The Taliban War on Women Continues by Rachel Reid

(Kabul) - Beware Taliban revisionism. You're going to hear much more of it in the coming months as policy makers from Kabul to Washington seeking to reintegrate Taliban fighters try to explain why the enemy isn't so bad after all. Bombs that slaughter civilians, acid attacks that disfigure school girls, assassinations of women in public life-all of this will be swept under the carpet.

In its place, a new narrative will be trotted out, one in which most of the fighters are "ten-dollar Talibs"-just in it for the money-or modern-day Robin Hoods fighting the injustices of their local government. While money or politics may indeed be the motivation for many low-level fighters, that doesn't change the fact that too many Afghan women are experiencing the same kind of oppression today they faced under Taliban rule.

"We as Taliban warn you to stop working . . . otherwise we will take your life away. We will kill you in such a harsh way that no woman has so far been killed in that manner. This would become a good lesson for women like you who are working." When Fatima K. received this letter she was terrified and left her job. Such messages-called night letters, since they are delivered after dark-are a common means of intimidation used by the Taliban.

When 22-year-old Hossai received similar threats by phone from a man saying he was with the Taliban in Kandahar, she refused to be bullied. She loved her job at the American development company DAI, and her salary supported her family. But one day in April Hossai was shot by an unknown gunman as she left her office. She died from her wounds.

A few days later another woman in Kandahar received a night letter. It demanded that she give up her job, or else she "will be considered an enemy of Islam and will be killed. In the same way that yesterday we have killed Hossai, whose name was on our list." This woman has since stayed home.

These stories are seldom heard, but it's not because they are rare. The victims are often too terrified to report such attacks to the authorities, or have little hope that anything will be done if they do. They can expect little or no protection from their government, which seems more willing to provide patronage to senior insurgents who switch sides than assist women at grave risk. When high-profile women are assassinated, their cases are not given the priority they deserve and their killers are rarely brought to justice. While men who run afoul of the Taliban are also attacked-particularly in Kandahar, where the murder rate in recent months has reached unprecedented heights-the situation for women is worse.

The reassurance offered by the Afghan and U.S. governments is that those Taliban who lay down arms through reintegration or reconciliation programs must accept the constitution, which enshrines equal rights for men and women. But given how often President Hamid Karzai has himself ignored the constitutional protections afforded to Afghan women-as when he approved the highly restrictive Shia family law in 2009-it is not clear why Taliban who return to the political mainstream would have any motivation to respect the rights of women.

Many women activists would prefer to see explicit guarantees put at the heart of negotiations with the Taliban. There are some rights that should be nonnegotiable: the right to work, to participate in political life, and to send their daughters to school. But when I spoke to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a founding member of the Taliban and its former ambassador to Pakistan, he did not inspire confidence that this would be possible.

Zaeef, who now resides in Kabul after a stint in Guantanamo, explained in our May meeting why he believes the freedoms won by Afghan women in recent years are "corrupting" them. "If you put a young adult man and woman in one room for some time, of course there will be some interactions, which is against Islam. This is like a virus here and it will spread," he said to me.

I emerged from my conversation with Zaeef uncorrupted. As for my questions about what gender segregation might mean for mixed work environments, like the Afghan parliament where women make up 25% of the members, I got no straight answer.

The Afghan government should have women's rights at the center of the reintegration programs. But the experience of the past nine years has been one of hasty deals and impunity for serious crimes. And with the need for an exit strategy weighing heavily on the minds of U.S. policy makers, there's a strong chance that justice and principle will once again be sacrificed.

American officials are often tempted to deny their own influence by claiming that this will be an Afghan process. But since the U.S. will pay for most of it, this is not a credible position. Worse still, it flies in the face of repeated U.S. commitments to help protect and promote the rights of Afghan women. The U.S. should make clear that if reintegration and reconciliation results in less freedom for Afghan women and girls, American taxpayers will not foot the bill.

Ms. Reid is the Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Let's Get Out of Afghanistan Now

American soldiers engaging in "social work" and nation building in Afghanistan

Despite being a hawk and a believer that the United States should project its power, all I can say now is that the time has come to get out of Afghanistan.

Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of politics by other means. Our politicians and generals are defining politics as the continuation of war by other means. This is dooming the war to failure and American soldiers once more to victims of policies carried on on the coffins of heroes.

Wars should be fought with one goal in mind: Victory. Fighting a war differently when it’s deemed an insurgency rather than a conventional war is letting the enemy know that we are putting our troops off limits in certain areas. These areas become then the places where the enemy chooses to hide in and fight from. Combine this with rules of engagement (ROE) that tie the hands of troops; announce a withdrawal date and presto, you have created a formula for defeat.

This new methodology of warfare stems from a belief that the majority of Afghanis are peace-loving victims of the Taliban andal-Qaeda and that killing one of them will make radicals of many. The belief in this concept is at the root of the new ROE. But this is nonsensical. Liberals believe that we are all equal in our ambitions and creed, and that given the choice the entire world would vote for peace and choose to become Jeffersonian democrats. In Afghanistan, Afghanis will tell us what we want to hear, and then they will do to us as much damage they can. This has been their modus operandi for centuries, and the British and Russians can attest to it.

The fact is that in the Muslim world exists a combination of inferiority complex, intertwined with Jihadism, Islamism, and a historical tradition of violence that is incongruent with our democratic traditions. The minority that wants peace and democracy is too terrified of the consequences of cooperation with our troops knowing our defeatist attitude.

America should announce that we are leaving, but that the drones will remain. Afghanis once again will be free to stone women who were raped, hang homosexuals, kill the infidels, deal in drugs, prohibit education of women, reinstate the burka, cane women who are caught unaccompanied by their husbands, and let the kites vanish once more from the skies of Kabul.

But let them know that if the terrorists return, the drones will hunt them, and no place will be sacred enough to prevent our bombs from finding their targets. If the cowards hide among innocent civilians, so be it. I’d rather see innocent civilians dead in Afghanistan, than innocent civilians dead in Manhattan.

The Carter-Obama Corollary

The Jimmy Carter Corollary: A foreign affairs phenomenon that occurs when one powerful nation kowtows to a less powerful one which in return uses this opportunity to kick the powerful nation in the posterior. Named after the 39th president when his genuflection to the Ayatollahs concluded with 55 Americans being held hostage for 444 days.

Some students of history also attribute the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR to this corollary. Said invasion, in conjunction with the rise of the Iranian clergy led to the rise of Islamism, and al-Qaeda, events for which we are still paying the consequences. And now, once again we are facing this phenomenon that I propose should be renamed the Carter-Obama Corollary.

The first signs of a return to the genuflecting school of politics took place when the US Badminton team was refused entry visas to Iran on February 4, 2009. Since then the US has polished its act, and in an example of extreme courage approached Russia with the proposal that the United States would remove the missile defense system from Europe in exchange for Russia’s help in convincing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Russia response was: “no haggling, just remove the missiles and we will be happy.”

In another act of vision and diplomatic courage, the Obama administration will donate 900 million dollars that we will borrow from China, for rebuilding Gaza. In an insult to the diminishing intelligence of many Americans, Hillary explained that the money would not go to Hamas. I am not aware of anyone in the media asking how this will be prevented. If Hamas, which rules Gaza, has funds for rebuilding infrastructure and we give them money, would it not free said funds for the purchase of weapons and missiles?

I am not disappointed because I expected the worst from the new administration. My fears were confirmed when a bust of Winston Churchill was removed from the Oval Office and sent back to England.

Knowing Barack Obama, I have no doubt that he would be much more comfortable with a bust of Chamberlain.