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Marilyn French's Anger

The Worst News From Pakistan Since 9/11

A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Jessica, thanks for your post on the Taliban’s latest critique of the U.S. military. It would be hard to overstate the seriousness of the Taliban’s advances in Pakistan these last few days, yet I think the significance is lost on most of us. In fact, the Taliban’s conquest of Swat and (briefly) Buner is possibly the worst news to come out of the region since we began paying serious attention to it on Sept. 11, 2001.

Imagine there’s some bloodthirsty Christian fundamentalist sect from Canada, whose mission is to force the entire world to join a doomsday cult—and if you refuse, you get your throat cut. This sect is based in Canada, and Americans generally don’t know or care much about what goes on in Canada, and besides, those people are Christians like most of us, so we ignore it and go about our coupon-clipping, job-searching lives. But the baddies are slowly moving south, first into the small towns of northern Maine and New York, and then into the Buffalo suburbs. More local police are getting killed as they try to fight the invaders, but the news is relegated to the Nation Briefs section of the Times, and to many decision-makers in urban America, these places are the boonies. They’re probably already full of fundamentalists with dubious ideas, so this newest enthusiasm causes little alarm. Slowly, quietly, the sect gains strength. People in small towns and suburbs of New York and Boston start to worry, but the police are busy with other crimes and everyone is distracted by the heart-pounding daily drama of the Dow Jones until one day we wake up and realize that these people are not just on the borders anymore. They’re in Queens, they’re on the outskirts of Boston and millions of people who never wanted to join them have been forced to go along. The police aren’t strong enough to stop them, and when the president calls in the National Guard, they fade into the landscape. They look just like the rest of us when they’re not preaching or cutting throats.

That’s a version of what’s happened in Pakistan over the last year or two, but instead of simply being distracted, the situation for Pakistanis is much worse. Many have lost track of what their country stands for and why it’s worth defending. Is Pakistan the country established at the time of the British Partition as a refuge for the subcontinent’s Muslims, many of whom have managed to live just as well or better in democratic India? Is it the place where politicians get endlessly richer and more corrupt while ordinary people cope with day-long power outages and soaring food prices? A place where a young man with a college degree feels lucky to get a job as a waiter, serving sandwiches and tea to rich Pakistanis and foreigners? Where children are kidnapped and bombs go off and people are found hanging from lampposts, and no one really thinks that the government or the army can or will do much to stop it?

Buner has a story. It has been told in part, but the whole bitter thing should be required reading for anyone frustrated by the hesitation among Afghans and Pakistanis to stand up to the Taliban. In Buner last summer, the Taliban executed a handful of police. The men of the village of Shalbandi raised a local defense force to avenge the slaying. This was seen as a model strategy for Pakistan—local people fighting the militants with their own hands on their own terrain, far more effectively than the police or the army could. The men of Shalbandi fought hard, and they killed six Taliban. But it didn’t end there. In revenge, the Taliban kidnapped two young sons of the defense force leaders, and in December, a car packed with explosives exploded outside a local polling place, killing more than 30 people who were lining up to vote. After that, the Taliban promised to wipe out everyone in Shalbandi. The police, who are vastly under-resourced, and the government, which is monumentally distracted, did little to resolve the situation in Buner before the Taliban took it over last week. Instead, when the Taliban rolled in, the people of Shalbandi were left alone with their tormentors. On Sunday, the Times revisited the story, reporting that one of the posse’s organizers had tried yet again to fight the Taliban, only to have his businesses, his house and those of his relatives taken over by the militants while he fled to Karachi.

This is the point at which people usually bring up the fact that Pakistan has a nuclear weapon, and how horrible would it be if the Taliban got a hold of it. But I’m not sure we can afford to wait until they do. Is Pakistan’s nuclear technology all that much safer in the hands of a government that can’t control its territory or protect its people?

Taliban Angered by American Female Soldiers

The Cultural Weight of an Unveiled Face

A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:

I was deeply moved by the sight of Afghan women marching in Kabul this week to protest the so-called “rape law,” which requires a woman to “preen for her husband” whenever he desires it, not to leave the house without his permission and to have sex with him on demand. The law affects Shias, and news photos showed the faces of female protesters from the Hazara ethnic group, Afghanistan’s beleaguered Shia minority, some smiling, some firmly set—and all uncovered. In their cultural weight, the pictures reminded me of another image, printed in Unveiled, photographer Harriet Logan’s book on Afghan women, of a Kabul street protest in 1972. In it, a young woman with uncovered hair stands amid a sea of teenagers. The woman—little more than a girl—reads aloud from a notebook, one hand cupped at her waist in a dramatic gesture. The banners behind her call for peace, democracy and social progress, yet how distant those goals would seem just a few years on, as the Russians rolled in, and later, when rival Afghan warlords tore the country apart, giving rise to the stringent, chastening dispensation known as Taliban rule.

What’s heartbreaking about these 1970s photos, taken during the reign of the last Afghan king, Zahir Shah, is that the advances they document, as well as those under communist rule, were later used to drive Afghan women beneath the folds of burqas. The Russian invasion created a hierarchy of Islamic purity, with the corrupted, secular communist at the lowest level and the pure servant of God—as the mujaheddin leaders, and later Mullah Omar purported to be—at the top. Islam became an excuse for anything, a sheltering veil beneath which every kind of violence and immorality hid. Advances adopted by the admittedly flawed king, the Afghan communists and the Russian-installed puppet governments were condemned as un-Islamic, from the spread of secular education to the expansion of women’s rights. It would be ungenerous to say that we shouldn’t avidly support Afghan women’s protests against the so-called “rape law,” but when commentators talk about backlash, this is what they mean. Anything that looks like an import, like the hand of the west reaching too boldly into Afghanistan, will be furiously repulsed. It’s this outrage at foreign intrusion, regardless of its potential benefits, that’s already building in many parts of the country, and that feeds the Taliban resurgence. How else could insurgents slaughter Afghans and still win a measure of support, if they didn’t claim to be doing it in the name of Islam, which trumps all else? As a cleric who witnessed this week’s protest against the so-called “rape law” told the Times: “We Afghans don’t want a bunch of NATO commanders and foreign ministers telling us what to do.”

It’s frustrating, as a western woman, to be relegated to such a quiet supporting role in Afghan women’s struggle, but perhaps understanding the complexity of their situation counts for something. It might help explain, for example, an arresting NPR report about rising drug abuse among Afghan women (and men). Opium, Afghanistan’s main cash crop, is first and foremost a pain-reliever, and I’ve seen few places where pain is as dominant a part of memory and experience as it is in Afghanistan. Putting aside the horrors of 30 years of war, the inexorable rhythms of hope and disappointment that have characterized the lives of Afghan women—the fresh-faced girl speaking at a street protest and later, a muffled, cloaked women being publicly beaten for showing her ankles in the bazaar—are enough to make anyone crave opiates.