CRACKED LIBERTY BELLES:

Real Women's Liberation: It's happening in Afghanistan, and U.S. feminists don't care. (Katherine Mangu-Ward, 10/25/2004, Weekly Standard)

HERE'S A CHUNK of President Bush's standard stump speech: "Think about what happened in Afghanistan. It wasn't all that long ago that the Taliban ran that country. Young girls couldn't even go to school. They were not only harboring terrorists, they had this dark ideology of hate. And people showed up in droves to vote. Freedom is powerful. People have gone from darkness to light because of liberty. The first voter in the Afghan presidential election was a 19-year-old woman."

And here's Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women: "In only three-and-a-half years, George W. Bush and the right-wing leadership in Congress have undermined and eroded more than four decades of advancements for women. . . . We are declaring a State of Emergency for women's rights and calling upon all of our allies and supporters to get involved in the election process to put an end to the relentless attacks on women."

Before the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, the Taliban regime was the gold standard for horrifying treatment of women. The burqa became the symbol of female oppression. It was invoked by women's rights activists of various stripes worldwide as the worst of the worst. The writer Azar Nafisi quotes a woman functionary of the straitlaced Iranian regime as saying, "Look at Somalia or Afghanistan. Compared to them, we live like queens."

In 2001, NOW regularly issued "Action Alerts" on the plight of Afghan women. One of them reported that "when the Taliban took over the capital city of Kabul in September 1996, it issued an edict that stripped women and girls of their rights, holding the Afghan people hostage under a brutal system of gender apartheid. . . . Women were prohibited from being seen or heard. The windows of their homes were painted, and they could not appear in public unless wearing the full-body covering, the burqa. Women were beaten for showing a bit of ankle or wearing noisy shoes."

Fast forward to October 9, 2004, when about 4 million women voted for the first time ever in Afghanistan. A statement on the election from the United Nations' Division for the Advancement of Women begins by noting that "insufficient information is available on the actual participation of women on election day," but does wanly concede that "this first election has been an important process to increase women's participation in the political life of their country." Exhibiting the usual U.N. preference for progress on paper, the statement closes by noting with approval that Afghanistan ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women last year.

The folks over at NOW seem even less enthusiastic about the progress in Afghanistan. The NOW "Issues" page headed "Women in Afghanistan" hasn't been updated for two-and-a-half years. And there is no mention of the Afghan election on the main pages of the NOW website. Calls requesting a statement went unreturned.

For the feminists, history stopped at the moment George Bush effected the greatest women's liberation anyone's ever seen.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 17, 2004 1:04 PM