What About the Women?
The frauds who wanted to protect Afghan women and girls are letting them starve
In February 2020, the US and the Taliban signed the Doha Agreement laying out a timetable for the withdrawal of all US forces by May of the following year. Before the ink on the deal had dried, the most hawkish members of Congress decided that pretending to care about the fate of Afghan women would be a useful tactic in blowing through the timeline and staying indefinitely.
Last summer, when maintaining a footprint of 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan remained an option, nothing was more important to these individuals than the safety and well-being of the country’s female population. Now with millions of Afghans on the brink of starvation as a direct result of President Biden’s unspeakably cruel and barbaric sanctions, the urgency of helping Afghanistan’s women and girls has been replaced with silence from Capitol Hill.
Lawmakers who couldn’t bear the thought of Afghan women being forced to quit their jobs haven’t said a word about them being forced to face the harsh winter without heating fuel. The members horrified at what would happen to educational opportunities for young girls are quiet about the 23 million Afghans facing acute hunger.
With the situation in Afghanistan swiftly deteriorating into one of the most catastrophic humanitarian disasters on earth, this is a hypocrisy worth exploring once again.
It’s hard to overstate just how monstrous the US government’s treatment of Afghanistan has been. After two decades of occupying its land and relentlessly bombing its people, the Biden administration is stealing the country’s assets.
On Friday morning, President Biden signed an executive order freezing $7 billion in assets belonging to Da Afghanistan Bank, the country’s central bank.
As far as the US is concerned – because the Afghan government dissolved in August – who exactly this money held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York belongs to is unclear. Furthermore, since the US doesn’t recognize the Taliban as the nation’s representative government, the Biden administration feels that it is well within its right to confiscate the funds.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, it is being taken by the US.
According to last week’s announcement, the Biden administration plans to ask a judge for permission to transfer $3.5 billion to a trust set aside for humanitarian relief for the Afghan people. The other half of the amount is slated to be awarded to family members of 9/11 victims. This makes absolutely no sense.
Approximately 2/3 of the country’s population is 25 or younger. More than 20 years after an act of terror their country did not commit, its people are being punished for an event a significant portion of them weren’t even alive for. As so many liberals loved to emphasize during the Trump years, the cruelty seems to be the point.
US media and Washington’s political class may have forgotten about Afghanistan but the country is on the verge of collapse. Conditions on the ground in Afghanistan are worsening by the day and people are desperate for assistance. Not only is the empire that occupied their country for two decades under the guise of human rights not stepping in to help; it’s responsible for creating the nightmare they’re facing in the first place.
According to the UNICEF World Food Program, as many as one million children under five could die by the end of this year as a result of famine and a lack of water and proper sanitation.
Late last month, in describing the “frozen hell” the majority of Afghans are now experiencing, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, told the UN Security Council that the country is “hanging on by a thread.”
“They’re in the grips of another brutal winter of blistering wind, cold and snow. Families huddle in makeshift tents under plastic sheets — even burning their possessions to keep warm,” Guterres also noted. “Education and social services are on the brink of collapse. Millions of children — critically, girls — are out of school, and 70 per cent of teachers are not getting paid.”
In his remarks to the body, Guterres repeatedly emphasized the importance of ensuring equal rights for Afghan women and girls, just as so many congressional members spent last summer doing. None of those same lawmakers have used their power to echo his concerns. For years, they ignored the destruction our bombs were causing in Afghanistan and instead chose to focus all of their attention on the seemingly impossible task of trying to force the Taliban to be less Taliban. Now that the suffering of the Afghan people is, once again, being directed from the Oval Office, they are choosing to remain silent.
Nobody illustrates this hypocrisy better than Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and Senator Jeanne Shaheen. The pair have been at it for years.
Days after US forces began bombing Afghanistan in 2001, Maloney wore a burqa on the House floor to draw attention to the mistreatment of Afghan women. During these remarks, the congresswoman praised “the Bush administration for balancing war with compassion, for dropping food as well as bombs. Even in war, we are showing a regard for human life and human rights that the Taliban will never know.”
In January 2020, during a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, Maloney spoke about the improvements in women’s rights in Afghanistan since 2001, noting that approximately 14% of K-12 students in Afghanistan were girls and a quarter of all government employees were women. Wouldn’t improvements like these justify our nearly 20-year occupation, Maloney wondered? None of the innocent civilians, many of them being the women and girls Maloney claims to care so much about, seemed to factor into the congresswoman’s rationale.
“I know the United Nations has made several reports that when women are educated and empowered and respected, the amount of terrorism in that country or in that village goes down. So investing in women and allowing them to be part of the country and not killing them if they go to school… I think we’ve made a tremendous impact on that country. And I’m afraid if we retreat and leave, it’ll go back to the way it was before. So my question is ‘Do you believe women have made a significant contribution to successes in education and healthcare, and also, if we left, as some politicians are proposing, wouldn’t it fall back to the other way where they were so… where being a woman meant you were almost not alive in what you were allowed to do?” Maloney continued.
This is just one of many, many examples. In the past few years, Maloney used her time during no less than half a dozen congressional hearings to ask about women’s rights in Afghanistan. The wording of this filler question rarely changes and the outcome is always the same.
It’s a tactic Senator Shaheen has also perfected.
Just like her counterpart in the House, Shaheen uses every opportunity during committee hearings to repeat the same question, over and over and over. It never yields a result but Shaheen never appears to be searching for one. Mirroring Maloney, the senator is concerned with performance, rather than substance.
When questioning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during an April 2019 hearing, Shaheen demanded to know what the US was doing to ensure that women were being included at the Afghan peace talks. After all, as Shaheen reminded him, the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 clearly states that women should be at the table. Of course, the legislation Shaheen is referring to does no such thing.
The bill – which Shaheen herself sponsored – merely “promotes” the idea of including women in mediation and negotiation processes and details why doing so “helps to promote more inclusive and democratic societies and is critical to the long-term stability of countries and regions.” It simply reflects the “sense of Congress” that including women in peace negotiations is a good thing to do. Because nothing in the language mandates anyone to do anything, it’s unclear how Shaheen was hoping Pompeo or any other US official would utilize it. The Taliban hates and brutalizes women. Passing good-things-are-good and bad-things-are-bad legislation won’t do anything to change that, not in Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world. Choosing not to repeat our mistakes in the Middle East will, but that’s not what Shaheen opted to focus on while speaking with the secretary of state.
Two years later, she asked about Afghan women and girls during the Senate confirmation hearing of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.
In September 2021, she grilled Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the same topic. After a furious introduction in which she blasted President Trump and Secretary Pompeo for “giving away the rights of women and girls,” Shaheen wanted to know what steps the State Department was taking to provide for the safety of women and girls and what we were doing to rally the international community behind that effort.
Earlier that spring, during a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing, Shaheen said that she wanted to put a face on the violence Afghan women were facing at the hands of the Taliban. “When you say what Taliban values look like, I want to put a face on that too,” Shaheen added, referring to the blown-up image of a group of women killed by the terror group.
These are far from the only instances of Shaheen using her massive platform to speak for the rights of Afghan women. For nearly two years, as the US wrestled with the notion of finally ending its occupation of Afghanistan, Shaheen reiterated these concerns time and time again. What would happen to the country’s female population if the US went home? What would life be like for the millions of girls forced to live under Taliban rule?
After a while, the script was adopted by others, filtering down to many other members of Congress eager to find an excuse to oppose the war’s end.
New Hampshire’s other senator, Maggie Hassan, made use of the talking point during a February 2020 hearing. A month later, during a hearing conducted by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation, Congressman Gerald Connolly did the same. The fact that we’ve taught a quarter of a million Afghan women how to read and write has been repeated numerous times during hearings by Congressman Stephen Lynch, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
In September 2020, after noting her own concerns about the fact that the Doha agreement did not explicitly protect the rights of Afghan women and girls, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz insisted that US peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad specify whether the US was still squarely focused on that goal. Khalilzad reiterated US support for the Afghan government as well as economic and humanitarian assistance (at least, at that moment in time) and after some pushback from Schultz, noted that America’s desire for a long-term partnership will necessitate assistance “including on issues that you have described.” Not good enough.
“Is it a priority of the administration to include in the negotiations and the ongoing assistance that we provide to the Afghan people that there is continued advancement and improvement of the rights of Afghan women and girls? I’m not even hearing you say the words ‘women and girls.’”
In the wake of the Biden administration’s decision to prolong the suffering of the Afghan people, nobody’s heard Congresswoman Schultz say the word “women and girls” either.
Women have endured brutal lives under Taliban rule. This is absolutely true and not something anyone can credibly deny. What is also true is that there have indeed been tangible improvements after the US invasion.
After coalition forces defeated the core of al-Qaeda in the fall of 2001, life for women in Afghanistan improved almost immediately. A new constitution, ratified in 2004, mandated that at least 68 out of 249 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of Afghanistan’s parliament, be set aside for women. Women exceeded this minimum threshold by six seats when the country went to the polls a year later. Under the new system, the president was responsible for personally choosing 34 of the 102 seats comprising the country’s House of Elders. According to the constitution, it was required that at least 50% of the appointments be women. In recent years, women worked as doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and police officers. They owned businesses and served in the military. According to the US Agency for International Development, more than 3.5 million girls – about a third of all students in Afghanistan – were attending school. Nearly a third of all votes cast in the 2019 presidential election were cast by women.
These are real gains and to assume that anyone celebrating them is being disingenuous may seem like a dark accusation, but the records of these lawmakers speak for themselves.
Before the start of the conflict in 2015, Yemen was already one of the absolute worst places on earth to be a woman. Like a number of other Middle Eastern countries, women’s rights are severely restricted, violence and abuse widespread.
Yemen has no minimum age for marriage. According to Article 40 of the country’s Personal Status Law, women are required to have sex with their husbands whenever the men require them to do so. Women are always at risk for dying in so-called “honor killings” at the hands of their family members. According to a UNICEF report, the war in Yemen has forced some two million children out of school, with girls particularly vulnerable to dropping out as a result of the conflict. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack reported in 2019 that local militias and gangs have been known to threaten school administrators in Yemen with bombings if girls were permitted to continue attending classes.
Following President Biden’s announcement that the US was planning to end support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Shaheen thanked the newly minted commander-in-chief for his actions.
“I’ve long pushed to prioritize human rights & democratic values, I’m glad @POTUS is seeing this through,“ Shaheen tweeted. No explanation for what exactly the president meant by “relevant” arms sales was given. No analysis of what would ultimately qualify as “offensive” was provided. With war in Yemen still raging, there has been virtually no pushback from Capitol Hill on the Biden administration going back on its word.
Following the inauguration, Shaheen co-signed a letter urging the Biden administration to encourage other countries to contribute to the United Nations’ plan for Yemen humanitarian relief.
A few weeks later, during an April 2021 hearing, the senator did inquire about women being shut out of the Yemeni peace talks but that appears to be where her concerns about women in Yemen ended. As of this writing, the aforementioned letter is the last mention of the Yemen crisis on the senator’s website, as well as on both of her Twitter accounts.
None of the Democrats who praised President Biden for “ending” US support for Saudi Arabia’s assault on Yemen have prioritized the fact that it hasn’t actually ended.
No heartache for the women of Iraq. None for the girls in Syria. Not a care in the world for gender equality in places like Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, or any of the other countries we’ve bombed and illegally occupied.
Lawmakers like Maloney and Shaheen cloaked their militarism in pretending to care about the people of Afghanistan but now are nowhere to be found.
Senior staff for both Maloney and Shaheen did not respond to requests for comment.
The US government doesn’t care about women in the Middle East. It’s murdered thousands of them and has aligned itself with a number of absolutely heinous regimes who’ve done the same. It makes billions selling arms to states that dehumanize and abuse them, and treat them like second-class citizens. Our hypocrisies on women’s rights around the world are well-known, our offenses widely documented. Nevertheless, our government’s ability to sell war by manufacturing humanitarian outrage never wavers.