Bombs for matriarchy
What were we fighting for in Afghanistan? According to Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, it was female rappers:
“Many of my friends have fled or are in hiding. Only one was brave enough to meet up, a rapper…It's hard to imagine how once we drove around the city together in a taxi while she rapped. What was the point of the past 20 years? We gave people like my friend the chance to dream and then we snatched it away.”
Afghanistan started as a simple war of revenge but soon transmogrified into something entirely different. Women’s rights became the overriding justification for the conflict. Trillions of dollars we're spent on a war so that women could wear miniskirts and start rap careers.
“People who disparage American imperialism tend to forget that the US spends many billions” said a Guardian column, on “the promotion of women's rights and other things through quasi-governmental endowments and agencies”. Splashing billions of dollars on woke causes can get liberals on board with military adventurism. “China”, the article continues, “has a big Africa investment fund, but I doubt much of it goes toward those sorts of things.” Unlike China’s deeply pragmatic belt and road initiative, for NATO nation building is a euphemism for social engineering.
How was that money spent? In the BBC documentary Bitter Lake we see footage of Afghan women being taught the merits of conceptual art. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal — a “found object” presented as art — is projected on the wall of a seminar room. The expressions of the students convey a mixture of bemusement and horror. One woman shakes her head. Whenever you hear the term “nation building”, this is what it means.
The Spectator summed up the Western efforts to foment women’s liberation in the country:
“According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country…Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.”
Female fighters, so lauded by the West, failed to hold back the Taliban. The Western press quickly moved on to use exactly the same tactic in Ukraine. Disastrous militarism would garner the support of liberals by using a Ukrainian G.I. Jane as the cover girl.
Here's a tweet from Melinda Simmons, the UKs ambassador to Ukraine.
The fate of the Afghan Amazons has already been forgotten. Militarised gynocentrism hasn't worked out well, but it still makes for effective war PR.