You can't bomb women into liberty

thinks women everywhere should be incensed enough, that a country we are supporting, passes a law that woman can be raped, who can be beaten, denied education, must step off the sidewalk when a man passes, cannot drive, cannot talk out in public, must accompany a male when outdoors, must cover their body, cannot look men in the eyes.....

Stop it! You actually want to bring these people to the table and do what? Sorry, someone needs to fry their a** not send them money and bring them to the table.

Mandos, I pretty much share your reading of the situation, but I despair of getting many North Americans past the temper-tantrum stage of conducting foreign relations.

There are strong women's political organizations in Afghanistan. Supporting them (by supporting them, not ordering them around) would be a welcome sign of intelligence from the hobnail-boot crowd, but I don't see that happening soon. North American politicians use Afghan women for propaganda and little else, and sadly, a lot of feminists are acculturated to the same easy fixes.

rape and similar mistreatment of women -- (and children).

Domestic violence against child brides is widespread, said Suraya Pakzad, the founder of the Voice of Women organization, who was married at age 14 and has six children. She said girls as young as 10 face "violation" by husbands 40 years their senior. "By the end ... women, or girls, run away." "Because of security we, unfortunately, day by day, we have to pull out of areas where last year we operated, we have our operations. We were able to work with the women, but this year we cannot," she said.
"Rapes in the country have been growing tremendously, particularly child rapes within the ages of 9, 8, 7, even lesser than that," said Wazhma Frogh, director of Global Rights Afghanistan.
"So these are the issues that are all born by this lack of security where women have no place in ... security decisions."
Domestic violence against child brides is widespread, said Suraya Pakzad, the founder of the Voice of Women organization, who was married at age 14 and has six children. She said girls as young as 10 face "violation" by husbands 40 years their senior. "By the end ... women, or girls, run away."

And personally?

If it's an article of your faith to thank God you weren't born a woman every day, and it's an article of your faith that you are superior to and therefore can mistreat women, your faith is FITH and so are you. And if it's an article of your faith that God wants you to have your way with children, then not only are you FITH, you deserve to spend the rest of your life alone in the dark in a small secure room. (I'm looking at you, Warren Jeffs.) I don't give half a damn whether you're in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Arizona, Utah, or Schleicher County, Texas.

RAWA outlines the Taliban's rules for women. More of that weakness Rick Wright talks about -- "prevent the seditious limbs from being noticed". Just this month the first Afghan woman to appear on television since the fall of the Taliban has fled the country after her husband was murdered.

Paween Mushtakhel, 41, and her two children left Afghanistan on Friday. Hours later, under intense pressure from critics worldwide, President Hamid Karzai promised to review new laws that are said in effect to legalise marital rape in the Shi’ite minority.

Those laws had angered Nato countries weighing up US calls for more troops. From London to Ottawa, officials questioned whether they should risk their soldiers’ lives to bolster an Afghan government that not only failed to protect women but was also planning to reverse their hard-won freedoms.

“When the Taliban went I thought things were getting better for women,” said Paween. “Now I think it won’t change for a long time.”
...
Last summer she appeared in a production of the Shakespeare comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, staged by a French director, after which she began to receive death threats. People in turbans came on motorbikes, saying: “Don’t act or you’ll be killed.” Her husband was also threatened. “They told him, ‘You pimp, letting your wife on TV. If you’re a real man you’ll beat her and kick her and take her back to Khost’.”

One night, as Paween came out of Ariana TV, she was knocked down by a bike. Then, as she prepared dinner at home, her husband went out for firewood. She thought she heard shots, but because there were lots of fireworks at the time, she took little notice. By 11pm he had still not returned. Paween said: “I did not sleep all night. I knew something had happened.”

At 9am a local elder told her she should go to the police station, and 200 yards from their house she saw her husband’s bullet-riddled body.

When she tried to register a case with the police, they asked for a bribe. She took her children into hiding and spent three months trying to get help. Eventually she ended up at the national security office, where she was warned off, on pain of also ending up dead.

“What can I do but run away?” she asked. Paween is now in Pakistan and hopes to request asylum in Canada. Her story adds weight to the fury of Nato officials over the laws from the Shi’ite minority, which would limit the rights of women, apparently in a bid to secure clerics’ votes in the coming election. Women will also need their husband’s permission to leave their home, just as in Taliban times.

FSM knows CNN is anything but pro-feminist, but they tell the story of a woman who still gets death threats for teaching women to read in Taliban-controlled territory in 2009.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Suraya Pakzad still receives death threats for teaching women how to read and write in Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan.
"[When] I go to the office I don't use the same way ... every day," she told CNN's Carol Costello. "I cannot share my schedule even with my friends, with my staff and even sometimes I'm not secure talking on phone."
Pakzad is one of several Afghan women's rights advocates who are in the U.S. capital this week to address a move the Obama administration is considering: reaching out to Taliban moderates in an effort to bring peace to Afghanistan.
She took part in a hearing on Capitol Hill -- sponsored by Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana, and Richard Lugar, R-Indiana -- titled "Women Shaping Afghanistan's Future."
Last weekend, President Obama told The New York Times that he is willing to talk to some members of the Taliban.
Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday that he agreed with a recent assessment by Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke that only about 5 percent of the Taliban is "incorrigible, not susceptible to anything other than being defeated."
"It is worth engaging and determining whether or not there are those [in the Taliban] who are willing to participate in a secure and stable Afghan state," he said.
But Pakzad wants U.S. lawmakers to put women's rights at the forefront of any deal with Taliban moderates. She warned that the negotiations described by Obama and Biden could threaten the hard-won gains in women's rights in Afghanistan over the past seven years.
"It makes me scared and everybody has the fear that one day [the Taliban] will be back again," Pakzad said.

And assassination is a Taliban tool against women who dare political careers or to speak up for the rights of women.

Sitara Achakzai was attacked by two gunmen as she arrived at her home in a rickshaw - a vehicle colleagues said she deliberately chose to use to avoid attracting attention.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the murder. The two gunmen were apparently waiting for Achakzai, a 52-year-old women's rights activist who had lived for many years in Germany when the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan.
Officials said she returned in 2004 to her home in Kandahar, which is also the birthplace and spiritual home of the Taliban.

Of course you can't bomb women into freedom. You can, though, stand aside and watch barbarians destroy art and murder women in the name of their faith.
You can even squall that bloggers and feminists and others who don't stand passively by or sweep these atrocities out of sight, out of mind, and into convenient pockets for the sake of "pragmatism" are shrill. Or hyperventilating.

Hope that makes you feel good about yourself. Bet you're male, too.

in the 1990s. So the original quote claiming that the Taliban's brutality was neither known nor acted against is FITH too.

I am a feminist, a Canadian woman who joined her first women's liberation group in 1968, which I suspect was before some people here were born. My brother, a journalist, spent a couple of months in Afghanistan every year from 1979 until the early 1990s and has returned often since, so I know a bit about the people, have bothered to educate myself about the country and its history, and I don't throw words like "Taleban" into my writing like solid objects just because politicians told me to.

Nowhere did I claim that "feminists have never done a damn thing to support Afghan women." I don't know how you get that from what I wrote; I know feminists who are seriously (ie, not self-righteously) involved in such support work.

Pretty obviously, I was not addressing feminism itself but unexamined Western privilege, which North American feminists, like all North American leftists, are not immune to. I was addressing the knee-jerk reactions of people who think they can fix the world tomorrow (in their own image, of course), and every comment since has been evidence of such reactions.

Many of the examples I see above of "help" offered to Afghan women are examples of crushing imperialist cultural condescension, but some people here can't see that, apparently. I am as appalled by human-rights abuses anywhere as a person possibly can be, but that doesn't send me to the opposite extreme, of just trying to wipe out anyone who hasn't seen the light that I do.

It is possible to think and write in slightly greater complexity than seems to be the custom here. I don't see any attempt at discussion or sustained argument above. I just see people flinging details around, as though quoting one example of appalling abuse after another was going to prove something on its own.

What it proves is that you are labouring under your own version of Kipling's "white man's burden," an expression, interestingly, that was inspired by his experiences in the very part of the world we're talking about here.

And then there's the "linkie" squeak. Do you really need a "linkie" before you will permit someone to observe reasonably that many North Americans are prejudiced and xenophobic? Maybe what you really need is a mirror.

Atwood (whom I knew years ago when we were both young -- and I dare you to try squeaking "linkie" at her) certainly had something like the Taleban in mind when she was writing Handmaid's Tale, but much more she had in mind, as she always does, the good ole US of A. You see, it is possible to think in complexities.

I have discussions online with Americans every day, so I know that it doesn't always have to feel like a scene out of Hitchcock's film The Birds, which is pretty much what this experience looks like to me. You don't discuss here; you just snipe and shriek and squeak. I'm sure the moderator will now ban me, but that will be redundant by the time s/he gets to it.

THIS bit of disingenuity:

Pretty obviously, I was not addressing feminism itself but unexamined Western privilege, which North American feminists, like all North American leftists, are not immune to. I was addressing the knee-jerk reactions of people who think they can fix the world tomorrow (in their own image, of course), and every comment since has been evidence of such reactions.

WOULD have made an interesting point, maybe, had the writer bothered to define "unexamined Western privilege." Left as-was, it hits like another "tell" -- not from academic discourse so much as from gambling: a classic bluff in an effort to buy the pot. Or if you prefer a more widely-accessible metaphor, a bit like the CarFax commercial in which, even as the firefighters extinguish the blaze, somebody's typing a used-car ad that claims, "This car is HOT!!!" across the bottom of the screen.

Oh, we're shrill here. We snipe. We're good at it. Some of us have military training, in fact. Others parse well, and aren't shy about raising a querulous voice to confront overgeneralization or specious contentions.

Still others simply have too much pit-bull attitude to let sloppy logic go unchallenged. We don't "squeak" about links, either. That noise you hear is a chorus of demand, which we're prepared to back up at call with links of our own -- and with our own experiences and knowledge as well.

But, "The Birds"? Dear, no. Velociraptors would be a much better comparison.

Congratulations on your correspondence with a fine author, by the way. D'you suppose you ought to read her book?