In the spirit of Lines and its commitment to engage with issues from “Gaza to Gujarat”, my comments focus not on Sri Lanka, but on the international political reaction to the vexed question of women’s rights in Afghanistan.

Having recently returned from visiting family in Toronto, I was struck by the tenor of public debate around the passage in Afghanistan of the controversial family law bill referred to in the popular press as the “Rape Law”.

This issue and the controversy it has generated in Afghanistan and well beyond, along with the April 13th assassination by the Taliban of a prominent women’s rights advocate and MP, Sitara Achakzai, spurred a renewed and passionate debate about Western advocacy for women’s rights as a justification for military invasion of countries “like Afghanistan”.

If we recount from the early days of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the 9-11 attacks, Cherie Booth and Laura Bush were on the front lines of the global war effort promising to liberate the veiled Afghan woman from local extremism.

This issue seems to have a special resonance in Canada, for at least two reasons that I can identify. First and most obviously, Canadian troops have played an active and visible role in the occupation of Afghanistan (in contrast to government having chosen to opt out of the invasion of Iraq), which receives greater national attention, including media coverage. Secondly, there is a common sense national pride of basic Canadian decency in the international arena, defined in direct opposition to the imperial ambitions of its neighbor to the South.

As Muslim-Canadian media watch dog blogs like Muslim Lookout and Muslimah Media Watch point out, the conservative Canadian government’s insistence that the Canadian troops are in Afghanistan to protect and promote women’s rights and human rights, neatly glosses over the fact that the invasion and occupation are motivated by strategic interests.

In the media coverage I followed, from more conservative newspapers and blogs to liberal media including The Globe and Mail and the CBC, the debate about the justification and cost of war had to do with whether or not “we” Canadians were morally responsible for uplifting “their” backward society. As journalist Sandra Martin wrote last weekend:

Should we stay, fighting a potentially unwinnable war, which has already cost the lives of 117 Canadian soldiers, in a pre-Industrial tribal society where the rule of law is not even a concept, let alone a functioning system? And yet, after Rwanda, Ethiopia and Darfur, can we turn away from the suffering of other people?

In response, eloquent and vocal critics in the blogosphere, and on radio and television, contested the familiar colonial logic of these arguments by insisting that the “women’s question” and human rights more broadly have to be understood in the larger vacuum of political, economic and military security.

Nevertheless, the two sides of the dominant debate about the justification for Western military intervention in Afghanistan appeared fixed around the two poles of liberal reasoning: Those who opposed intervention given the innate cultural differences of the premodern Afghanis and those who supported military presence in the hopes that it would ultimately lead to spreading Canadian values like respect for women’s rights. To quote Sandra Martin from The Globe and Mail once more:

Horrifying as it was to watch women being pelted with stones, seeing them march with their faces uncovered and their veils pulled back to show some hair was a hopeful sign that women are feeling strong enough to protest against an unjust law.

Feminist scholars have discussed the cringe-worthy commentary about feminist liberation through the symbolically powerful veil at great length in recent years. But the casual reference in discussions like this one, that claims to weigh the pros and cons of a brutal military invasion in terms of justifying women’s rights still sends chills through my weary feminist (of color) spine.

As Sunera Thobani, a vocal critic of Canada’s role in Afghanistan and a long time feminist advocate and now Women’s Studies professor at UBC reminds us, Canadian feminists who have supported the Afghan war are complicit in the US-led imperial excursions in places like Iraq.

Similarly, those who oppose the war based on arguments about the essential cultural differences inherent in the Afghan people might want to consider if racism is part of the core Canadian values promoting decency in the international arena.

Category: Article

Tags: Afghanistan, Bush, Canada, Democracy, Feminism, Invasion, Iraq, Liberation, Media, Women