Fewer Iraqi girls attending school October 29, 2007 Jill Remember how “women’s rights” were used to sell this war and the one in Afghanistan? Well, it looks like we’re hurting a whole lot more than we’re helping.
Not a surprise. If you’re trying to improve women’s rights in the Middle East, you don’t destroy a country with one of the better track records in the area. (Not the best, but among the best.)
While I certainly agree that using women’s rights to push the war in Iraq was hypocritical and massively counterproductive for Iraqi women, is the same true in Afghanistan? The situation for women is much improved in Afghanistan (it couldn’t have gotten much worse), and the way you wrote your post, it’s easy to infer from it that we’re “hurting a lot more than we’re helping” not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. I don’t think you mean this, and if you do, that’s quite the claim.
Outside Kabul, life is as bad as ever for Afghan women. I honestly can’t think of a worse place one could be born a woman (the nightmarish DRC comes a close second.) The Afghan Government (which isn’t so woman-friendly to begin with but sure beats the Taliban and local warlords) has little control over the countryside, where women are routinely subjected to everything from forced marriages to outright “I bought her for this much money” slavery. On IRIN the other day, I read about an Afghan woman in her late twenties or early thirties who had been sold four times to different men, and had given birth to ten children, some of whom were taken from her to be sold as well. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and the international organizations do their best, but it’s a daunting job in a very, very dangerous place. Some provinces are basically off-limits to foreign aid workers because so many of them have been kidnapped. The life of rural women in Afghanistan is uneducated, brutal, and short. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate for women in rural Afghanistan is very high.
Matt, are you serious? The United States talked a big game about women’s rights in Afghanistan, but we didn’t follow through. Many women are worse off than they were before the war; few are better off.
The situation for women is much improved in Afghanistan Maybe, for women in Kabul, but only maybe. In the meantime, women in some parts of Afghanistan have as high as a 6% mortality in pregancy and childbirth. And remember that’s per pregnancy, not lifetime risk. It is much better in Kabul–the maternal mortality there is “only” 0.7% per pregnancy. Hard to imagine anyone being worse than the Taliban for women, but Bush and his cronies are giving it their best try.
What is disputable is that Iraqi women are far, far, far worse off than before we invaded their country. We’ve set them back decades in terms of realization of rights.