Negotiating With Taliban No Benefit For Afghan Women

In the Calgary Herald, CASC's own Lauryn Oates provides an illuminating counter to Nicholas Kristof's contention that the UN-mandated military mission should draw down and negotiate with the Taliban. An excerpt:

Kristof, author of Half the Sky and often identified as a proponent for women's empowerment, argues for a reduction of American troops in Afghanistan and for a peace deal with the Taliban.

In seeking to convince himself that this turn of events will not be harmful to Afghan women, he optimistically provides some astoundingly slim anecdotal evidence to convince us that the Taliban are really not so bad.

Kristof feels uncomfortable with what he terms the U.S. "occupation"-- though I know few Afghans who refer to the U.S. or international presence here that way -- and so waves away his own discomfort over the spectre of a new Taliban government in Afghanistan by essentially saying, don't worry, the Taliban might let girls have some schools, in some mosques, in some cases. This is hardly a reassuring argument to girls and women -- who have gained the most since the fall of the Taliban -- and conversely, have the most to lose from a Taliban return.

The evidence that girls will be able to go to school under the Taliban is slim. While girls might go to schools in some areas, in my experience, this is highly exceptional and by no means a uniform practice. The Taliban have been quite consistent in their beliefs that girls should not be educated and women who work outside the home deserve to die, a belief enacted in the Taliban's murder of numerous female politicians, elections workers, policewomen and other prominent professional women. They are hardly interested in the protection or welfare of children given they regularly use children as suicide bombers and spotters and have hung boys they accuse of "spying for the Americans".

Yet, even if the Taliban let a few girls study in the odd madrassah or mosque, what of the quality of education? In my work training teachers and supporting schools in Afghanistan, I frequently meet students in Grade 8 or 9 who are barely literate because their teachers are so poorly educated themselves and the instruction they have been exposed to focuses too heavily on Islamic education and too little on sciences, arts and literacy. Afghan kids and their teachers don't want a privileged American white man's culturally relativist arguments. What they want is physics, chemistry and math. They want to learn to read, and to read well. They want to know about the outside world, and about their rights in it. They deserve nothing less.

In his stubborn insistence that all things military are automatically bad, Kristof never gets around to defending the other consequences of a Taliban government or a Taliban power-sharing agreement resulting from negotiations with the insurgents: such as the end of the democracy that Afghans have been fighting and dying for since 2001, and which was promised to them in Bonn. Nor does he address the fact that Afghans have shown again and again, in poll after poll, that they support the NATO and U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and only four per cent of Afghans would prefer a Taliban government to what they have now. Further, the Afghan women's movement is firmly on the side of a continued U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan, and have expressed publicly and often their anxiety at, once again, being abandoned by the international community and left without security. If Kristof really wishes to answer the question "what about Afghan women?" then the opinions of Afghans on the matter should matter greatly to him.