The photo on the front page of Monday’s New York Times of a soldier caught in a firefight in a remote region of Afghanistan came in the midst of a news cycle filled with depressing stories out of the region: Taliban takeovers of towns and villages close to Pakistan’s capitol city, new bombings in Baghdad and the story out of Afghanistan.
The day after the story about the ambush, the paper ran an op-ed piece by two young Afghan women who begged America not to turn its back on give up on the brave women who took to the streets to protest the latest government law caving in to fundamentalist demands. “[Westerners assume] Afghans are a ‘tribal people’ who probably do not want a say in choosing their leaders,” they wrote. “Others claim that because Afghanistan is a traditional Islamic society, any promotion of democracy and women’s rights will be resented as an imposition of Western values… These assumptions are wrong.”
That’s good to know. There are people in Afghanistan and in Pakistan who fervently support women’s rights, human rights and democracy. Possibly even more of the population simply wants to live in peace under whatever form of government is presented to them. In any event, we should support their efforts to live a life free from terror and intimidation.
And it’s not quite fair to say we’ve turned our backs on Afghan human rights, regardless of which country our politicians may discuss from one day to the next. We’ve got boots on the ground there who will soon be joined by new troops our experts are moving from what we and they hope is a more stabilized Iraq. Although we have no troops in nuclear neighbor Pakistan, we have planes overhead and an Executive Branch proposal for nearly 3 billion in investments to support a military I worry seems far more focused on India than the Taliban militants. Decisions have to be made about how and where to place finite resources – our resources. Maybe that’s why it seems as if Uncle Sam is playing in high-stakes chess game all by himself.
It’s no fun to be a superpower soloist.
The authors of the piece about Afghan’s marching women note that “Democracy and progress are not products to be packaged and exported to Afghanistan. Afghans have to fight for them.” Absolutely true, as I think our government is beginning to figure out. Democracy promotion isn’t something that can be done strictly from the outside in. We should assist, support, speak out in no uncertain terms concerning anything relating to human rights. But as far as translating words into actions, we can always use a little inside help.
1 Woman' s Vu by Nikki Stern 
Boots alone are insufficient to stop insurgencies like the ones in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One problem is that both nations’ secular governments have proven so incompetent and corrupt that they’ve alienated masses of their people– secular moderates included. I think it would be more effective to find historical examples of outbreaks of hysterical, armed religiosity that were successfully quelled. One of the things that led to the quick collapse of the Taliban in 2001 was the fact that they’d had been ruling much of Afghanistan for five years, during which time they’d proven as crooked and inept as the warlords they’d supplanted, and crueler and more stupid. Imagine an impoverished country devoting a significant share of its scarce resources to destroying a ‘blasphemous’ monument– I mean the Buddhas of Bamiyan– that happens to be one of that nation’s few treasures. I don’t mean that we should surrender Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Taliban (though, judging from press accounts, they may end up surrendering themselves), but we need to think of ways in which those slavering, gynophobic neanderthals can be exposed to their own people, and made small in their eyes.
approved – and then some!!