We can’t make Afghans respect women’s rights
No matter what Afghanistan’s Constitution says, after 20 years there, we were not even close to establishing herd immunity to extremism and misogyny.
The Taliban march to power, so quick, so easy, so obviously in the works for months, makes a mockery of earnest pleas to include women on the Afghan government’s team in peace negotiations with the Taliban. As if they ever would have agreed to a peaceful political solution and protection of women’s rights, or kept their word if they gave it. As if women at the table could have made a difference.
Just last year, there were “targeted attacks on women leading up to the start of the negotiations,” including an assassination attempt on Fawzia Koofi, one of four women on the government’s negotiating team, according to the latest State Department report on human rights. The Taliban also “burned a girls’ school” and about a year ago prevented 200 women from taking university entrance exams “by threatening them with fines.”
The Afghan Constitution says women must be represented in government, and they are. It says
And (we) can’t make a country care about its own women.
they can vote, and they do, making up about a third of the electorate in 2019. Millions of girls have gone to school. There has been progress, no doubt, and it is in grave danger.
But women in Afghanistan, the report says, are the victims of “cultural” factors that range from raw Taliban brutality to government negligence, cruelty and injustice: women imprisoned because they reported being victims of crimes, or at the request of family members, or as proxies for male relatives convicted of crimes.
Catalog of horrors
There's no end to this type of thing, in accountings by our own government and other close observers. Human Rights Watch said a year ago that the legal, educational and political gains for women and girls were “partial and fragile even in government-controlled areas” – and were eroding. The inescapable conclusion is that no matter what the Afghan Constitution says, after 20 years, we were not even close to establishing herd immunity to extremism and misogyny in Afghanistan.
The State Department report is a catalog of horrors that knows no national boundaries. Women all over the world are in trouble, the kind that leads to stunted lives or even death.
They are fleeing gang violence in Central America, and sometimes the United States has to decide whether to let them in to seek asylum. They may be subject to female genital mutilation. Sometimes U.S. authorities have to decide whether to grant asylum to those fleeing this, too.
Women in Saudi Arabia must have male guardians who control fundamental aspects of their lives.
The State Department report on human rights there measures progress like this: A woman can now “move freely
within the country” without her male guardian's approval, the Ministry of Education decided women studying abroad on government scholarships did not have to be accompanied by a male guardian, and a court ruled that a woman “living independently did not constitute a criminal act.”
On the other hand, an abusive guardian can be fatal. Fighting for rights like driving can send women to prison, where they report being tortured and sexually assaulted.
Sharia law discriminates against women and in some cases, the State Department noted, “the testimony of a woman equals half that of a man.” Sometimes “courts punished victims as well as perpetrators” in rape cases, and women still require a guardian's permission to leave prison after their sentence is served.
It's heartbreaking. Nevertheless, we can't save all the world's women, or even Afghanistan's.
No matter how long we stayed
Accounts of entrenched, widespread corruption in Afghanistan still have the power to shock, as do revelations of one U.S. leader after another compounding disaster by spreading false information. This time, it's not about inflated body counts in Vietnam. It's their delusional or perhaps intentionally misleading assessments of the commitment and capabilities of Afghan troops.
We should also ask if in fact our intelligence services knew that the Taliban started buying off Afghan officials and planning this show of force “early last year,” as an Afghan military officer and a U.S official told The Washington Post. And if not, why not?
President Joe Biden has faced test after test in his short tenure to date. It may be that only a commander in chief who spent decades dealing with foreign leaders and visiting troops as a senator and a vice president, whose son had served, who is 78 and “the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan,” could have the confidence and resolve and political courage to finally say: This is it, it ends here and now, and no future president will have to bear the burden of this decision. America was a superpower before the war in Afghanistan. We are still a superpower. Our military is still the strongest in the world, our troops the best. But they can't make a country honest or unified or patriotic.
And they can't make a country care about its own women. No one could do that but Afghanistan, no matter how long we stayed.
Commentary editor Jill Lawrence is the author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.”