This is What a Feminist Army Looks Like, II
October 22, 2009
I think you should read the excellent article by economics professor Marc W. Herold, “Killing the Innocents to Save ‘Our Troops’” posted at the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) website. I feel compelled to warn you that it has extremely graphic photos of airstrike victims, and also that it mistakenly identifies Rep. Ron Paul as an Independent rather than a Republican.
Herold discusses in detail the minimal monetary value that the U.S. attaches to Afghan casualties, in terms of the wrongful death amounts awarded. And since the majority of those casualties are women and children, we find that gender and age as well as color matter:
U.S aerial strikes were a chosen way of minimizing U.S casualties at the expense of Afghan civilian deaths and injured. In other words, a conscious self-serving U.S decision was made to impose undue harm upon Afghan civilians. That is a war crime. Moreover, as I have long argued and documented, some 60-70 percent of Afghan civilians killed by U.S and NATO forces have been women and children (19). That is another war crime!
Oh well. Let’s look on the bright side: at least with air strikes, the victims of wartime rape, also predominantly women and children, just get incinerated, not assaulted and then killed.
But of course, to oppose this war means to oppose women’s rights, at least from the perspective of domestic feminists and human rights organizations. As Herold notes:
Other American commentators – the humanitarian interventionists on Afghanistan – including Human Rights Watch, Sarah Chayes, Harvard’s Carr Center, etc. – present a completely idyllic end-game where jolly Afghan farmers labor in cooperatives producing pomegranates or saffron for export and Afghan girls’ schools dot the countryside. This has nothing to do with reality and all with marketing/selling the war to the American general public.
I’d add Code Pink and the Feminist Majority Foundation to that list of embarrassments. The FMF piece, authored by Eleanor Smeal, approvingly notes that the Afghans are progressing toward her ideals of equality:
In the last seven years, there have been some successes. In 2000, girls were not allowed to attend school. Last year, the U.N. reported that 6 million children attended school. More than a third were girls. 49% of health care workers are women. Women comprise 25% of civil service workers.
Women also represent the majority of the civilian casualties, but strangely enough, Smeal leaves this out. And neither Herold nor Smeal address exactly how many of these women and girls are in increased danger of rape due to the region’s instability. But this shouldn’t be too surprising, since FMF’s co-founder, Peg Yorkin, apparently approves of child rape, so long as the perpetrator is sufficiently talented and connected. And who could be more connected than the USG? (To be fair, Yorkin did catch from her late producer husband a vicious case of Hollywood-itis, which leaves its sufferers with a moral IQ less than that of Woody Allen’s.)
October 22, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Excellent post, Cheryl.
RAWA has been condemning US military intervention in their country for over eight years now. Here’s a statement the organization made on 10/11/01:
“America, by forming an international coalition against Osama and his Taliban-collaborators and in retaliation for the 11th September terrorist attacks, has launched a vast aggression on our country.
“Despite the claim of the US that only military and terrorist bases of the Taliban and Al Qieda will be struck and that its actions would be accurately targeted and proportionate, we have witnessed for the past seven days leaves no doubt that this invasion will shed the blood of numerous women, men, children, young and old of our country.”
http://www.rawa.org/us-strikes.htm
But, of course, nobody in the West really cares what Afghan women have to say.
October 23, 2009 at 9:03 am
Thanks, Don. The RAWA’s predictions have proven to be all too accurate, sadly.
October 23, 2009 at 1:04 am
Feminist Majority’s material on Afghanistan has been pretty uniformly confused-to-awful since December 2001. It doesn’t even have much to do with the Obama administration; their basic tone was established as soon as U.S. troops entered Kandahar, and hasn’t changed much if at all since Obama was elected. I think it has more to do with FMF’s politicos not wanting to set themselves squarely against the warfare state when they think that they might somehow be able to leverage it.
However, Alex Jones notwithstanding, I think that lumping Code Pink in with FMF on Afghanistan is awfully unfair to Code Pink. They’re one of the few major national antiwar coalitions that’s still staging regular protest actions at all, and opposition to the occupation of Afghanistan has been their central campaign since about November 2008. (Code Pink has also promoted RAWA, as an organization, in their anti-occupation campaigns; see for example how just this past month they promoted, and sponsored the Southern California stop for, an anti-occupation speaking tour by a representative from RAWA. They also run one of the few national campaigns against the bombing of Pakistan.) Does this reportback / action alert from the recent Afghan delegation really read like a group that’s just forgotten about the effects of war and occupation on women in the warzone?
October 23, 2009 at 9:10 am
You’re right, it’s unfair to tar Code Pink and FMF with the same brush.