International dismay as Karzai backs law ravaging women's rights

We already count as allies countries that consistently restrict women's rights including the big oil producers Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Afghanistan already has condemned one of its citizens to death for converting to Christianity and kicked a female parliamentarian out of the legislature for uttering the obvious truth that there were former warlords who had violated human rights in the government. No wonder the socalled moderate Taliban might find a place in the government.
It is understandable that feminists should ride their moral high horses when such a pernicious law is presented but it is quite another thing to think that foreign occupation and force from outside is the way to change anything. The Soviets also contributed considerably to advancing the rights of women in Afghanistan but ultimately they were forced out with the help of the West of course who at the time considered these same jihadis with the same anti-feminist values as freedom fighters!


AFGHANISTAN CONFERENCE: 'THIS WILL CREATE SERIOUS DIFFICULTIES FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA': HILLARY IS NOT IMPRESSED
International dismay as Karzai backs law ravaging women's rights
Law would legalize rape within marriage, UN says, putting damper on summit hopes and outraging ministers

DOUG SAUNDERS

April 1, 2009
THE HAGUE -- An effort by ministers from the United States, Canada and other members of the 42-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan to put an optimistic face on the war's progress came close to collapse yesterday when Afghan President Hamid Karzai was publicly accused of supporting a law that dramatically limits the rights of women.
Attended in total by 72 countries and organizations interested in rebuilding the country, The Hague summit was meant to be a "big tent" show of support for U.S. President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan war plans. But by day's end the participants had been forced to confront the reality of a government riddled with corruption and committed to legislating sexual inequality.
According to United Nations organizations that have seen it, a law backed by the Karzai government would legalize rape within marriage and would forbid women from going to the doctor or leaving their home without their husband's protection.
It also reportedly grants custody of children only to fathers or grandfathers.


When the law was brought to the attention of the summit by the Finnish Foreign Minister yesterday afternoon, forcing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to back away from her optimistic message, it marked the culmination of a day in which public statements of progress in Afghanistan were contradicted by private expressions of deep concern.
"Things are going worse for us than they have during the past four or five years - the Taliban controls more of our territory than before, and we have made no progress at all on corruption," a Canadian official said moments before Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon told the summit that he was "immediately able to see the results and impacts of our efforts" in Afghanistan.
The rape-law allegations were an especially severe blow to a conference meant to be what Ms. Clinton called a "blank slate," in which the 42 countries in the coalition would commit themselves with renewed vigour to the eight-year-old UN-mandated campaign, with support from 4,000 additional U.S. troops and a long-term commitment from Mr. Obama.
Faced with questions about the law yesterday afternoon, Ms. Clinton expressed dismay. She is said to have upbraided Mr. Karzai, whose presidency has been backed and promoted by the United States for years, in a private meeting.
"This is an area of absolute concern for the United States," she told reporters. "My message is very clear. Women's rights are a central part of the foreign policy of the Obama administration."
Officials from other countries had even more trouble hiding their disappointment with a government that was meant to signal a turn away from the sexual oppression of the ousted Taliban regime.
In Ottawa, Trade Minister Stockwell Day, chairman of the cabinet committee on Afghanistan, suggested that if the reports are true, Canada's support for the Afghan government will be affected.
"If these prove to be true, this will create serious problems for the government of Canada, for the people of Canada," Mr. Day said. "The onus is upon the government of Afghanistan to live up to its human-rights responsibilities, absolutely including the rights of women. If there is any wavering on this point ... this will create serious difficulties, serious problems for the government of Canada."
Spousal sexual assault is an offence in most parts of the Western world, and became a crime in Canada in 1983. In its 1993 declaration on the elimination of violence against women, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights established marital rape as a human-rights violation.
For many officials, the reports of Mr. Karzai's support for the law making rape exclusively an extramarital crime mark the culmination of years of frustration with the corruption, inertia and culture of impunity for which his government is known. One Canadian official said that Mr. Karzai no longer has the support of any country fighting in Afghanistan, but nothing can be said in public because he is likely to win the presidential election scheduled for this summer.
A British cabinet minister was more explicit. "We are caught in the Catch-22 that the Afghans obviously have the right to write their own laws," Lord Malloch Brown, the foreign secretary for Africa and Asia, told the Guardian newspaper yesterday. "But there is dismay. The rights of women was one of the reasons the U.K. and many in the West threw ourselves into the struggle in Afghanistan. It matters greatly to us and our public opinion."
With 2,800 soldiers fighting in the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, Canada has suffered the highest casualty rate of any coalition member, and has an important leadership role in the country's troubled south. Mr. Cannon was able to proclaim a Canadian victory in having built a new agreement between Pakistani and Afghan border officials, after talks organized by Canada. But there was a distinct sense that Canada is no longer being treated as a major coalition partner now that both the governing Conservatives and the opposition Liberals have made it clear that they will withdraw all combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011.
Canada did not share in the major international development of the day, a public diplomatic contact between the United States and Iran for the first time in 30 years. Signalling a possible rapprochement between Iran and the West, Iran sent a mid-level official to the meeting and held talks in which Tehran agreed to co-operate with drug-eradication schemes in Afghanistan and allow non-military supplies to be sent across its borders - in both cases solving difficult logistical problems for the coalition.
With reports from Campbell Clark in Ottawa and Caroline Alphonso
dsaunders@globeandmail.com

Juan Cole: Obama's Domino Theory

While Cole gives a plausible critique of Obama's domino theory I just wonder if Cole thinks that the theory is developed as Obama's real rationale for his Afghan and Pakistan policies or if there is some alternative rationale that Obama refuses to reveal. Personally given the obvious errors in the theory that it is probably a public consumption rational based on public fear of terrorism. I think that probably the real reason for Obama's Pakistani and Afghan policy is to project US influence and power in the region. However, Obama seems not to be aware of the difficulties of doing this using the methods he has chosen. Increased military presences will mean more expense and casualties and increased use of drones in Pakistan will increase anti-US feeling in Pakistana and perhaps destabilise the Pakistani govt. resulting in a less co-operative govt. taking power in Pakistan.


Obama's domino theoryThe president sounds like he's channeling Cheney or McCain -- or a Cold War hawk afraid of international communism -- when he talks about the war in Afghanistan.
By Juan Cole
Mar. 30, 2009
President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it on Friday is almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting "al-Qaida" in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories.
Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble.
He acknowledged that we deserve a "straightforward answer" as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. "So let me be clear," he said, "Al-Qaida and its allies -- the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks -- are in Pakistan and Afghanistan." But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. "And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban," he said, "or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged -- that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can."
Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, saying, "The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan," and warned, "Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within."
This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the "Taliban" is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded "Taliban" only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or "killing" it.
The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban. The Afghan government has 80,000 troops, who benefit from close U.S. air support, and the total number of Taliban fighters in the Pashtun provinces is estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. Kabul is in danger of losing control of some villages in the provinces to dissident Pashtun warlords styled "Taliban," though it is not clear why the new Afghan army could not expel them if they did so. A smaller, poorly equipped Northern Alliance army defeated 60,000 Taliban with U.S. air support in 2001. And there is no prospect of "al-Qaida" reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it could attack the United States. If al-Qaida did come back to Afghanistan, it could simply be bombed and would be attacked by the new Afghan army.
While the emergence of "Pakistani Taliban" in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is a blow to Pakistan's security, they have just been defeated in one of the seven major tribal agencies, Bajaur, by a concerted and months-long campaign of the highly professional and well-equipped Pakistani army. United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied last summer to the idea that al-Qaida is regrouping in Pakistan and forms a new and vital threat to the West: "Actually, I don't agree with that assessment, because when al-Qaida was in Afghanistan, they had the partnership of a government. They had ready access to international communications, ready access to travel, and so on. Their circumstances in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and on the Pakistani side of the border are much more primitive. And it's much more difficult for them to move around, much more difficult for them to communicate."
As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, nor can they "kill" it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public.
Obama's dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the "killing" of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an "al-Qaida" victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president's views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.