The history of the world is replete with women suffering from exploitation and violence. In “enlightened” democracies like the UK and US, women didn’t get the right to vote until the 20th century (1918/1928 in the UK, 1920 in the US), something not seen in many places yet. Many modern institutions and cultures seem to live in the Dark Ages. The Catholic Church made sure old men would be in power from its very beginning, and that hasn’t changed. And even modern but backward subcultures like those of the Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Muslims treat women as breeders and men’s property.
We’re seeing the consequences now with the US evacuation of Afghanistan. Maybe some of the Afghan women will manage to escape from the exploitation and violence of the Taliban if the US can get them out as American allies and their families, but that won’t stop the Taliban’s evil treatment of those Afghan women who must remain.
One argument used to our support our mistaken nation-building exercise in Afghanistan was that women’s rights are an important of human rights. The latter is very true. We said that we would work to improve the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan. We’re now showing that was a damn lie. There were some improvements over the two decades we were there, but now those will evaporate and be lost in the dust of our withdrawal, a chaotic evacuation made even more perilous by Biden’s accepting the Taliban’s 8/31 deadline that’s logistically impossible to meet.
This article won’t dwell on the Good Ole Piranhas dissing Biden on one hand about not getting our Afghan allies out while at the same time wringing their fascist hands about more immigrants coming to the US (yes, the GOP is doing that),. It isn’t about dim Dems excoriating progressives like me, saying we’re against the withdrawal if we dare point out the chaos the Biden administration has created (yes, many Dems are doing that(). Like many, I’m all for withdrawal. We should have done it long ago. I’m criticizing how it’s being done. It’s chaos! And condemning Afghanistan’s women who are left behind to suffer once again the Taliban’s abuses just adds to my ire.
The Taliban admitted defeat by November, 2001. We stayed in Afghanistan for two bloody decades, trying to reform a culture from the Dark Ages and bring a country into the modern world. We failed…and Afghan women will suffer terribly from that failure.