Ellen Goodman: What Option for Afghan Women
[Ellen Goodman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary appears in more than 300 newspapers. Since 1976, she has written about social change and its impact on American life. She was one of the first women to open up the oped pages to women’s voices and is today, according to Media Watch, the most widely syndicated progessive columnist in the country.]
Boston - It's been 11 years since I looked through a photo album smuggled out of Afghanistan by a brave young woman. "This is a doctor," she said, pointing to one picture. "This is a teacher." It was impossible to tell one woman from another under the burqas enforced by their Taliban rulers.
Back then, the world had turned a cataract eye on Afghan women. Under virtual house arrest, they were forbidden from work, from school, from walking alone or even laughing out loud. It was arguably the greatest human rights disaster for women in history.
After 9/11, when we went after al-Qaeda and the Taliban who had hosted these terrorists, many saw collateral virtue in the liberation of Afghan women. Indeed, President Bush played this moral card in his 2002 State of the Union speech when he declared to thunderous applause: "Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government." Mission accomplished.
Many women shed their burqas, opened schools, entered parliament. Equal rights were written into the constitution. But slowly, as America turned to the disastrous misadventure in Iraq, Afghan women's freedoms were casually traded in like chits for power.
Now again, we're focusing on this beleaguered country and its sham leader. The discussion is cast in military terms - more troops, less troops. Yet I keep thinking about the women who are once again pushed to the outskirts of the conversation, as if they were an add-on rather than a central factor...
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Boston - It's been 11 years since I looked through a photo album smuggled out of Afghanistan by a brave young woman. "This is a doctor," she said, pointing to one picture. "This is a teacher." It was impossible to tell one woman from another under the burqas enforced by their Taliban rulers.
Back then, the world had turned a cataract eye on Afghan women. Under virtual house arrest, they were forbidden from work, from school, from walking alone or even laughing out loud. It was arguably the greatest human rights disaster for women in history.
After 9/11, when we went after al-Qaeda and the Taliban who had hosted these terrorists, many saw collateral virtue in the liberation of Afghan women. Indeed, President Bush played this moral card in his 2002 State of the Union speech when he declared to thunderous applause: "Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government." Mission accomplished.
Many women shed their burqas, opened schools, entered parliament. Equal rights were written into the constitution. But slowly, as America turned to the disastrous misadventure in Iraq, Afghan women's freedoms were casually traded in like chits for power.
Now again, we're focusing on this beleaguered country and its sham leader. The discussion is cast in military terms - more troops, less troops. Yet I keep thinking about the women who are once again pushed to the outskirts of the conversation, as if they were an add-on rather than a central factor...