Before that famous sinking ninety-eight years ago the same understanding--that women and children must live even at the cost of men's lives was embodied in the words, "Birkenhead drill." This term commemorated the sinking of a British troopship. There were sufficient lifeboats for the women and children, but not the men. The troops stood in formation on the deck of the foundering vessel as their wives, children, sisters, and even mothers watched from the boats.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries where Islamists and jihadists loom large in daily lives and fears, the slogan is also, "women and children first." These, particularly women, are first.
First to be repressed.
First to be demeaned.
First to be terrorized.
First to be murdered.
In Kandahar women are again under the guns and throat-slitting knives of Taliban. Kandahar has been the reborn home turf of Taliban over the past several years, since roughly 2003 when the failed American "shock and awe" approach to war allowed and encouraged Taliban's reemergence from the grave. Kandahar has been well known to be the next destination for General McChrystal's counterinsurgency campaign.
As the pressure has grown on Taliban, these paragons of both Islamic and masculine virtue have responded with an escalating terror program directed against women, particularly those women who would be so uppity as to work for foreign companies or--shock and horror!--go to school.
Unless and until the US and other components of the ISAF move into Kandahar and establish a permanent, effective government presence, the women of Kandahar will provide convenient targets for the bile and fear of Taliban trigger pullers, throat-slitters and other exemplars of the unique sociopathy of Islamism. It is of more than passing interest and certainly more than marginal importance that while the Afghan tribal elders, village chiefs, and even Karzai personally work themselves into frothing rage if an American or other foreigner kills an Afghan civilian, they are totally unconcerned, utterly indifferent to the murdering of women by the Thugs of the Koran.
The contrast between the gnashing of teeth, renting of garments, beating of breasts after four Afghan civilians on a bus which ignored stop orders until fired upon by a road clearance patrol near Kandahar and the yawns which have greeted the killing of women in the city is stupefying. The need to limit as close to zero as is humanly possible the number of civilians killed by interventionary forces is central to success. The Geek was making that point repeatedly to any number of military audiences the best part of twenty years ago, but the fact remains that it is incumbent on the Afghans, at least the government of Hamid Karzai, to distinguish properly between the (mis)fortunes of war, particularly those brought about by civilian stupidity or misconduct or provocation, from the policy of deliberately terrorizing civilians by murdering women in the name of Allah.
There is a ground truth here. Afghanistan cannot hope to become even a shambling simulacrum of a nation unless and until its population, or at least its government at all levels, sheds the notion that fifty-one percent of its citizens are religiously stigmatized as less than human, as mere objects, as chattel. Whether the more true believing Muslims--including those who are not members or supporters of the jihadists of Taliban--like it or not, the world is not and will not become a facsimile of the culture and society of the Arabian Peninsula of the Prophet's time.
This implies that even a traditional, tribally based people such as the Afghans must come to grips with the reality that no country can overlook, let alone suppress, the energy, talents, and potentials of its female component. The attempt to keep women illiterate, covered in garbage sacks, and locked in the kitchen or bedroom is to assure national suicide.
It also deserves mention that the Afghan people generally and government in particular do not seem at all bothered by the latest wrinkle in Taliban's suicide bomber campaign. That is the use of children. In the attempt to avoid falling foul with the security forces, the Always Brave, Always Willing To Die Mighty Warriors Of Taliban have been "recruiting" pre-pubescent boys to be "martyrs." The degree of volitional, informed choice made by these grade school martyrs in the making has been less than zero judging from the statements made by the boys who have been captured before they could hit the clicker on the explosive laden belt.
Sending a boy to do a man's job in this kind of activity is every bit as repugnant as the murdering of women. Making the whole thing even more disgusting--if such is possible--is the religious justification invoked by the clerics of Taliban. It is hard to see how even these fanatics can find any support in the Koran or other sacred writings for cozening and coercing boys many years shy of any legitimate age of majority or even rationality to commit suicide.
The Afghan people and their government most of all have to make a decision about just what is tolerable. They must decide if the uniquely perverse form of "women and children first" is supportable, acceptable. Or is worthy only of the most robust opposition, including supporting the efforts of "foreign forces" to end the Taliban murders.
The Afghan people and their government have to decide whether it is worth accepting the relatively small number of incidental civilian deaths which occur regardless of any and all attempts to prevent them in war, or is it better for Afghans individually and collectively to live under the murderous threat of Taliban. The mere fact that Taliban is composed of Muslims while the foreign forces are not does not make their Muslim victims any less numerous. Or any less dead.
The UN determined last year that Taliban was responsible for seventy-five percent of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan with the balance divided between Afghan national forces and the various foreign combat units. Even the most implacably anti-American non-governmental organizations did not dispute this assessment.
Hamid Karzai and the rest of his governing apparatus have to understand and communicate with the population two simple realities: The US and others in the ISAF are warriors, they kill with care, with control, and, when civilians are caught in the crossfire, with regrets which are sincere. Taliban is a collection of murderers and no twisting of a highly malleable theology can change that brute fact.
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