The Women of Afghanistan

I think that's Old Dog in the back, because of the dog thing, Beagles at the front right because of that grim expression, and I of course am on the left with the gleam of the enlightenment in my eyes and with my mouth open.

There were many in the country when Beagles's forbears stepped off the boat that would have loved to apply his solution right at the dock.

I was going to continue with my math lesson announcing the rational numbers and them move on to the scary world of the irrational numbers, and to the strangeness of the imaginary numbers, but I'll give it a pause to speak of an article about Afghan women I read in the New Yorker over the weekend.

It's a long article, but it's even handed and I think quite enlightening, a view of the people who live in the countryside of Afganistan rather than the view of the Washington policy makers of the succeeding administrations.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

It reminds me a little of a book about Chinese women I read maybe twenty years ago, Wild Swans.  In the period before the revolution which was pretty feudal, they had no rights and were treated like chattel.  Then the nationalists, the Japanese and the guys Beagles loves to call the red Chinese took over, and each time the women thought they would do better and each time the new leaders turned out to be shits to them.

These Afghani women had a long succession of regimes come to their villages, the feudal guys, the Russkies, the mujahedeen, the Taliban, the Americans, and now the Taliban again.

It seems to me that the US has had three different goals in Afghanistan, revenge, nation-building, and fighting terrorism.  

The revenge was of course for 911.  That had to happen.  There was no way a US president could have shrugged his shoulders and said, well, shit happens.  Ben Laden slipped through our fingers, but we did topple the Taliban and that would have been a very good time, to dust off our hands like after the first gulf war, and go home.  

But W, who I think may have turned out to be not such a bad prez were it not for the seductive Dick Cheney whispering neocon dreams into his ear about Iraq and Afghanistan becoming bastions of capitalism in the mideast through nation building.  

Well that turned into a fine mess, and Obama was not seduced by neocon dreams at all but thought that if we kept a presence there we would be better able to keep a close watch on terrorism.  That did not turn out well either because then we had to make all kinds of agreements to brutal warlords which drove the rural Afghanis into the arms of the Taliban.

More on this and reflections on what it all means will be arriving in subsequent posts.  It's a long article, but it is interesting reading.