After 9/11, the Bush administration went after the Taliban in Afghanistan who had sheltered Osama bin Laden and had provided support for Al-Qaeda. But then the administration took its eye off the ball and aggressively pushed for war in Iraq. When we first realized that the Bush administration was leading the U.S. into war with Iraq, my husband and I were aghast. I remember Tom jumping up and yelling at the television: "We're abandoning Afghanistan! We haven't finished the job!" Indeed. Now, after millions of Iraqis have fled their country, and Shiites have cleared out Sunni neighborhoods, and Iraq is still in shambles (despite the "surge"--which even General Petreaus warns not to call "victory"), our leaders are pushing for new forces in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has returned with a vengeance.
While our gaze was shifted elsewhere, the Afghani people worked hard to put their country back together. Professional women who had been subjugated under Taliban rule, unable to practice their professions as teachers, doctors, shop keepers, police officers, resurrected their old roles even as they continued to face great obstacles. Malalai Kakar was one of those women.
Malalai Kakar was a mother of six and in her late 40s when she was murdered this week by Taliban forces. She had joined the Kandahar police force in 1982, where her father and brother were also police officers. However, Kakar had been forced to give up her job when the Taliban took over the country. When the Taliban regime was defeated, she was given her original job as an investigator for the Kandahar Police Department, focusing on crimes against women and children. Nonetheless, she often received death threats; she had to choose her route to work carefully. Now she is dead, and her fifteen-year-old son, the driver of the car on which the Taliban opened fire, is critically injured.
Women such as Malalai Kakar remind us that the fight for women's rights is far from over around the world. These women face danger every day doing the work they feel called to do, following their dreams, insisting on being treated with dignity and respect. We must honor these women who courageously face such horrifying obstacles every day. We cannot forget them. We cannot abandon their cause--and ours.
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One of the women who is leading the Deep Green Resistence weekend I'm going to next month is Lierre Keith, whose book, along with Aric McBay's (another of the leaders) book on surviving peak oil I ordered to read since I am going to that workshop and wanted to be familiar with the leaders (especially since Derrick Jensen is ill and may not even be there), is a lesbian radical feminist, apparently----or it seems so since that is the perspective her novel takes. Of course, one does not indicate the other, but I do believe this is true in this case. Anyway, it's going to be an interesting weekend. . .
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