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So to make a factual statement "it is true that woman are suffering" followed by another "and so are women in other countries" somehow lacks empathy. I still don't get it. How does it lack empathy? I know for sure what it doesn't lack--hypocritical empathy.
I still think I need a diagram.
Subtext isn't the point. The point is the one I and Glenn (I think) made quite clearly. The question isn't "are women suffering somewhere"--because we can all agree they most definitely are (did that lack empathy too).
The question is, "is making war and occupying the nations where women are suffering the wisest course of action in alleviating that suffering?" And if it is in fact the wisest course, why start or stop in Afghanistan?
Given your multicultural/multinational family relationships are you prepared for America to make war on and occupy a nation where you may have female relatives who don't have it as good as you do in Germany(?)? How do you think your female relatives would perceive such a war and occupation? How would they feel if their infant son or daughter was killed in the course of a third party "ensuring safety and freedom" from their oppressors?
I'm not trying to condescend to you, I'm trying to understand how you could miss the point and how you would perceive the "problem" if the shoe was on a foot closer to your heart or family.
How about the tradeoff of military intervention for a burgeoning sex slave trade in Afghanistan that American troops and contractors are fueling? Boys, girls, women--there's a market for it in Afghanistan (not to mention Kuwait, Dubai and a host of other places our servicemembers are stationed--which I have on direct authority from my buddies in the Navy and Army) despite our 8 + years of freedom and liberty spreading intervention. But I'm sure we're close to turning it around if we just "surge" some more. And I don't mean to nitpick, I love that my tax dollars go to pay for American service members to visit houses of underage prostitution in foreign lands and assault 30% of their fellow female servicemembers while on active duty. What's not to like?
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10605
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/26/ctw.afghanistan.sex.trade/index.html
[snip]
Or maybe that our intervention isn't all it is purported to be given we seem to have backed Karzai who is no friend of women all on the basis of "our interests" not Afghani women's?
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2009/10/21/remember-the-womeno.html
as UNAMA investigators found, are often "directly linked to power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation." Last year Karzai pardoned political thugs who had gang-raped a woman before witnesses, using a bayonet, and who had somehow been convicted despite their good connections. UNAMA researchers conclude: "The current reality is that...women are denied their most fundamental human rights and risk further violence in the course of seeking justice for crimes perpetrated against them." For women, "human rights are values, standards, and entitlements that exist only in theory and at times, not even on paper."
Caught in the maelstrom of personal, political and military violence, Afghan women worry less about rights than security. But they complain that the men who plan the country's future define "security" in ways that have nothing to do with them. The conventional wisdom, which I have voiced myself, holds that without security, development cannot take place. Hence, our troops must be fielded in greater numbers, and Afghan troops trained faster, and private for-profit military contractors hired at fabulous expense, all to bring security. But the rule doesn't hold in Afghanistan precisely because of that equation of "security" with the presence of armed men. Wherever troops advance in Afghanistan, women are caught in the cross-fire, killed, wounded, forced to flee or locked up once again, just as they were in the time of the Taliban. Suggesting an alternative to the "major misery" of warfare, Sweden's former Defense Minister Thage Peterson calls for Swedish soldiers to leave the "military adventure" in Afghanistan while civilians stay to help rebuild the country. But Sweden's soldiers are few, and its aid organizations among the best in the world. For the United States even to lean toward such a plan would mean reasserting civilian control of the military and restoring the American aid program (USAID), hijacked by private for-profit contractors: two goals worth fighting for.
Today, most American so-called development aid is delivered not by USAID, but by the military itself through a system of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), another faulty idea of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Soldiers, unqualified as aid workers and already busy soldiering, now shmooze with village "elders" (often the wrong ones) and bring "development," usually a costly road convenient to the PRT base, impossible for Afghans to maintain and inaccessible to women locked up at home.
like Winny is a PhD candidate in INTENTIONAL HUGE Studies.
@ McGupta . . . so the initial invasion was good and gave Afghanistan a chance? But we botched it "temporarily" and can still fix it if we only "surge" harder?
Fair enough.
Here's my take. We are stuck in a neverending cycle of violence against people we may or may not drive from their lands temporarily while pushing non-residents back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan in a neverending loop of Groundhog's Day.
You want to get me onboard. Forge a coalition with every nation in the Middle East, Europe, America, Russia, China, and SE Asia (including Pakistan and India) to station 4 million neutral peacekeepers to provide law enforcement and economic development to the Pakistani frontier, Kashmir, and Afghanistan and you just might stand a chance--if you stay for 20-50 years. Short of that your kidding yourself that we have the capacity to go it alone and change anything in the long run.