The Rape of the Afghan Women

I don’t like to say stuff like ‘I told you so,’ but I told you so. We are now in cahoots with an Afghan government that is legalizing the rape of Afghani wives by their husbands, pretty much whenever they want. I don’t know what tenet of Sharia law this follows, nor in what passage in the Quran it is mentioned, but I’m pretty sure this just your garden-variety marginalization of women that that world has always been seen, throughout the history of mankind, especially in Muslim countries (usually on religious grounds). This means that not only are Americans sending their money to support an Afghan government that betrays women at the drop of a hat, we are also sending our soldiers to die for it. This is not cool, man. This is NOT okay.

I’m mad. And I’m mad not only in that ordinary ‘someone is pissing me off’ way, I’m mad in a political way, historical way. I’m mad for everything that has been done to women for someone else’s advantage, throughout time. I’m mad for every time anyone has ever said or thought, “It’s okay now—women have their rights and should pipe down.” I’m mad in a profound, visceral, all-encompassing way—because I do not intend to be complicit in ‘trading away’ the rights of women for certain alleged successes. That is not a ‘success.’ And it has been done habitually in the history of the world, and I won’t have a part in it.

We anticipate this happening in Iraq, too. The ascendancy of Sharia law will make it not only harder for women there to keep their rights, but for religious minorities, too. And we have blundered into it, losing 4270 of our soldiers to the ‘liberation of Iraq.’ And countless of innocent Iraqi lives, as well. Who—exactly—will be ‘liberated’? What are we to tell the families of those soldiers who were lost? That ‘they didn’t die in vain’? That their service was wholly ‘honorable’? How can we sustain that lie when a previously secular Iraq will now be demanding veils on women, and keeping them in their homes unless they have men to accompany them? What is ‘honorable’ about that? And you can’t say ‘well, we didn’t MEAN for that to happen’ when it was totally foreseeable, given the religious situation there.

So what do we have in these places that we have bumbled into with some testosterone-loaded plan to vanquish the ‘enemy’ that A) wasn’t in Iraq to begin with, and B) might have been in Afghanistan, but is now in Pakistan, and where we have in fact, helped to continue the oppression of women. We have a mess—that’s what we have. An unjustifiable, unholy, unfair, and undemocratic mess.

I do not hear Republicans taking responsibility for that mess. I do not hear this party that is so anxious for others to be ‘accountable’ for their actions actually being accountable for what they themselves have lockstepped in support of for the past 8 years. In fact, I hear a party that is STILL pushing the swaggering, macho ‘strong (if thoughtless) defense’ mentality that bungled us into these various messes. Well, I am not going to let them carry on as if nothing has happened. What happens to the women of the world may not be very important to them, but it is important to ME. And I will out them at every opportunity.

As is spoken from those who endured a previous hideous outrage of history: “Never again.”

Whenever we deal with countries whose entire cultural and historical pattern includes the oppression of women, we must tread carefully, so as not to entrench these grotesque patterns even further.
That is the very least a ‘democratic’ nation can do.