Ms. magazine reports a brief story today about the suspiciously high number of women registering to vote in Afghanistan's upcoming election. Officials are starting to think something is up, given that some of the areas reporting record registration are regions where women don't travel.

Normally, that headline wouldn't merit my second glance, but today it held me. Late last night I finished reading Åsne Seierstad's 2003 account of her infiltration into an Afghani home, The Bookseller of Kabul. Her glimpse into the kitchens, bedrooms, and walled-in courtyards that make up the entire world of many Afghani women is terrifying and tear-inducing.  It provides the backstory to today's news and reveals exactly why those officials sense fraud.  They know that women don't have the freedom to show their faces, fall in love, or earn money, let alone to vote.  And when I read the headline, all I could think about was the stories of Leila, Sharifay, and Sonya.

Stories trigger paradigm changes the way news can't. So just wanted to give a shout-out to all the women journalists out there, like Åsne, whose work transforms far-away issues into intensely personal ones. Let's hope future presidents around the world have the chance to echo what Abe Lincoln supposedly said when meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!"

Tags: Åsne Seierstad, afghanistan

The news of the hour is a new vote in Afghanistan. This is good news for Peter Galbraith, a United Nations representative in Afghanistan who had been fired from the U.N. team for blasting Afghanistan's “tainted vote” in public. This new Washington- and Kabul-sanctioned runoff election, to be held on Nov. 7, may well delay an official White House announcement on more troop levels for “the good war.” But when discussing the Afghan crisis, which Daily Show co-creator Liz Winstead has taken to calling “Noplanistan”—the plight of women in the feudal, fractured, straight-dangerous nation should spring to mind. This wasn’t always so. I’ve been slowly digesting Ghost Wars, Steve Coll’s indispensable treatise on Afghanistan from the end of the Carter years until the 9/11. A passage about Bill Clinton’s administration (pp. 362-3) caught my eye:

By the autumn of 1997 persistent lobbying against the Taliban by the Feminist Majority had influenced the two most important women in the Clinton administration, Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton. When Albright visited a refugee camp in Peshawar that November, she departed from her prepared script and denounced the Taliban’s policies toward women as “despicable.” It was the first time a Clinton Cabinet member had made such a forceful statement about Taliban human rights violations. A few weeks later Hillary Clinton used a major speech about human rights at the United Nations to single out the Taliban. “Even now the Taliban in Afghanistan are blocking girls from attending schools,” Clinton said. The Taliban were harassing those “who would speak out against this injustice.” It was the first time that either of the Clintons had seriously criticized the Taliban in public.

It wouldn’t be the last time—Albright and Clinton were early movers in what has since been an avalanche of censure for the Taliban’s record on women’s issues. Coll also writes about what caused Afghanistan to breach Clinton’s radar: networks of feminist organizers who remained vigilant even in what seemed like boom times for women’s rights. He continues:

The impetus had come from old friends of Albright and Hillary Clinton in the feminist policy networks of the Democratic Party. These were accomplished, professional women of the baby boomer generation now stepping into powerful positions that women had not held in Washington before, at least not in these numbers. They kept in touch with one another and worked on each others’ issues. The Taliban had now slipped onto the agenda of their fax machine network. Sitting cross-legged in their barren ministries thousands of miles away in Kandahar, the Taliban’s leaders had no idea where this turn in American attitudes had come from. They made little effort to find out. When pressed on the issue of education for girls by the occasional visiting American delegation, they said “this is God’s law,” recalled the State Department’s Leonard Scensny. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. Leave us alone.”

The upcoming election may or may not present an opportunity for women’s advancement. (In August, “a combination of fear, tradition, apathy and poor planning conspired to deprive many Afghan women of rights they had only recently begun to exercise.”) But 12 years after the fact, it’s heartening to see the maturation of this network, moved from faxes to the Internet!

No doubt the old network or those like it included Melanne Verveer, chief-of-staff-to-Hillary-turned-American-ambassador-at-large for women’s issues, and Carol Browner, a mid-level climate specialist, now energy czar. Pentagon brass, like Michele Flournoy, and protégés of Albright, like North Korea adviser Wendy Sherman and Indonesia specialist Karen Brooks, were likewise not at the apex of their authority then. These networks were instrumental in fighting for reproductive rights, as well as education and career opportunities abroad. They remain interested in the happenings in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some are key decisionmakers. Events like the Darfur policy change announcement yesterday, run by Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice—in 1997, a first lady and an assistant secretary of state for African Affairs*—really bring home the leaps and bounds that American women have made during the time that the Taliban bas been busy bullying and oppressing and so forth.

*Fixed!

Tags: Afghan elections, afghan women, afghanistan, Ghost Wars, Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, women in government

Dana Goldstein's article about the few feminist groups that came out in support of a long-term occupation in Afghanistan sure has tongues wagging, as is inevitable every time a perceived gap between liberal and feminist interests opens up. Eleanor Smeal and a few other feminists object to President Obama's plan to leave Afghanistan in 18 months because they correctly believe that leaving will cause reactionary forces to swoop in and eagerly oppress women to the fullest extent possible. But the few feminists Dana covers hardly represent majority feminist opinion on this front. Many of us believe that we should leave Afghanistan sooner rather than later, even as we sympathize with Smeal's concerns.

How can I, as a good feminist, believe that we should just get out of Afghanistan, knowing full well what will happen to women when we do? It's a good question. On one level, the answer is actually quite simple: I don't buy the idea that you can shove good values such as feminism down people's throats with violence. And that even if you could, it's irrelevant in this case. As Dana notes, the human rights arguments about Afghanistan have never been put forth in good faith but have always functioned as a rationale for the war. Because of this, I fail to believe that we're doing anything but putting off the inevitable by occupying Afghanistan. And by putting off the fall, we are also putting off the potential for legitimate feminist forces within Afghanistan to start working to improve things the only way possible, from the inside.

There's a deep arrogance to the long-standing argument that Westerners can simply visit the lessons we learned the hard way on other countries at the end of a gun. Our society didn't move in the direction of equality because outsiders forced it upon us. As painful as it is to admit it, women don't gain power through violent coercion. They have to build it, step by step. That's why interventions that give women control and power over their own lives, such as microlending, work so much better than trying to create a feminist society by fiat.

To say that war is against everything that feminists stand for is not to make a mere theoretical argument, either. It's pragmatic. Invading and occupying a country causes many of the men of that country to feel disempowered and emasculated. And men in that situation lash out at women, making themselves feel powerful again by dominating women. It operates by the same principle as schoolyard bullying, but on a global scale. If we truly care about women's equality, the last thing we need to be doing is creating incentives for men to oppress women to build themselves up.

Tags: afghanistan, feminism