# The Feminist/Left and Afghanistan



## daftandbarmy (12 Jan 2007)

The Feminist/Left and Afghanistan

J.L. Granatstein

No one doubts that the Taliban in Afghanistan were and are Islamic fundamentalists. To the mullahs who control the movement, the duty of women is to serve their husbands and fathers, to be covered at all times except in the home, and not to hold a job outside the family’s confines. Violators can be punished severely, even killed. Similar draconian rules apply to female children who are best left uneducated. Their schools, their teachers, and occasionally the girls themselves can be destroyed or executed for violating such rules.

<>This is monstrous policy by any standard, utter medieval lunacy in the guise of religious faith. It offends Western values deeply, and it has much to do with the reasons that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has troops in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and trying to bolster the more moderate Karzai government in Kabul.  <>

But to judge by the silence of Canada’s left and its feminists, there are worse sins occurring out there than the repression of Afghan women and children. What could be worse? The whole War on Terror, the American and NATO interventions in Afghanistan, and Canadian complicity in Washington’s many and varied sins. In other words, the silence of the Canadian feminist lambs suggests strongly that this is a classic case where anti-Americanism and anti-Bush sentiment, combined with anger at Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and its policies, easily outweigh the harm done to Afghan females by a fundamentalist cabal.  <>

Not that the feminists and the left have been completely silent on Muslim outrages against women. Consider the case of Darfur where New Democrat leader Jack Layton, his female colleagues in his caucus, and many Canadian feminists have been demanding that Canada act to stop the killings and rapes by Muslim militias, aided by the Sudanese government. The brutality in Darfur is horrid, no doubt of this, and the world community has been slow to act, not least because Khartoum has until recently refused to permit the intervention of United Nations forces within Sudan’s borders.  <>

But why is a Darfur intervention a good and necessary response while the war in Afghanistan is not? There are a variety of pathologies at work here. One is that Darfur is now to be a UN peace enforcement mission, and the United Nations and peacekeeping of any variety are, by definition, good. Afghanistan, by contrast, is seen on the left as a U.S. war, aided and abetted by NATO. It doesn’t appear to matter that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 the UN Security Council passed resolutions authorizing intervention in Afghanistan. For the feminists and the left, if the Americans are involved, at root it must be about oil, about President Bush’s failed policies, or about American obsession with the War on Terror. 
Another factor is that in Darfur, the United States, along with Canada and most Western nations, was loathe to intervene. It was not so much that the democracies condoned the brutality of the militias; they didn’t. It was that the Darfur deserts were inhospitable, to say the least, that the logistics involved in supporting Western forces there were a nightmare, and that troops were in short supply. Moreover, the presence of white, largely Christian soldiers would not necessarily have a calming effect when the Muslim government in Khartoum was pledging a jihad if infidels dared to intervene in their affairs. In other words, until the Sudanese government accepted UN intervention, any Western help in Darfur could only be offered after an invasion. To the West and its governments, it seemed better, safer, and smarter to try to bolster the Organization of African Unity’s small peacekeeping forces in Darfur.

<>But to the feminists and the left, it was easy to portray these sensible and practical concerns as if Washington and its friends were deliberately shirking their responsibilities to the women of Darfur. American intervention in Afghanistan was a bad thing by definition; America’s refusal to intervene in Darfur was an evil, a deliberate abandonment of Sudanese women and children to the brutal militias who were raping and killing wantonly. The United States, in other words, was damned if it did and condemned if it didn’t act. 
Those who believe that the rights of women and children in Afghanistan matter enough to deserve protection need to play on this ideological confusion on the left. Jack Layton and his feminist friends want Canada’s troops out of Afghanistan and into Darfur. But how abandoning the women of Kandahar province to the not-so-tender mercies of the mullahs will help bring peace and justice there is very hard to comprehend. Yes, the West should help in Darfur; of course, it should. But unless and until someone can produce a compelling case that the women and children of Afghanistan are any less worth saving from barbarism than the females in Darfur, there is a huge logical and moral blindspot in the feminists’ and the  left’s position.

(Historian J.L. Granatstein writes on behalf of the Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century.)


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## ArmyRick (12 Jan 2007)

Interesting article.

Being in Afghanistan is bad (Bush started it)

Being in Sudan is good (Bush has nothing to do with it).

Jack Layton and reality are on two different continents...


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## old medic (12 Jan 2007)

Intresting, George Carlin said it best.
http://www.iceboxman.com/carlin/pael.php?printable



> ....  Isn't there something nobler they can do to be helping this planet heal? You don't hear much about that from these middle-class women. I've noticed that most of these feminists are white middle-class women. They don't give a shit about black women's problems. They don't care about Latino women. All their interested in is their own reproductive freedom...and their pocketbooks.  ....


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