghanistan are primed to take power back after our departure, continuing the reign of terror they exercised for years. The methodical destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was a crime not only against humanity but against history and civilization itself. I was in New York recently and walked by an Afghan restaurant, where a painting of the Buddhas lay fixed in the window. I stood and stared as the tears welled in my eyes. Just thinking about it drives me into a furious rage.
The Taliban treatment of women was without question the most horrific in the modern world. And there's no reason to imagine it won't be just as bad after we leave. Karzai himself is no angel, but he's better on human rights than the warlords he replaced. He won't likely last long after American forces leave unless he becomes just as bloodthirsty and brutal as the warlords he replaced.
Even now, women who do work outside the home are subject to awful abuse, as NPR reported:
Protection of women's rights in Afghanistan remains a focal point for the West — and American officials regularly tout the fact that the Afghan security forces now include hundreds of women. In northern Afghanistan alone, about 300 women are serving in the police force.
But in a culture that is not fully comfortable with women working outside the home, these women face significant risks. An NPR investigation in the city discovered disturbing allegations of systematic sexual coercion and even rape of female police officers by their male colleagues.
The women at the recent training session at a huge base outside Mazar-e-Sharif hardly looked like victims as they assembled and loaded assault rifles. But none dared to give their names as they alluded to what is an open secret in the city.
"Some women are being promoted only if they agree to give sexual favors," said one female officer...
But privately, several told of terrifying experiences. The women agreed to speak on the condition that their names be withheld, and the only place they felt safe enough to talk with a reporter was in a car moving around the city.
"It's a fact. Women in the police are being used for sex and as prostitutes," said Ann — not her real name — who is in her mid-30s.
"It's happened to me. Male cops ask for sex openly because they think women join the police just to work as prostitutes," she said.
In Afghanistan, even in modern cities like Mazar-e-Sharif or Kabul, the capital, a wide array of supposedly "immoral" conduct can get a woman called a prostitute. Anything from wearing the wrong clothes to sitting in the front seat of a car, or simply working outside the home can cause dangerous rumors.
The law reflects that. With sexual assault, the woman is as often sent to jail as the man, the assumption being that any woman who puts herself in a situation to be vulnerable to rape must be immoral.
And that's the enlightened part of Afghanistan, where women have more rights. Seriously. Under the Taliban, it's far worse.
While I understand that many progressives are have no problem at all with paying fervent attention to women's rights within our own arbitrary national borders and closing their eyes with insouciance to what goes on in distant lands, I find it far more difficult. Rick Santorum and the Taliban are of a single mindset, symptoms of the same theocratic, patriarchal disease. It's the sort of perverse morality that freaks out at the burning of a religious "moral" text, but has no problem with institutional rape, be it in the traditional mode or with a newfangled ultrasound device. I find it much harder than most to obsess over minor changes to abortion laws in Virginia while utterly ignoring far worse declines in the rights of women elsewhere in the world. What happens there is just as much our business as what happens here--and vice versa. It's all our business, collectively, as an interconnected human species in an interconnected world.
But continuing this awful, endless occupation replete with civilian massacre after civilian massacre is no answer at all. It's long past time to go.
Still, weep for the people we will be leaving behind. Weep for the Shi'ite ethnic hazara who will likely be doomed upon our departure:
The ruling Taliban—mostly fundamentalist Sunni, ethnic Pashtuns—saw Hazaras as infidels, animals, other. They didn't look the way Afghans should look and didn't worship the way Muslims should worship. A Taliban saying about Afghanistan's non-Pashtun ethnic groups went: "Tajiks to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, and Hazaras to goristan," the graveyard. And in fact, when the Buddhas fell, Taliban forces were besieging Hazarajat, burning down villages to render the region uninhabitable. As autumn began, the people of Hazarajat wondered if they'd survive winter. Then came September 11, a tragedy elsewhere that appeared to deliver salvation to the Hazara people.
And mourn the fate of a people who once had hope for a better future, and now have none because America ended up doing more harm than good when all was said and done. It didn't have to be thus.
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