 Coping
with the 9.11.01 Aftermath
The Other Side of the Women's Issues in Afghanistan
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
I am writing to you after reading an article
Adept in Politics and Advertising, 4 Women Shape a Campaign in the November
11, 2001 issue of the NY Times. The women, who included chief Pentagon
spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, are described there as "among the Bush
administration's most important shapers of the words and images that the allies
are seeking to convey to a global audience."
The final quote of the article is from Mary Matalin, chief political adviser to
Vice President Dick Cheney. She says of her commitment to advocating for the
war: "I think we [the 4 women] probably bring--and I don't mean this to sound
sexist--but we probably have more of a subconscious outrage at these
issues...This is something that crosses my mind every day: a third of these
women in pre-Taliban days were doctors, lawyers and teachers. You can't help but
be outraged."
I am outraged by this cynical use of the lives of women. Here is a historical
context for Matalin's remarks (sources at end if not cited in text):
In 1978 a secular government came to power in Afghanistan. This government
immediately moved to improve the terrible feudal conditions of women. It set up
literacy programs especially for women, whose illiteracy rate was 96%. It
trained more teachers and published textbooks in local languages. It trained
brigades of women to go into countryside to provide medical services and by 1985
increased hospital beds by 80%. It prohibited the "bride price" and gave women
freedom to choose their marriages. It prohibited punishment of women for losing
their virginity before marriage, It made it possible for women to train and then
work as doctors, teachers, and lawyers. The government also
cancelled mortgage debts of laborers and tenants. These debts had been inherited
over generations so that feudal warlords held land workers as virtual serfs.
It was this government that U.S. President Jimmy Carter set out to overthrow by
beginning to send money and equipment to fundamentalist opposition groups in
1979. This initial effort grew into even more extensive U.S. backing of the
Taliban, the Northern Alliance and other factions, all of which drew
their power from the feudal landlord class.
The secular government that promoted the welfare and liberation of all women was
a young socialist movement, the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).
"The CIA actually created Osama bin Laden's organization back in the 1980s to
attack...the progressive government in Afghanistan. As vice president, George
Bush Sr. oversaw the operation. In the Agency's employ, bin Laden's troops
murdered teachers, doctors and nurses, disfigured women who took off the veil,
and shot down civilian airliners with U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles.
The U.S. has known all along the reactionary position on women of the
U.S.-financed and trained fundamentalist groups--and the U.S. government did not
care. Instead, U.S. government policy has been to support the interest of U.S.
oil in the Central Asia region. These oil corporations have been trying to get a
pipeline through Afghanistan for about 10 years.
From a May 26, 1997, New York Times article by John F. Burns:
"While deploring the Taliban's policies on women and the adoption of a penal
code that provides for the amputation of thieves' hands and the stoning to death
of adulterers, the United States has sometimes acted as though a Taliban
government might serve its interests. The Clinton Administration has taken
the view that a Taliban victory would end a war that has killed 1.5 million
Afghans; would act as a counterweight to Iran, whose Shiite Muslim leadership is
fiercely opposed to the Sunni Muslims of the Taliban, and would offer the
possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence
in the region. For example, a proposal by the Unocal Corporation of California
for a $2.5 billion pipeline that would link the gas fields of Turkmenistan
through Afghanistan to Pakistan has attracted strong support in Washington,
though human rights groups are likely to object to the plan.... The Afghan
project, strongly endorsed by the Taliban, is part of a broader concept under
which the vast mineral resources of the former Soviet republics would be moved
to markets along routes that would offer these countries a new autonomy from
Moscow."
In May 1998, Time magazine reported that the CIA had "set up a
secret task force to monitor the region's politics and gauge its wealth. Covert
CIA officers, some well-trained petroleum engineers, had traveled through
southern Russia and the Caspian region to sniff out potential oil reserves. When
the policymakers heard the agency's report, [Secretary of State Madeline]
Albright concluded that 'working to mold the area's future was one
of the most exciting things we can do.'"
After some setbacks to U.S. efforts,
www.Caucasuswatch.com [NOTE: caucasuswatch.com has gone off the
internet, click here to get the
GOOGLE search on caucasuswatch] (which describes itself as an intelligence
service for the
oil industry) wrote in January 2001: "With the coming of a Sino-Russian pact of
mutual assistance and an Iranian acceptance of the Russian proposal to carve up
the Caspian Sea, any chance the U.S. had of cementing alliances in the region
seemed doomed. The incoming American administration, heavy in oil and related
interests, will likely try to reverse this trend. How effective they will be is
open to question."
A more recent entry on the
www.Caucasuswatch.com site tied U.S. "Big Oil" future in the region to: "the
success of the Central Asian counterstrike." That article was posted on April
24, 2001.
The U.S. has cared not a whit for women who were "doctors, lawyers and teachers"
when they were flourishing under a secular government--nor did it care for the
Afghan women of the countryside living under feudal conditions.
The U.S. armed and trained the Taliban because the U.S. power interests hoped
the return of the feudal warlords to power would give the U.S. oil companies a
chance at that pipeline--a chance that a secular socialist government would not
give them.
(A historical note here: The U.S. began its war against the secular government
six months before the USSR intervened with troops. [p. 146, "From the Shadows,"
an autobiography by Robert M. Gates, former Director of the CIA, Simon &
Schuster, 1996])
Now the U.S. government is trying to use the very women whose lives were -
crushed and ended - by U.S. interference and power politics! The U.S. is
dishonoring women twice.
The U.S. engineered events in Afghanistan that resulted in the fall of a secular
government attempting to liberate women, and that resulted in the terrible abuse
and deaths of women under fundamentalist forces.
Now the U.S. is trying to use the very deaths of women that - it caused - to
consolidate U.S. power in Central Asia.
We who are dedicated to the liberation of women can not let ourselves be
manipulated. We know that the full liberation of women can not be accomplished
within a framework of injustice, inequity, and imperialist violence.
Please--tie your support for the women of Afghanistan to the demand "No U.S.
War! U.S. Out of Afghanistan!"
Sources:
See Attached Article below: Afghanistan: The lynching of a
revolution
Pentagon publication by the U.S. Department of the Army,
"Afghanistan--a Country Study for 1986"
www.internationalANSWER.org Act
Now to Stop War and End Racism
Afghanistan: The lynching of a
revolution
By Deirdre Griswold
Workers World News Service Reprinted from the
Oct. 10, 1996 issue of Workers World newspaper
Not that long ago, the bourgeoisie
could still feel pride in their revolutionary history. They continued to
celebrate the 1789 French Revolution and many other great victories in the
struggle against feudal oppression.
They even spoke approvingly of the 1917 overthrow of the czarist autocracy in
Russia. The problem, they said, was that the Bolsheviks had spoiled that
struggle for democracy by going too far.
But capitalism in this rotten age of U.S. imperialist conquest of the globe
has degenerated so far from its revolutionary roots that it is now, to borrow a
phrase from Henry Kissinger, to the right of the czar. And it is celebrating the
return of absolute feudal rule in Afghanistan.
The powerful media engines, their reach multiplied by the most modern
technologies, are presenting the world with instant photographic images of a
lynching-that's all it was-of the few progressives left in Kabul.
To make the deed more palatable, the media use adjectives like "butcher" to
describe former President Najibullah and his aides. Dragged out of the United
Nations compound where they had sought asylum for the last four years, they were
beaten to death and then left hanging for all to see.
But among themselves, foreign-policy experts for the U.S. establishment know
that the Afghani progressives' real crime was that they tried to carry out a
social transformation in their country in the direction of socialism.
What authority bears witness to this? None other than the U.S. Department of
the Army itself.
The Pentagon puts out what it calls country study books on almost every
country in the world. They are updated every few years. These books contain
basic information for the use of U.S. personnel traveling or working abroad.
There's nothing classified in them. They're available in most libraries.
"Afghanistan-a Country Study" for 1986 has of course the anti-communist line
expected of a Pentagon publication. But it also contains much useful information
about the changes instituted by the Afghani Revolution of 1978.
Freeing women and peasants
Before the revolution, 5 percent of Afghanistan's rural landowners owned more
than 45 percent of the arable land. A third of the rural people were landless
laborers, sharecroppers or tenants.
Debts to the landlords and to money lenders "were a regular feature of rural
life," says the U.S. Army report. An indebted farmer turned over half his crop
each year to the money lender.
"When the PDPA took power, it quickly moved to remove both landownership
inequalities and usury," says the Pentagon report. Decree number six of the
revolution canceled mortgage debts of agricultural laborers, tenants and small
landowners.
The revolutionary regime set up extensive literacy programs, especially for
women. It printed textbooks in many languages-Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and
Baluchi. "The government trained many more teachers, built additional schools
and kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans," says the country
study.
Before the revolution, female illiteracy had been 96.3 percent in
Afghanistan. Rural illiteracy of both sexes was 90.5 percent.
By 1985, despite a counter-revolutionary war financed by the CIA, there had
been an 80-percent increase in hospital beds. The government initiated mobile
medical units and brigades of women and young people to go to the undeveloped
countryside and provide medical services to the peasants for the first time.
Among the very first decrees of the revolutionary regime were to prohibit
bride-price and give women freedom of choice in marriage. "Historically," said
the U.S. manual, "gender roles and women's status have been tied to property
relations. Women and children tend to be assimilated into the concept of
property and to belong to a male."
Also: "A bride who did not exhibit signs of virginity on the wedding night
could be murdered by her father and/or brothers."
The revolution was challenging all this.
Young women in the cities, where the new government's authority was strong,
could tear off the veil, freely go out in public, attend school and get a job.
They were organized in the Democratic Women's Organization of Afghanistan,
founded in 1965 by Dr. Anahita Ratebzada.
Ratebzada's companion, Babrak Karmal, was one of the young revolutionaries
who had formed the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan in that same year
and would later become president of the country.
Repression and revolution
A revolution was literally thrust upon this young party in 1978. The
reactionary government of Mohammad Daoud, which was close to both the shah of
Iran and the United States, arrested almost the entire leadership of the PDPA on
April 26, 1978. There had been a huge funeral procession just a week earlier for
a murdered member of the party, and the progressive masses in Kabul saw the new
arrests as an attempt to annihilate the Party just as the military junta had
done to the workers' parties in Chile in 1973.
An uprising by the lower ranks of the military freed the popular party
leader, Nur Mohammad Taraki-the soldiers actually broke down his prison walls
with a tank. Within a day, Daoud was overthrown and a revolutionary government
proclaimed, headed by Taraki.
This uprising of the soldiers and the city masses, many of them low-paid
civil servants in a country with very little industry, was every bit as glorious
as earlier revolutions against feudal tyranny in Europe. It held the promise of
breaking down the old traditions based on oppression and fear.
The leaders of the PDPA were educated, although some, like Taraki, came from
very poor families. But they had been to Kabul University, some had studied
abroad, and they yearned to bring enlightenment and material progress to
Afghanistan.
Had all this happened 150 years ago, the feudals would have been overthrown
and Afghanistan welcomed into the fold of progressive bourgeois nations. But
that was before the age of imperialism, and especially before the era of
proletarian revolutions and the Cold War.
The U.S. CIA began building a mercenary army, recruiting feudal warlords and
their servants for a "holy war" against the communists, who had liberated
"their" women and "their" peasants. Washington spent billions of dollars every
year on the war.
The only country in the area ready to help the Afghani Revolution was the
Soviet Union. The USSR intervened militarily. But it could not defeat this
well-armed counter-revolutionary force.
Every battle was a test not only of Soviet military might but of the
political resolve of its leaders. They finally withdrew the troops in 1989 as
the shift to the right within the USSR became critical.
The war in Afghanistan began some 18 years ago. It continued long after the
last progressive government in Kabul fell in 1992. The recent stage has been an
orgy of destruction as rival reactionary groups fought for control of the
capital, now mostly destroyed.
More than 2 million Afghanis have been killed in this struggle, and millions
more made refugees. Now half the remaining population-the women-have been
returned to the status of property without a single human right. A poor man
unable to pay his debts can have his hand cut off for theft.
The schools and clinics built by the revolution are in ruins. The Taleban-a
fundamentalist group supported by Pakistan that was trained and armed by the
U.S. CIA-has taken the capital and is pursuing the war northward, toward the
border with what were the Central
This is the hideous face of counter-revolution. Afghanistan has been dragged
back more than 100 years. But it was the most modern weapons and communications
systems, made in the USA, that killed the progressive dream of a generation of
Afghani social revolutionaries.
Oil companies happy
The return of unbridled feudal tyranny to Afghanistan is considered a "very
positive development" by the U.S. energy company Unocal Corp. Together with
Delta Oil Co. of Saudi Arabia, it is seeking to build both a gas and an oil
pipeline from Pakistan to Turkmenistan via Afghanistan. Chris Taggart, executive
vice president of the company, says these projects are "now more likely to
succeed than they were two weeks ago." These are multi-billion-dollar projects
that promise huge profits to the transnational oil companies.
The U.S. government indicated it will recognize the new regime soon, despite
its ultra-reactionary character.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is
cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011;
via e-mail: ww@wwpublish.com. For subscription info send message to: ww-info@wwpublish.com.
Web: http://www.workers.org)
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