Why America May Not Want to Hear What Afghan Women Have to Say

We American feminists have allowed ourselves to be dragged into two wars within less than ten years.  The pretext is that the U.S. is making life better for Iraqi and Afghan women, by killing their sons, husbands and marriage prospects.
 Afghan feminist and politician, Malalai Joya, wrote in a new book called: A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice:

"I know that Obama's election has brought great hopes to peace-loving people in the United States," she writes. "But for Afghans, Obama's military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians, while it may not even weaken the Taliban and al-Qaeda."

It is arrogant and foolish for westerners to believe that women in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East lack agency and are merely passive victims. If the women in Afghanistan, for instance, were behind our military efforts, the U.S. would have won the war against the Taliban years ago.  We substitute propaganda for knowledge and then wonder why this or that country is an anti-American puzzle.  

The July 29, 2010, cover story in Time Magazine was entitled: "The Plight of Afghan Women: a Disturbing Picture." It presented among other things the story of a young woman maimed by the Taliban.  But it does so by dehumanizing all Afghan women, making them sound so pathetic and powerless, that nothing about their lives or circumstances makes rational sense.  Sonali Kolhatkar, a radio host for Pacifica and co-director of the Afghan women's Mission says:

But the mainstream media does not get this. It seems bent on portraying women of the Muslim world as voiceless victims who need liberating. The 2001-02 press coverage of the bombing of Afghanistan made the media complicit in the crimes against women. Afghan women had to dodge bombs in addition to surviving continuing poverty and fundamentalist rule. Bombs don’t liberate women – women liberate themselves, if given the chance.

There is a reason why CNN International news broadcasts, sound different from the news broadcasts in America, even when describing the same events.  Manipulative journalism fed to the American public distorts our understanding of women throughout the Middle East, not just Iraq and Afghanistan.  I've lost track of how many news stories I've read in the American press about oppressed women in the developing world.  Such articles lack context or the necessary insights that will help the reader unravel the perfectly understandable motivation for these womens' actions or choices. Non-western females are either portrayed in our media as pathetic victims imprisoned in veils, child brides, or helpless tools of male terrorists.  In this way we perpetuate the dehumanization of foreign women, refusing to hear their genuine stories.  Do we approach the rest of the world this way because they might possibly teach us things about ourselves we'd rather not know?  Sometimes I even wonder whether we, women in the West, are projecting our own insecurities and fears onto foreigners.  Maybe their veils become a gauzy canvas for our own projections.  How many women from developing countries have to struggle with deadbeat dads unwilling to pay child support, beauty standards that cause fatal anorexia, the sexual commodification of womens' bodies, pornographic standards of female presentation, and the possibility of death by plastic surgery?  If we actually listened, we would find that the biggest item on the agendas of most non-western women is either that we stop invading their countries, or offer healthier balance of trade agreements so that they can feed their families.  

 If we don't understand what is truly at stake for Afghan and Iraqi women, it may be because we'd rather not know.