Misrepresenting revolutionary women

An article in the ever-ideological FrontPage magazine abuses the laudable Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), and the reason is pretty clear.

Cinnamon Stillwell writes that RAWA activists, "were more opposed to U.S. military intervention than they were in favor of getting rid of the Taliban." Then Stillwell goes on to talk about the opinions of Duke University Professor Miriam Cooke, who is presented as an apologist for Muslim oppressors of women around the world.

Whatever the position of Cooke, however, she does not represent RAWA, which has been one of the most relentlessly democratic organisations combating the misogynistic mullah mentality in Afghanistan -- the only indigenous one, really.

RAWA's real thoughts on the US-supported overthrow of the Taliban and the three years since can be found on the RAWA website. What they say is actually along the following lines, as caught by a recent VOA piece:

...Zoya, a member of a group called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) who does not use her last name for security reasons, says the recent improvements are limited, and that the situation for women is worsening in the rest of the country. "They cannot go without a male relative outside their houses, and they have no access to education and there are health problems for them. So we think that the bombs in Afghanistan - the bombing by the U.S. administration - has not changed the situation because they replaced one fundamentalist [group] with another one," she says.

For RAWA the point is really that the US-sponsored overthrow of the Taliban, which RAWA supported at the time, put in power a group of vicious, fundamentalist thugs little better than the Taliban themselves. Given the past record of serious human rights abuses and mass atrocities of a number of leading hard-line fundamentalist leaders in the post-Taliban government, what RAWA is saying is undeniably true. If you're going to root out "religious fascists" (RAWA's term), you should root them all out.

And the 9 October election will sadly not improve the situation much. As a RAWA statement asked a few months ago:

What value does an election have for the hopeless people who have no bread and no work and are being tormented by criminal fundamentalists?

Certainly the recent dismissal of Ismail Khan in Herat is only good news, but a number of other prominent jihadis with appalling CVs are backing President Hamid Karzai's (all but stitched-up) re-election. If your camp includes brutes like Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, it's hardly likely that real democracy and women's rights are going to result.

Stillwell's lumping of Cooke and RAWA was either done out of ignorance (ie, not knowing how to use Google), or it was a deliberate attempt to brush aside legitimate criticism of the Bush administration's half-hearted efforts in Afghanistan by a respected, indigenous, pro-democracy organisation. Given the ideological bent of FrontPage magazine, the latter seems pretty likely.