A protest by armed Afghan women in Ghor province, July 2021, a month before the Taliban once again took power.
It’s been a thousand and twelve days since the Taliban banned education for girls older than 12 in Afghanistan and I keep thinking of Qamar Gul.
A year before the Taliban re-takeover of Afghanistan, Qamar – who was about 15 at the time – fought off what was described as an attack on her home in which Taliban gunmen killed her parents. Qamar killed two of the three Taliban with the AK-47 rifle her father had taught her to use.
"I am proud I killed my parents' murderers," Gul told AFP. "I killed them because they killed my parents, and also because I knew they would come for me and my little brother."
The New York Times soon after reported that one of those Taliban that she killed was Qamar’s husband, who had come to force her to return.. The marriage had been arranged by her father as an exchange: Qamar was given to her husband as a second wife in return for that husband’s teenage niece becoming Qamar’s father’s second wife. Qamar’s father was the village chief and was believed to support the U.S. backed Afghan government and Qamar’s husband had joined the Taliban, the enemy of that government.
It was a reminder that war divides families and communities and patriarchy unites the men in their ownership of women.
While Qamar was being hailed as the hero that she was, then-Afghan Deputy Defense Minister Munera Yousufzada put the Taliban on notice that women in Afghanistan in 2020 had changed from the women who had lived under the Islamist group’s initial rule in 1996-2001.
"The Taliban should know that women in the current two decades (since the end of the Taliban’s initial rule) are not the women of silence and tolerance, and they want nothing less than their rights,” she said.
A year after Qamar killed her husband for killing her parents, and 20 years after the United States’ reckless invasion, increasingly disastrous war and occupation, and criminally chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban once again ruled Afghanistan.
War divides families and communities and patriarchy unites the men in their ownership of women.
And Taliban 2.0 have distilled their hatred of women into the perfect patriarchy, a template for the total control of women, barring women from working in public and private sectors, except for Afghan health care and a few other departments. They have barred women from traveling long distances by road or air unless accompanied by a male relative and from visiting public places such as parks, gyms, and bathhouses without a male relative. The Taliban have shut down even the women-only space of beauty salons.
And cowards and capitulators from too many countries have sold out Afghan women, who have never been women of silence and tolerance. What Afghan women have been subjected to exemplifies the ways patriarchy uses women’s bodies as an extension of the proxy battlefields when men go to war and then as bargaining chips when “peace” ends those wars of men.
Whose wars, whose peace and at whose expense?
What Afghan women have been subjected to exemplifies the ways patriarchy uses women’s bodies as an extension of the proxy battlefields when men go to war and then as bargaining chips when “peace” ends those wars of men.
Taliban 1.0 was an offshoot of the proxy war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. that followed the former’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The Taliban won a civil war that followed the withdrawal of humbled Soviet troops—humbled by a coalition of misogynists (the Mujahideen) trained by the U.S. and funded by the Saudis—the template for the Taliban.
Don’t be fooled by Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman’s “I’m an emancipator of women. I allow raves now!”
And Muslim reluctance to criticise the misogyny of the absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia because that country is home to Islam’s two holiest sites bleeds into reluctance to more forcefully condemn the Taliban when they hold up Sharia as their guidebook to misogyny. The Taliban know how many other Muslim majority rulers and tyrants use culture and religion to justify their misogyny–as if culture and religion, like so much else, aren’t dominated and co-opted by patriarchy.
And Taliban 2.0 have distilled their hatred of women into the perfect patriarchy, a template for the total control of women
The U.S. went to war against Taliban 1.0 after the group refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden (a Saudi) after the September 11, 2001 attacks. And 20 years later, the uber misogynist fucks aka Taliban 2.0 are in power after they humbled the U.S. and its coalition.
Both the Soviets and the U.S. pushed to “liberate” Afghan women. The Soviets by pushing the government they backed to amend laws affecting women and girls, enraging clerics and more importantly feminists who understood the danger of an imperial power co-opting women’s rights.
The U.S. went one step further, claiming their invasion was to “liberate” women from the Taliban’s misogyny–ignoring that they had trained virulent misogynists just a few years earlier but hey that’s ok they were fighting the enemy of the U.S. so the enemy of my enemy is my friend and we all are enemies to women.
Even worse, and more shamefully, unlike Afghan feminists, white feminists in the U.S. were cheerleaders of that invasion to “liberate” women, failing to understand the dangers of imperial powers co-opting women’s rights and choosing instead to point “over there” because it’s so much easier to see theocrats and zealots who don’t look like you. Would the Feminist Majority (a feminist group that supported the invasion of Afghanistan) call for the invasion of the U.S. now that the federally protected right to an abortion has been overturned and white supremacist Christian zealots further erode women’s bodily autonomy.
Every time an imperial power claims to “liberate” women from “their” men, those men’s victory becomes incumbent on wresting back control over “their” women from the infidel imperialists. And when the “infidel invaders” decide to pull out with disastrous speed, those same women whose liberation you used to justify your invasion, then become bargaining chips that you can use or ignore in negotiations and business deals with your former enemy.
Enter Taliban 2.0.
Russia–eager to sell natural resources to someone other than the western countries that have boycotted it over its invasion of Ukraine–invited Taliban 2.0 to a major economic forum.
China was the first country to send an ambassador to represent its interests under Taliban 2.0, with an eye on economic and security interests.
The U.S. shares those security interests, with both Beijing and Washington wanting to believe the Taliban will stem “terrorist threats” and not allow Afghanistan to become a haven for “extremism.” As if the Taliban aren’t themselves extremists and as if their regime of gender apartheid wasn’t a form of terrorism against women and girls.
Politically motivated violence committed by one group of men against another is recognized and condemned as terrorism. We must see that politically motivated violence by men against women is a form of terrorism.
The UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan Richard Bennett told the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday that the Taliban’s gender apartheid should be codified as a crime against humanity.
And yet, the U.N. “desperate to placate the Taliban,” has excluded women from the third Doha meeting, a two-day United Nations conference on Afghanistan, slated for June 30. With no women there, it will be easier to further sell them out at the conference that will mark the first time Taliban 2.0 will attend the gathering of international envoys on Afghanistan that is aimed at finding a way for the world to engage with the misogynist zealots.
The Taliban did not invent patriarchy in Afghanistan but have undoubtedly made it worse; the United States did not end patriarchy but its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan undoubtedly made it worse.
“The women of Afghanistan are being held hostage by 70,000 men with guns.” Afghan human rights and education activist Pashtana Durrani has said.
And the world keeps selling them out. And Afghan women keep fighting.
In 1977, two years before the Soviet invasion, revolutionary women’s rights activist Meena founded RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) to fight patriarchy at every level in her country.
"We were daily witnesses of rape, of domestic violence in families and of oppressions in work and all aspects of life. It was obvious that women always had the inferior role in family, society, everywhere. And we thought that one woman cannot change all of this; there needed to be many women coming together, establishing a group movement to get rid of these inequalities," said Shaima, an early recruit to RAWA.
Shaima has explained that women in Afghanistan had to be mushti dar dahan, a term in Dari that means "a fist in the mouth," towards the men in their families, and also to society and government–i.e. State, Street, and Home.
As Soviet interference in her country expanded in the run up to the invasion in 1979, RAWA expanded its mandate, becoming, in Meena’s words, “an organisation of women struggling for the liberation of Afghanistan and of women.”
Because imperialism will never liberate women, in Afghanistan or anywhere else. Women will liberate themselves and they will liberate their countries from the twin occupations of imperialism and patriarchy. That’s why patriarchy, everywhere, fears feminism.
Meena was assassinated 10 years later while living in exile in Pakistan.
Afghan feminists know their work endangers them.
Fawzia Koofi, a former member of Afghanistan’s parliament and a women's rights activist, was one of just four women negotiators involved in the intra-Afghan talks in Doha, Qatar in October 2021 aimed at striking a peace deal with the Taliban.
Koofi has survived several assassination attempts. She now lives in exile, where she has founded the Afghan Women Coalition for Change with a goal of establishing gender apartheid as an internationally recognized crime against humanity. She pays the price, to try to make “peace” with misogynist fucks.
Afghan women have not asked for their country to be invaded nor for its continued occupation by invaders. They have asked us to stop selling them out. They have asked us to get out of their way as they aim their fist at the mouth of patriarchy.
"Some Westerners believe that they alone gave freedom to the Afghan woman, that she couldn't do anything herself, which is not the case," said Habiba Sarabi, another negotiator. She was quoted in the documentary "The Sharp Edge of Peace," which focuses on the women who took part in the intra-Afghan talks. "Afghan women didn't get here easily, they endured a lot of struggles."
From underground schools to feminist newsrooms, to unimaginably courageous protests against the men with guns holding them hostage, Afghan women continue those struggles today, their fists still aiming for the mouth of patriarchy against the misogynist fucks who have created the “world’s most serious women’s rights crisis.”
The Taliban did not invent patriarchy in Afghanistan but have undoubtedly made it worse; the United States did not end patriarchy but its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan undoubtedly made it worse.
Heather Barr, assistant director of Human Rights Watch’s Women’s Rights Division, is correct when she says that “the global backlash (against women’s rights) perhaps feels like permission for diplomats to shrug their shoulders in a ‘what can you do?’ way over the women’s rights crisis in Afghanistan.”
“One effect of the Taliban’s abuses is that the bar for women’s rights globally just got much lower. The lack of an effective international response creates the impression that women’s rights are not much of a concern to world leaders,” Barr says.
Misogynist fucks are on the rise globally.
Women are not proxy battlefields. Women are not bargaining chips. Afghan women have not asked for their country to be invaded nor for its continued occupation by invaders. They have asked us to stop selling them out. They have asked us to get out of their way as they aim their fist at the mouth of patriarchy.
Swing your fist, wherever you are, and bloody the mouth of patriarchy.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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