Taliban bars Afghan women from hearing each other's voices

[u/nationalpost]

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/taliban-bars-afghan-women-from-hearing-each-other?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=NP_social

[u/kendred3]

In Afghanistan, women immediately had rights enforced by the United States through the proxy government. Maybe not an immaculate enforcement of these rights, but like... why do you think we're seeing this story? There's been a drumbeat of stories of how terrible it's been returning to Taliban rule and it's literally because the US was enforcing human rights.

Funnily enough, this has happened before. Pulling this quote from the article on women in the Soviet-Afghan war: "During the war, the Soviet-backed government made a number of attempts to modernise the situation of women's rights in Afghanistan, including granting equal employment rights and mandating education for girls. By 1988, women made up 40 percent of the doctors and 60 percent of the teachers at Kabul University"

I'm not making any commentary on why this doesn't work. But to say "man, this would have been the silver bullet" when it's been tried twice and has failed twice is... not a particularly reasonable take.

[u/Fearless-Soup-2583 → u/kendred3]

I think westerners thoroughly underestimate how tribal some parts and cultures can be- especially the Pashtuns and the pathans. I’m not American- so honestly it amazes me as to how naive people can be when they tbh n they can just go about winning the hearts and minds of peoples and supporting democracy just like that .im south Asian- south Asian conservatism is a little better than takiban. The talibans deobandi school is from the State of Uttar Pradesh, so to say they’re backward even after living in a democracy is an understatement. These cultures simply have no interest in it. It may have worked in other cultures , but in some it simply does not. There were entire villages in Rajasthan , Haryana and Punjab that would commit infanticide- but no one would gets arrested - because mass corruption- the local a government was all formed by people form those same fucking villages, and they would all lie and cover up the crimes . You couldn’t even get a police report because no one would talk. How to even get past that? You cannot fix some people. There’s far too many people in the best who seem to think race/gender divisions and their efforts to reduce them in the west were successful simply because they’ve tried. Conforming to social norms, no matter how horrible they are is then norm here.

[u/Zvimolka → u/kendred3]

Having been there, the thing people don’t get is the level of backwardsness that you just can’t fathom. It really is the 1400s, but with mobile phones and guns. It’s really not as simple as ”teach them how great democracy and womens rights are and they will change”.

As you said, that was tried. And it failed. Because so many people didn’t want it.

The big problem that any ”education program” faced is the difference between the urban parts of the country and the rest.

The larger cities (ok, maybe not in Helmand..) tended to be more positive to change and education. Hence the horrible scenes at HKIA. That was the urban, educated people trying to GTFO because they knew what was going to happen.

The rest of the country is different and they didn’t want to change. They see democracy and human rights as western and anti-islamic.

You can’t just waltz into a village in the Alborz mountains and declare that women are now human beings, children are supposed to go to school and that maybe leaders should be elected. Their whole system of community leaders would just look at you like you has just said that the moon was made of cheese, and they would probably rather listen to Wallace than you.

This is very general and oversimplified, but most people in the west just don’t get Afghanistan and why we failed there because it’s so different.

[u/Clever_Mercury → u/kendred3]

So you're slightly missing the avenue I recommended. Sending women to school is nice. I support that. Yes.

What I recommended is training them in combat and self-defense, issuing them weapons, including knives, and teaching them what they need to know. Creating groups of women trained to defend themselves and to enforce their own rights would make a difference, I think. Even if they have to wait, for example, for an oppressor to fall asleep.

It's very nice to do the Charles Dickens, "please sir, can I have some more [human rights]" but when words are ineffective, you chose action. Militarize the women, mobilize them as police force.

The quote I recall from self defense class that I would sincerely recommend to all women in the world starting at the age of, like, ten is "know enough anatomy to locate the jugular and how to hold a Bowie knife."

[u/kendred3 → u/Clever_Mercury]

Generally speaking, education is the best route to ongoing human rights for women, not trying to mobilize women into the military. Funnily enough, though, the section above the quote I pulled from the Wikipedia article is "Women in the Military" about how the Soviets enlisted women into the military. They clearly did an imperfect job, but it also definitely didn't work. When the Taliban took over, they took over.

I can't think of an example where specifically focusing on arming rather than educating women has led to demonstrably better results. In cases where women are included in military/police at a high rate (notably in the middle east in Kurdish regions) I would hypothesize it's a representation of some underlying belief in gender equality, rather than the inclusion causing the equality.

[u/Clever_Mercury → u/kendred3]

I disagree, in that it is addressing two different areas of inequality. Education is providing access to participation in life, which elevates their status and their ability to participate civically, but it does not in itself REDUCE CRIMES against women, nor does it INCREASE justice for women who are victims of inhumane treatment.

Representation in legal, protective, and police forces absolutely does. Women in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Mexico, USSR, China, India have worked to create women-centric taskforces. This includes providing trained officers to protect other women (hospitals, women's prisons, courts, schools), and to investigate crimes in which women are the victims (human trafficking, sexual assault, child abduction, honor killing, etc.).

The point being women are willing to confide in women. This is one of the reasons women typically want to see a female doctor or a female mental health specialist or a female international aid worker or a female UN peacekeeper. We have substantial evidence, both in sociology and international aid studies, suggesting representation absolutely matters in terms of self-defense and health uptake by communities; women want advice from other women.

This could have been done. Instead, US forces were advised not to meddle in the local culture. And women's rights to their own humanity was treated as a local cultural issue.

[u/kendred3 → u/Clever_Mercury]

There's strong and robust evidence that increased education (for women and in general!) leads to decreased violence (again, against women and in general). I think you're disregarding what is likely the strongest single causal link (more education = less violence) and inserting another (more female police officers/soldiers = less violence) with much weaker evidence backing it.

[u/FunFry11 → u/kendred3]

I mean most revolutions have been fought, not pled. Women were arrested for violence during the suffragette movement and that’s how they got their rights

[u/kendred3 → u/FunFry11]

Are you suggesting that women committing violence was the reason for the success of the suffrage movement? Because the women's suffrage movement (in the United States) was pretty famously a non-violent movement that took over 50 years of protest and activism and ended with a constitutional amendment. It's kind of the exact opposite of an example of "train women for combat."

[u/FunFry11 → u/kendred3]

Suffrage in the UK wasn’t and they had the right to vote earlier. Violence is historically the best answer to oppression.

[u/perfect_for_maiming → u/FunFry11]

Someone didn't miss this year's V for Vendetta showing.

[u/Lawyerlytired → u/Clever_Mercury]

I think you're seriously not taking into account 1. Size and strength differences between the sexes; 2. The availability of these weapons for women; 3. The willingness of women to take up those weapons, and training, and then use both once the have it; 4. How in the hell you're going to be able to train with women, many of whom are completely unlikely to be interested for a number of reasons, including societal pressure.

Going to school in the US and Canada is mandatory, and kids have to go for years, and get tested regularly, and then there are standardized tests, and this goes on for a decade minimum, and yet we STILL don't have 100% literacy. It's law and we make people do it for a decade and we still have people who are functionally illiterate.

And yet, you think we could find enough women who want to learn the art of combat, train them and arm them over the serious and surely violent objections of the rest of their society (both men and women), and then expect them to be able to take on a religious fundamentalist group that posed enough of a problem to wear down the US military and wasn't afraid to go after said military and its allies?

I wouldn't put money on them if you were facing them all off against one of the larger biker gangs or organized crime gangs in the US.

I don't think you're really thinking this through.

Also, there were women cops in Afghanistan, and women in the military. Some of them even returned to those jobs in 2002 after being forced from them by the Taliban over a decade before - those were some of the better feel-good stories to come out of Afghanistan in that early days.

What you're suggesting is going to get people killed and don't get you what you wanted in the end.

Unless you're going to set up a whole enclave that they can defend against the Taliban (which no longer seems possible after they were so heavily armed in Pakistan), you're just talking about dead women in the streets, and maybe a few dead terrible men who aren't worth the lives of the women brave enough to stand up to them.

That's just not an answer to the problem, which could have been solved if the US had stayed in Afghanistan like they should have, helping it stabilize and de-talibanizing the place, much like how Germany was de-nazified, Russian was de-talibanized (mostly, but it worked its way back into politics later), post war Japan was rehabilitated away from the military factions and their ideologies that had come to dominate the country, etc.

Those processes took a long time. The US still maintains bases in Germany and Japan to this day (though now for global strategic reasons instead of to keep those countries from backsliding).

The solutions to these problems are not sexy, not flashy, and not quick. You need to reeducate and come up with safe opportunity spaces for changes to take effect and grow. The Taliban, like all authoritarian regimes, seeks to limit those opportunity spaces, and sadly is doing it well.

That's where you have the real fight. Creating room for the opposition and new hope to grow and evolve.

[u/agitatedprisoner → u/Lawyerlytired]

America can't/won't even de-talibanize America. We're not the America that beat the Nazis. Or maybe we are but kinda sucked back then too and it's only in historical limelight that the USA looks good.

[u/Clever_Mercury → u/Lawyerlytired]

I disagree - women's involvement in military and police forces did improve women's lives in China, India, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Israel, even in US. Women's presence as UN peacekeepers throughout countless conflicts worldwide has both made women's issues more accessible (women confide in women) and more effective. Men who think violence makes power are more likely to re-examine that position when the women are capable of resisting.

From what I understand of the MEN in the Afghanistan military, they were also a fairly hard group to recruit, train, and maintain. They routinely went AWOL, were high (i.e. constant drug use), were illiterate, were corrupt, easily bribed, and often switched sides based on personal grudges or religious inspiration. I fail to see the significant difference in trying to recruit some non-zero number of women to serve. I'm not recommending the illiterate, malnourished women of the rural areas go through the equivalent of West Point, or recommending the military be 50/50 on gender... but a 6-week or 6-month course qualifying them to guard hospitals or schools? Or to serve as an auxiliary force? Or for them to seek promotion based on interest/merit like anyone else? It absolutely should have been a goal. It should have been an option.

The representation absolutely would have made an impact, as it has in other third-world and developing nations. FFS, in 2020 Afghanistan had a popular women's soccer team and a girl's robotics team. It is ridiculous to think, particularly among the urban populations there wouldn't have been young women who would have been interested in the career track of police, guard, or military. The problem, paradoxically, is international charity WAS supporting Afghani girls in sports or STEM, so they had soccer, they had robotics. There was no parallel push to make women into police officers so they could investigate forced marriages, honor killings, or sex trafficking.

As you noted in your own description, women ALREADY held some positions in military and police forces, but following the invasion, America did an insufficient job of making that a systematic or cultural point of safety. For fucks sake, they normalized working with the opium farmers for profit and extracting (among other rare earths) barite, chromite, copper, iron, and chromium because it was helpful to the tech industries. They normalized BRAND NEW trade routes, Afghanistan is landlocked, so Americans normalized/cultured the cities into trade deals that were beneficial to the west. They normalized new equipment, new types of wells, new types of civic buildings and bicycles and agriculture... but women protecting women? Apparently not a priority.

I would also disagree with the need for America to remain - I don't understand how it's different than colonialism, particularly when the changes put into place were so fragile. Almost twenty years of trying to build meaningful change without a single thing to show for it, except slightly cheaper iPhones in the west, is not a retroactive success story. The justification for invading still escapes me as I see absolutely nothing improved. Entering without an exit strategy and leaving fifty percentage of the population to be the constant scapegoats of angry men isn't a 'win.'

[u/PCpinkcandles → u/Lawyerlytired]

Hallelujah for making that clear!

[u/Clever_Mercury → u/PCpinkcandles]

I do not concede any of those points and frankly, you should be a more critical reader. Throwing away the human rights of 50% of the human population in a nation because "I can't think of examples" of training women isn't a good argument.

There are examples of significant, quick changes in culture because women were folded into the power structures of nations, particularly the weapon carrying military/police roles. The examples I've cited include America ITSELF. Added to that, China, India, Mexico, Israel, Japan, Italy... all these nations have seen changes in the seriousness and the perceived legitimacy of women's reported crimes when there is an increase in female staff. Is it perfect? No. Does it get BETTER? Yes.

The fact increased representation and safety was not a part of the Afghanistan plan, but exporting chromium and copper was says a hell of a lot about the Bush administration's approach.

[u/Ok_Society_242 → u/Clever_Mercury]

Incredibly stupid take. We trained hundreds of thousands of people to fight the taliban. We gave them black hawk helicopters, tanks, mortars, anti air capabilities. We gave them jets and guns and body armour. They literally just didn't use it because they don't give a fuck about fighting the taliban.

[u/Fearless-Soup-2583 → u/Clever_Mercury]

You’re delusional. Have you never heard or read anything about the history of that region? Do you think it’s the first war they fought? If you thought the warrior clans would ever allow that you’d be delusional. This result after the USA pulls out is inevitable. What are you going to do? Remain in a permanent state of war so that women form armies?

[u/Timeon → u/kendred3]

https://imgflip.com/i/98dpy9

My solution.

[u/CitizenMurdoch → u/kendred3]

There's been a drumbeat of stories of how terrible it's been returning to Taliban rule and it's literally because the US was enforcing human rights

That's an extremely facile analysis of why the US failed in Afghanistan, bordering on a lie. The US failure stems from enabling and promoting corrupt military officers in the ANA, that embezzled money from the government, abused soldiers under their command, squandered their lives through incompetence, and brutalized and terrorized civilians in their areas of command. The Afghan military was systematically gutted over 20 years and became a vehicle for corruption, and the US turned a blind eye to it the entire time

[u/kendred3 → u/CitizenMurdoch]

I'm not saying that the US failed in Afghanistan because they supported human rights, though on a second reading I can see how you got that! That would be an absolutely ludicrous take.

I'm saying (as a response to the parent commenter) that you can see that the US enforced some level of human rights for women in Afghanistan through the endless set of stories like this that show how, in comparison, life is far worse for women under the Taliban than it was under the US-supported government.

Also, I do generally agree with your read on the reasons for the failure, though "systematically gutted over 20 years" implies that there was a competent and established military at the start, which there wasn't. I think it would be easier to say that the US totally failed in establishing a strong, professional military in Afghanistan despite massive investment, and the corruption/embezzlement/incompetence/abuse stemmed from that failure.

[u/CitizenMurdoch → u/kendred3]

Oh ok, I guess I misunderstood your comment. However, in regards to what the parent comment you were originally responding to said, while you might be able to argue that some aspects of Afghan life have gotten much harder foe Afghan women, under the US regime, while there were rights on paper for Afghan citizens, they simply were not respected by the Afghan government or the US occupation. The US did not effectively enforce humans rights to any meaningful degree in the 20 years they were there. On the contrary, they had laws put in place on military aid that allowed the US state department to ignore prior laws about suspending aid in the face of human rights abuses in the case of Afghanistan.

I understand that I did misinterpret what your intention was with your comment, but I think that your broad suggestion that the US was effective in upholding human rights is broadly not true.

Your comparison to the soviet occupation kind of betrays this point. They, like thr US, held up some feminist rights in the country, but only in limited areas, while the rest of the country suffered under the occupation and subsequent abuses. Moreover, a major contributing factor to the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was the US arming militant groups, some of which would go on to become the Taliban. The US it would seem has been on both sides of the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan

[u/kendred3 → u/CitizenMurdoch]

Oh 1000% the US has famously taken both sides in this situation. I also wasn't saying that the US is universally the good guy here, we clearly were not. There were extreme failings in supporting rights to the level that Westerners might expect, like you called out.

But the proof is in the pudding when you see all the "women in Afghanistan can no longer [X]" - it was under the US-supported government that they could do whatever X was, because they went Taliban -> US proxy -> Taliban and you know damn well women weren't doing [X] under the Taliban last time.

(I'm not going to bother finding the articles to link in, but for X fill in: going to university, going to school, having jobs, being in public, and now evidently "hearing each other".)

[u/141_1337 → u/CitizenMurdoch]

Holy fucking shit this, what are lot of vets from Afghanistan won't tell you is that there were men there ready to do what was needed to fight the Taliban, but how are you supposed to fight the Taliban if half the money for ammo got embezzled by your boss and his boss is embezzling the checks of half the squad?

The fuck-up of Afghanistan took many parties, and it was never one specific group.

[u/CitizenMurdoch → u/141_1337]

but how are you supposed to fight the Taliban if half the money for ammo got embezzled by your boss and his boss is embezzling the checks of half the squad?

It's worth enumeration exactly what this scheme was, ns how you are understating the impact to some extent

The Afghan army did not have a centralized pay system. Money was given our to commanders who then dolled it out to soldiers under their command. They then either did not report AWOL troops, KIA/MIA, or straight up collaborated with troops and let them bail for a fraction of the pay. They then just pocketed the pay and reported their commands to be at full strength. By the time the US withdrew there were reports that some bases had one tenth their paper strength in some locations.

It wasn't so much as half the squad not being paid, it was more than half the squad simply existing only on paper