Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Should America Liberate Afghanistan's Women?

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 53; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00396338.2011.621632

1468-2699

Malou Innocent,

Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Stephen Kaufman, ‘Clinton: Returning Taliban Must Respect Afghan Women's Rights’, America. gov, 14 May 2010, available at http://us-emb-001.openminds.be/headline/clinton-returning-taliban-mustrespect-afghan-women's-rights. In addition to Senator Barbara Mikulski and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, other US and NATO officials and leaders who have advocated remaining in Afghanistan for the sake of Afghan women include NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen; US Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Intelligence; and US Senator Barbara Boxer, who sits on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. See ‘NATO Chief Pledges to Uphold Afghan Women's Rights’, Reuters, 29 October 2010; George Stephanopoulos, ‘Feinstein: Obama Should Approve McChrystal's Recommendations’, ABC News, 11 October 2009, http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/10/feinstein-obama-should-approvemcchrystals-recommendations.html; and ‘Bipartisan Group of Women Lawmakers Offer Resolution Condemning Afghan Marital Rape Law’, Press Release of US Senator Barbara Boxer, 23 April 2009, www.boxer.senate.gov/en/press/releases/042309.cfm. See also ‘Taking Stock in Afghanistan’, New York Times, 13 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/opinion/14mon1.html, in which the New York Times editorial board makes a similar agument. The United States has an obvious interest in promoting the spread of liberalism, defined as a political philosophy based on the principle of individual freedom; and democracy, defined as a system in which the people choose their leaders, prospective leaders compete for public support, and the power of government is restrained by its accountability to the people. Far more important, however, is understanding whether, how and to what extent democratic electoral procedures can encourage the growth of liberal values. These definitions are adapted from Sean M. Lynn-Jones, ‘Why the United States Should Spread Democracy’, Discussion Paper 98-07, Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, March 1998. Culture here is defined as shared knowledge, values and symbols that create meaning for a particular group. Mark Ward, special advisor on development, United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, in discussion with the author, 5 May 2010, Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghanistan's constitution calls for equal rights for men and women (Article 22); for women's education (Article 44); for medical care for women without a caretaker (Article 53); and for women in government (Article 84). Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddan, ‘The Arrested Development of Afghan Women’, in J. Alexander Their (ed.), The Future of Afghanistan (Washington DC: US Institute of Peace, 2009), p. 65. Afghanistan: Fear Behind the Veil, documentary film directed by Zarghona Rassa (Surrey: Journeyman Pictures, 2007), http://www.journeyman.tv/57790/short-films/fear-behind-theveil.html. Ann Jones, ‘Afghan Women Have Already Been Abandoned’, The Nation, 12 August 2010, http://www.thenation.com/article/154020/afghan-womenhave-already-been-abandoned. There is a vast and rich theoretical literature on the relationship between women's rights and international security. See, for example, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs, vol. 12, no. 4, Summer 1987, pp. 687–718; Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Francis Fukuyama, ‘Women and the Evolution of World Politics’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 77, no. 5, September– October 1998, pp. 24–40. Afghanistan: Fear Behind the Veil. This is not to say that the diffusion of liberal norms in Afghanistan is unrealisable. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a survey of some 200 women holding public office in 65 countries found that women's participation in the political process can increase the amount of attention given to social welfare and legal protection. Inter-Parliamentary Union, Politics: Women's Insight (Geneva: Inter-Parliamentary Union, January 2000). These attitudes are rooted in the modernisation school of international development, a dominant paradigm that shapes both scholarly work and foreign-assistance policies toward developing countries. See Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Laurie Nisonoff and Nan Wiegersma (eds), The Women, Gender & Development Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997); Naomi Chazan, Peter Lewis, Robert A. Mortimer, Donald Rothchild and Stephen John Stedman, Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1999), p. 16; and Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 310. ‘Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy’, White House Press Release, 1 June 2002, http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html. As twentieth-century internationalrelations theorist Hans Morgenthau writes, ‘What justice means in the United States can within wide limits be objectively ascertained: for interests and convictions, experiences of life and institutional traditions have in large measure created a consensus concerning what justice means under the conditions of American society. No such consensus exists in the relations between nations.’ Hans Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), p. 34. See also Rory Stewart, The Places In Between (London: Picador, 2004), p. 248. Marshall D. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 74. Gender serves as a basic category of identification and a profound marker of difference that pervades various levels of social intercourse. As anthropologist Barbara Diane Miller notes, ‘We must not forget that human gender hierarchies are one of the most persistent, pervasive, and pernicious forms of inequality in the world.’ See Barbara Diane Miller, ‘The Anthropology of Sex and Gender Hierarchies’, in Barbara Diane Miller (ed.), Sex and Gender Hierarchies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 22. Hillary Clinton, ‘New Hope for Afghanistan's Women’, Time, 24 November 2001, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,185643,00.html. This conception of agency is similar to eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's principle of respect. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), pp. 66–7. Readers must bear in mind that this concept of individual liberty is closely bound to the Christian moral tradition. Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris argue that although beliefs about democracy are not different between Islamic and Christian cultures, beliefs about gender equality differ markedly. See Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, ‘The True Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Policy, no. 135, March–April 2003, pp. 63–70; and Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007). In his empirical analysis of Muslim societies, University of California, Berkeley professor M. Steven Fish disconfirms the notion that Islamic nation-states disproportionately suffer from authoritarian rule. He finds that the oppression of females is better explained by discrepancies in sex ratios and the literacy gap between males and females. See M. Steve Fish, ‘Islam and Authoritarianism’, World Politics, vol. 55, no. 1, October 2002, pp. 4–37. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3, September 2002, p. 785. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 11–12. Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 23. Robert Cox, ‘Social Forces States, and World Orders’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 204–54. As West Virginia University economist Christopher Coyne argues, ‘Cooperation and self-governance is a habit … But when those values and underlying beliefs are absent, constant coercion and intervention will be needed to sustain formal institutions.’ See Christopher Coyne, ‘Can We Export Democracy?’, Cato Policy Report, January–February 2008, http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v30n1/cpr30n1-4.html. In seeking to enhance Afghan women's rights, US policymakers and the Afghan people have entered into a principal–agent relationship, in which ‘a third party (principal) provides a security guarantee (contract) to a domestic minority (agent) who wants protection from genocide, civil war, or other bad outcomes’. However, this relationship has been weakened by one of the two classic principal– agent problems, namely adverse selection. The second problem, moral hazard, would imply that Afghan women were engaging in activities that increased their chances of being victimised by the risk against which the coalition had insured their safety. Instead, the problem is not so much Afghan women engaging in risky behaviour as much as it an asymmetry of information prior to the contracting period. Unlike moral hazard, adverse selection shifts the focus from Afghan women (the ‘agents’) to the events and circumstances leading up to the Western offer of security (the ‘contract’). Due to uncertainty or lack of local knowledge about these circumstances (‘hidden information’) Western efforts – however noble – have the potential to make conflict more likely. See Robert W. Rauchhaus, ‘Principal–Agent Problems in Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazards, Adverse Selection, and the Commitment Dilemma’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 53, December 2009, pp. 871–84. Barfield, Afghanistan, pp. 12, 40–1. Anna Larson, ‘Toward an Afghan Democracy? Exploring Perceptions of Democratisation in Afghanistan’, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, September 2009, p. 27. Nooria Haqnagar, a spokesperson for Afghanistan's Ministry of Women's Affairs, says, ‘In some remote areas, men deal with women like animals.’ See ‘Afghan Women Still Suffer Abuse’, BBC News, 30 May 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4592697.stm. See also Afghanistan: Fear Behind the Veil. Kirk Semple, ‘Afghan Women Slowly Gaining Protection’, New York Times, 2 March 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/world/asia/03shelter.html?_r=2&hp. Alissa Rubin, ‘For Afghan Wives, a Desperate, Fiery Way Out’, New York Times, 7 November 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08burn.html. Rauchhaus, ‘Principal–Agent Problems in Humanitarian Intervention’, p. 873. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 310. Mohammad Qayoumi, ‘Once Upon A Time in Afghanistan’, Foreign Policy, 27 May 2010. Barfield, Afghanistan, p. 202. Thomas A. Marks, Sebastian L.V. Gorka and Robert Sharp, ‘Getting the Next War Right: Beyond Populationcentric Warfare’, Prism, vol. 1, no. 3, June 2010, p. 83. David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Hiroyuki Tosa, ‘Anarchical Governance: Neoliberal Governmentality in Resonance with the State of Exception’, International Political Sociology, vol. 3, no. 4, December 2009, pp. 414–30; and Stefan Wolff, ‘Building Democratic States after Conflict: Institutional Design Revisited’, International Studies Review, vol. 12, no. 1, March 2010, p. 134. For an insightful examination of the relationship between the physical security of women and the relative peacefulness of states, see Valerie M. Hudson, Mary Caprioli, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Rose McDermott and Chad F. Emmett, ‘The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States’, International Security, vol. 33, no. 3, Winter 2008–09, pp. 7–45. Clinton, ‘New Hope for Afghanistan's Women’. In 2006, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, ‘The world is … starting to grasp that there is no policy more effective [in promoting development, health and education] than the empowerment of women and girls. And I would venture that no policy is more important in preventing conflict, or in achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended.’ Kofi Annan, ‘No Policy for Progress More Effective Than Empowerment of Women, Secretary-General Says in Remarks to Woman's Day Observance’, United Nations press conference, 8 March 2006, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/sgsm10370.doc.htm. George W. Bush, ‘Second Inaugural Address’, 20 January 2005, available at http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres67.html. For an excellent analysis of America's drive for global hegemony since the Second World War, see Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006). See, for example, Barry Posen, ‘Command of the Commons: The Military Foundations of U.S. Hegemony’, International Security, vol. 28, no. 1, Summer 2003, pp. 5–46; Benjamin H. Friedman and Christopher Preble, ‘Budgetary Savings from Military Restraint’, Cato Policy Analysis, no. 667, 21 September 2010; and Eugene Gholz and Daryl G. Press, ‘The Effects of Wars on Neutral Countries: Why It Doesn't Pay to Preserve the Peace’, Security Studies, vol. 10, no. 4, Summer 2001, pp. 1–57. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: World Pub. Co., 1959). ‘National Military Strategy of the United States’, January 1992, available at http://dodreports.com/pdf/ada338837.pdf. ‘National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, September 2002, available at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/nss/nss_sep2002.pdf. The authors of NSC 68, the 1950 National Security Council document articulating America's Cold War strategy, argued that America's ‘policy of attempting to develop a healthy international community [was] a policy which we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat’. See Part VI, ‘U.S. Intentions and Capabilities – Actual and Potential’, in NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, 14 April 1950, available at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm. Today, the United States spends over $700 billion a year – nearly half of global military spending – not to preserve its own security, but to protect allies such as Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia; to contain countries such as China, North Korea and Iran; and to protect open sea lanes in Asia and East Africa. See Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/ CFO, ‘United States Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Request: Overview’, February 2011, p. 1-1; and International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2011(London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2011), pp. 46, 49. Note that America's official defence budget, including the costs of overseas contingency operations, was $691 billion in 2010, $685bn in 2011, and $671bn (requested) for 2012; however, these figures do not include funding for counter-terrorism operations under the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nuclear-related activities under the US Department of Energy, and certain other military and defence-related activities. As Carey B. Joynt and Sherman S. Hayden note in their article, ‘Morals and Politics: The Current Debate’, ‘If we assume that the aim or end of our policy is to achieve peace and security, then it is a scientific question how this is to be achieved’. The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. 21, no. 3, August 1955, p. 359. See also A.C. Ewing, ‘Ethics and Politics’, Philosophy, vol. 26, January 1951, pp. 19–21. Coyne, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 16–17. Justin Logan and Christopher Preble, ‘Fatal Conceit’, National Review, 30 August 2010, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12065. Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western, ‘The Death of Dayton: How to Stop Bosnia From Falling Apart’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 88, no. 5, September–October 2009, pp. 69–83. Gordon N. Bardos, ‘Bosnian Lessons’, National Interest, 16 July 2010, http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/bosnian-lessons-3674. Safia al-Souhail, ‘Country Report: The Republic of Iraq’, A Modern Narrative for Muslim Women in the Middle East: Forging a New Future (Washington DC: American Islamic Congress, 2010), pp. 34–5, http://www.aicongress.org/prog/Women/AIC_Womens_Narrative_2.pdf. US Army General Tommy Franks, who commanded the invasion of Iraq, said famously in May 2003, ‘We don't do body counts’. Unofficial estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths vary considerably, but the online database Iraq Body Count cross-checks media reports, as well as hospital, morgue and NGO figures, and estimates that between 102,000 and 111,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the US-led invasion and occupation. Additionally, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 1.5 million Iraqis were internally displaced and that more than 1.6 million Iraqis fled to neighbouring Jordan and Syria. For Tommy Franks' remark, see ‘Counting the Civilian Cost in Iraq’, BBC News, 6 June 2005. For Iraq Body Count's figures and methodology, see http://www.iraqbodycount.org/. For figures on refugees and the internally displaced, see the UN Refugee Agency, ‘2011 UNHCR Country Operations Profile – Iraq’, www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e486426#. The most prominent international collaborative work on humanitarian intervention, The Responsibility to Protect, a 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, tried to speak for an emerging consensus in international ethics on the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine. However, this emerging norm remains rather unclear. See Carlo Focarelli, ‘The Responsibility to Protect Doctrine and Humanitarian Intervention: Too Many Ambiguities For a Working Doctrine’, Journal of Conflict & Security Law, vol. 13, no. 2, August 2008, pp. 191–213. Stephen Sloan and Sebastian L.V. Gorka, ‘Contextualizing Counterinsurgency’, Journal of International Security Affairs. vol. 16, Spring 2009, http://www.securityaffairs.org/issues/2009/16/sloan&gorka. Social psychologists suggest that people tend to distrust those whom they identify as outsiders. See Susan T. Fiske and Steven L. Neuberg, ‘A Continuum of Impression Formation, from Category-Based to Individuating Processes: Influence of Information and Motivation on Attention and Interpretation’, in Mark P. Zanna (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 23 (Oxford: Academic Press, 1990), pp. 1–74; Jason Kuznicki, ‘Never a Neutral State: American Race Relations and Government Power’, Cato Journal, vol. 30, no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 417–53; and Steven Messick and Diane Mackie, ‘Intergroup Relations’, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 40, 1989, pp. 45–81. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 2. Twentieth-century economist Friedrich A. Hayek argues there is no magic formula for assisting a society's development, since civilisations are held together by the largely unconscious influence of traditional moral codes and practices. See Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (London: Routledge, 2004). John Stuart Mill, ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’, 1859, available at www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/forep/forep008.pdf. This insight is influenced by Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which he provides interesting perspectives on the issue of change. Ken Auletta, ‘The Networker’, The New Yorker, 5 July 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/05/100705fa_fact_auletta. Ibid. Zahra Hasanpur, training officer, Women Activities and Social Services Association, in discussion with the author, 6 May 2010, Herat, Afghanistan. United Nations Development Fund for Women, ‘Afghan Women and Micro-Finance’, http://www.unifem.org/afghanistan/prog/CEED/activities/microfinance.html. As Yale University political science professor Seyla Benhabib writes, ‘In the process of repeating a term or a concept, we never simply produce a replica of the first intended usage or its original meaning; rather, every repetition is a form of variation.’ See Seyla Benhabib, ‘Claiming Rights across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty’, American Political Science Review, vol. 103, no. 4, November 2009, p. 698. See Amy Belasco, ‘The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11’, Congressional Research Service, RL3311, 29 March 2011, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf. Stephen Davies, ‘Imperialism’, The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2008), p. 238. This critique is only one element of the classical liberal case against imperialism. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMalou Innocent Malou Innocent is a Foreign Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute. Her primary research interests include Middle East and Persian Gulf security issues and US foreign policy toward Pakistan, Afghanistan and China.