Weblog Entry - 01/22/2002: "an irrational reaction to current events"

01/22/2002 Entry: an irrational reaction to current events

what does it take to stop a downhill slide started decades ago?

There's been some fretting about whether might makes right lately, on the subject of Afghanistan -- whether might is expressed with the force of weapons or with the force of cash. I think it's good people are asking these questions. I think it's good to doubt the answers, whatever answers come; I don't trust concrete answers, especially around questions of "right" and "wrong."

I used to be a very simplistic pacifist. I believed that no matter what the goal was, there was a better way than force to achieve it, and that I had therefore a moral obligation to oppose the use of force. Either I'm slightly more cynical these days, or the world has gotten vastly more complicated in the past decade. I'm putting my money on the former...Anyway. I'm very glad that there are sober, rational voices on both sides of the various questions being asked about US foreign policy. Because I'm not rational about this, anymore.

(this is a draft, pasted in from email. if I get the chance, I may add some links; maybe not.)

Whatever problem it was that those on the side of Might identified as The Problem In Afghanistan, it probably could have been addressed somehow, at some point, with less Might than has been applied to that problem with the force of first weapons and now cash. I shocked myself recently by discovering that I'm long past the point where I'm willing to wait for somebody to find that solution & make it happen.

This wasn't some sudden omigod-we-just-noticed-the-taliban-is-evil problem. The situation in Afghanistan has been sliding downhill for quite some time, and that slide accelerated when the Jihadists/Mujahedin took power (1992) and accelerated more when the Taliban took power (1996). People have been screaming about the human rights violations in Afghanistan for years (feminists not local to the problem may have been a little late on the bandwagon -- at least some of us only started talking about this when the Taliban took power). People have been smuggling women out of Afghanistan for years. Years of trying didn't *help*. The outlook for women in Afghanistan just kept getting worse and worse.

I can't get that overwrought over the damage to already-barely-there infrastructure that women weren't allowed to use, nor of the loss of life that isn't wildly indistinguishable from what the self-called-governments have been doing to their own people and omigod finally non-combatant-men are dying instead of just women and wow mainstream media is finally getting upset about all the death in afghanistan! Where the FUCK were all those upset people two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago? Why didn't people notice that there was a problem in Afghanistan until they started blowing up statues?

Women have been dying in Afghanistan for awhile. Besides the part where the governments have been raping them, killing them, and executing them, they were denied healthcare, not permitted to practice medicine or to see male doctors (so there's a choice...die of otherwise easily-treatable things, or sneak out to a doctor and risk getting yourself *and* the doctor executed. Whee). This is in a country whose professionals were half female, once (ranging from 40% of doctors to 70% of teachers). Where plenty of women were the primary breadwinners for their families. Where women had the right to vote earlier than women did in Switzerland (1965 for Afghanistan; 1968 in Switzerland). In whose capital women wore miniskirts, and in the course of my lifetime whose revolving-door-governments replaced them with burquas. The fact that women were complicit, at least at first, does not make it right, palatable, or excusable. [insert metaphor: frog, pot of water, etc.]

If I were a woman in a country overrun by people who were raping women on a regular basis, and was promised by a new government that that would stop, I'd welcome them, too. Choosing the rock instead of the hard place does not mean that the rock gains any sort of respectability.

Sure. If we hadn't buried our heads in the sand for this long, we might have been able to effect change without blowing things up. Maybe next time we won't fuck it up so badly.

(While I'm hoping for the unlikely, it would be nice if the US would sign the International Women's Bill of Rights. Nearly everybody else has already...)

(no, I'm not free of blame, here. One wonders whether I can justify getting so upset about this now, when I went ahead and prioritized other causes above this one. When the jihadists took power, I was still enough of an idealist to think that we could right all wrongs with sweet reason, and there appeared to be people more knowledgeable and articulate than I than I doing just that. Not that that's any excuse. And when the taliban took power, I'd become enough of a pessimist that I wondered whether I'd be able to address the wrongs in my own community, much less in the world. The wrongs that will be righted in my lifetime are a drop in the bucket; so much remains.)

Posted by sev @ 11:46 PM PST |

insert witty comment here