Adiba, 17, of Kabul, showed her support for Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai at the bidding of her teacher as he met with women from the Malal group at his home in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 12, 2009. Although she planned to vote on Aug. 20, she had not decided which candidate would get her vote.
Nikki Kahn-THE WASHINGTON POST
This is indeed the dawning of the Age of Barack Hussein Obama….mmm…mmm….mm:
The anti-war group Code Pink, which rose to prominence with high-profile protests against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over the past seven years, is softening its stance against the war in Afghanistan over concerns that a troop withdrawal could harm women’s rights in the country.
“We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline,” Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told the Christian Science Monitor. “That’s where we have opened ourselves … to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left the country, would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.”
The apparent shift in policy comes in the wake of a week-long trip to Afghanistan by Code Pink members, where activists were surprised to find a lot of support among women’s rights activists for maintaining the US and NATO presence in the country.
They are just now awakening to this fact? Where were their brains at for the previous 8 years? Angelina Jolie “got it“, in regards to safeguarding Iraq on humanitarian grounds. Why couldn’t they?
Was opposition to the war all about political opposition to President Bush and not about promotion of peace and human rights (let alone democracy)?
Some observers have been pointing out for years that the Western troop presence in Afghanistan is the principal reason that women in the country are now able to get an education, and that there is now at least a modicum of gender equality in Afghanistan. Many observers fear that the withdrawal of troops could allow the return of severe discrepancies between women’s rights and men’s rights in Afghanistan, as well as widespread violence against women.
“In the current situation of terrorism, we cannot say troops should be withdrawn,” said Shinkai Karokhail, an Afghan member of Parliament and a women’s rights activist, at a meeting of international rights groups. “International troop presence here is a guarantee for my safety.”
Afghan girls attend a class at the Ishkashim high school for girls in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, near the border with Tajikistan, April 23, 2008.
REUTERS/Ahmad Masood
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.