by Patricia Lee Sharpe
The U.S. has loaded many missions onto its agenda in Afghanistan, but the original mission has long since been accomplished. Bin Laden is dead. His Al Qaeda is no longer a threat to the U.S.
Can it be said that ambitious Al Qaeda clones don’t exist here and there? That fragments of I.S.I.S aren’t worrisome? That the Afghan Taliban are not a powerful force? Emphatically no. Islam almost everywhere is at war with itself. Some say that civil war will break out if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan. They’re wrong. Civil war has been raging for years. Robotic mission creep entangled the U.S. in a battle not ours to win or lose.
Now that the anything-but-impulsive Biden White House seems resolute about withdrawal, Americans are under attack for abandoning women to a fate they have no desire for. Let’s explore that accusation.
To the extent that the war in Afghanistan has been a war about religion as well as power, it has been about women. Their education. Their garb. Their freedom to do simple things like shopping without a male escort. Their slow progress toward acceptance as fully enabled human beings.
The Taliban Haven’t Changed
No Taliban statement to date has given the least hope that the Taliban will ever govern less dogmatically than they did at the time of the Twin Towers debacle twenty years ago. If the Taliban are back in charge, purdah in its most extreme form will be back in style.
While losing fighters and ceding terrain here and there, the Taliban as a force have never been defeated. Recruiting new fighters, clawing back territory, they rebound. Moreover, there has never been a time when they have been unable to wreak havoc even in Kabul, where a U.S. supported government is supposedly in control. By support I don’t mean approbation alone. I mean American (and allied) troops propping it up under the guise of turning its army into a force able to whip the Taliban on its own. Thanks to this formidable foreign force many Afghan women have been able to live the relatively unconstricted lives they enjoyed (check out the pix in the archives) before the advent of the Taliban. That life style is once again in jeopardy.
Did We Fail?
Twenty years have passed, but the Afghan army as it operates today is still incapable of holding the fort against relentless Taliban offensives. Does this mean that the foreign trainers have failed? Yes, but they have failed in this way: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Unless it’s thirsty.
In other words, you can equip and drill an army all you want, but the troops won’t fight with the necessary commitment unless there’s an objective they earnestly espouse and a leadership they respect. We’re talking about motivation. The most brilliant American instructors can’t provide a hunger for victory. Afghans fight ferociously and effectively for the Taliban. Their cousins in the Afghan army are a flabby force at best. If Afghan soldiers cared as passionately about preserving the non-Taliban way of life as the Taliban care about enforcing their own interpretation of Sharia, they’d need little or no help from outside. (Competitive pay might help.)
And the Women?
In short, Americans and their allies can’t save Afghan women from the indifference (or conniving) of their own fathers, brothers and uncles, the ineptitude and corruption of their own government and the time-honored constrictions of their own culture.
Time and time again, even in Kabul, professional women have been assassinated. Judges. Journalists. Parliamentarians. Admirable women all. And how has the U.S. funded Afghan government, whose current President is the U.S.-educated Ashraf Ghani, reacted? The culprits are never caught. Very few Afghan men on either side of the Afghan civil war are committed to full equality for Afghan women or to the social changes that would make Afghan women, prominent or otherwise, safe from religiously endorsed patriarchal violence.
Foreigners seldom succeed in regime-changing operations. Cultural change is even more resistant to outside influence. Thorough-going American control might protect ambitious, educated, strong-minded Afghan women (and gregarious housewives) from their own culture. That’s called colonialism. It’s not acceptable in this day and age. Nor has it ever been accepted in Afghanistan. I’m a woman. It hurts me to say this, but it’s time for the U.S. military to leave Afghans to regulate themselves.