Kabul, Afghanistan –

Mr. Pahlawan didn’t need convincing from the Karzai canvassers on a previous visit either, recalls Ms. Barekzai. Instead, the man with orange-dyed hair called the women of the house together and said, “You are going to vote for Karzai and these women will tell you why.”

It’s not uncommon for the male head of household to dictate a woman’s vote – but neither is it universal.

“Not all families were like this. There were some families where women influenced husbands,” says Barekzai. Besides, once in the voting booth, “it’s only herself and her God.”

Women’s roles in the upcoming national elections highlight some of the gains – and many of the remaining challenges – facing Afghan women as the country has moved toward democracy.

“We have seen advancements in women’s rights … but what was agreed to and committed to has not been done,” says Massouda Jalal, a former Minister of Women’s Affairs. “A fundamental change has not happened in the national lives of women.”

Progress for women

Considering that eight years ago Afghan women were not allowed to venture out alone, just participating at all in the elections process marks progress.

Now, two women candidates are among the 41 running for president in Thursday’s vote. Neither has gained any traction, but the issue of women’s participation came up as one of the questions during a TV debate Sunday night.

“Women should not be considered the second sex,” said candidate Ramzan Bashardost. One local Kabul man, Bismallah Ahmadi, said after watching the debate at a restaurant that it was his favorite line of the evening.

On the campaign trail

On the campaign trail, both Karzai and candidate Ashraf Ghani have reached out to women voters with special women’s rallies. Thousands attended Karzai’s rally in Kabul Thursday in which he claimed credit for opening girls’ schools. Karzai also appointed the country’s first female governor as well as female ministers.

Several women after the rally said they appreciated the focus on education, but complained that the salaries for teachers – many of whom are women – aren’t enough to put food on the table.

“If Karzai were not here, we would not have the freedom to say all these things, but if Karzai is reelected, we want to have him work on these things,” says Shakila Mohammad.

Controversial marriage bill

Representative politics here hasn’t always represented female freedoms.

In March, Karzai signed a marriage law bill for Afghanistan’s Shiite minority that critics said essentially legalized marital rape. The pushback, both from the international community and Afghan women, forced Karzai to suspend enforcement.

But a revised version released last month appears little better, giving a husband the right to withhold food to a wife who refuses to have sex with him. Karzai then used a legislative loophole to pass the revision by decree.

More women in government?

For Ms. Jalal, the whole affair explains how the government is not “gender sensitive.”

She had fought for years trying to pass a bill to protect women against domestic violence. Meanwhile, the Shiite marriage law sailed through parliament.

Most of the gains for women came early in the transition from Taliban rule, she says, and promises made internationally have since remained unfulfilled.

“This lack of political willingness can be solved if we have more women in the next government of Afghanistan,” says Jalal, who argues that 50 percent of the positions should go to women.

A woman’s style of campaigning

The women who go door-to-door for Karzai seem to talk less about what Karzai will do and instead tell personal anecdotes about how their lives are better than they were seven years ago under the Taliban.

One canvasser, Leeda Sadaat, convinced the manager of a Kabul hotel to switch allegiance from Mr. Ghani. Her list was practical – the drive from Kabul to the city of Shiberghan used to take 48 hours; now it’s only nine. And when she was a refugee in Pakistan she had to pay for education, but when she came back to Afghanistan, it was free.

“I have influenced my husband and he will vote for Karzai, too,” says Mrs. Sadaat, a computer operator.

Targeting women voters

Mostly, the women volunteers are not dispatched to talk to male voters. The precinct campaign directs male volunteers to reach out to influential people in the public square – in other words, men – while the women go out to the houses to influence those with private sway – the women.

Ten women volunteers work in Karzai’s Precinct 8 office in Kabul. Each is assigned 50 homes to look after, paying multiple visits to each family. They especially pay a visit if they learn another candidate’s workers have been courting one of the families on their list.

Gender separation seen in the campaign roles also plays out on the campaign trail. At a rally in Daikundi for Abdullah Abdullah, the men filled the bazaar, while women listened from a private square, hidden from view by sheets. A Karzai rally in a hotel ballroom kept the women sitting on the left and the men on the right.

But Karzai’s Precinct 8 office happens to be headed up by a woman. Lailuma Naimzai, an obstetrician/gynecologist on leave to work for Karzai, manages a campaign team with male doctors, engineers, and businessmen working under her.

In the end, Dr. Naimzai wants what most Afghans – men and women – want.

“I want to bring some peace to the country,” says Naimzai, explaining why she got into politics. “Karzai is a good person in that he brings peace, and brings a lot of clinics in the villages and hospitals to the city.”

Source: CS Monitor

By Tom Engelhardt

• Don’t turn the page on history

We’ve just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here’s how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders, didn’t inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn’t keep that body’s “Gang of Eight” informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We’re told that the CIA — being the president’s private army and part of the executive branch of our government — has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even “be illegal,” according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, US military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA’s own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations — sometimes wiping out innocent civilians — from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never — we’re told — off the ground.

If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there’s much that we don’t know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration’s deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.

After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA-destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice-Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more-widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA’s-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap its day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we’re told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to “look forward, not backward.”

Of course, he’s not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but — just for a moment — let’s not.

Admittedly, we’re a people who don’t really believe in history — so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old blabbing, of which each of these flaps has been but a tiny example. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each one of them is, soon enough, lessened by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?

The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we — not just the Obama administration — have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn’t been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.

As a start, remind me: What didn’t we do? Let’s review for a moment.

In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques — known to the previous administration and most of the media as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at “black sites” offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown, but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its global war on terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the “cleansing” of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our Special Forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out — and still carry out — assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world, on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined “torture” out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).

And don’t think that that’s anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. It’s only what comes to my mind on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even if I could remember everything done in these years, it would represent only what has been made public. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was regularly mocked for saying: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Actually, he had a point seldom thought about these days. By definition, we know a good deal about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an even darker world of known unknowns. We have no idea, however, what’s missing from a list like the one above, because so much may indeed remain in the unknown-unknowns category or, as with the latest CIA assassination story, a known curiosity whose full shape and depths remain to be grasped. If, however, you think that everything done by Washington or the US military or the CIA in these last years has already been leaked, think again. It’s a reasonable bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama administration inherited would curl your toes.

Nonetheless, what is already known, when thought about in one place, rather than divided up into separate flaps and argued about separately, is horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often say when trying to excuse what we did in these years, but it should be remembered that, in response to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were the ones who declared “war,” made it a near eternal struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so much to turn parts of the world into our own private hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear, a misreading of the nature of power in the world, delusions of military and technological omnipotence and omniscience, and so much more drove us along the way.

Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don’t believe it. History matters.

Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don’t face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over. This was, of course, the lesson — the only one no one ever bothers to call a lesson — of the Vietnam years. Because we were so unwilling to confront what we actually did in Vietnam — and Laos and Cambodia — because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H.W. Bush, “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” It still haunts us.

However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country — and they remain monstrously large — we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of… well, of us and our “safety.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.

Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?

Source: Middle East Online

– Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Saudi Arabia has arrested 44 suspected militants who were planning attacks, the interior ministry says.

Weapons, ammunition and detonators were also found, in a series of operations over a three-week period.

The militants tried to recruit youths and finance “deviant” activity, the ministry said, quoted by local media.

Al-Qaeda-linked militants launched a violent campaign to destabilise the country in 2003, and the authorities responded with a fierce crackdown.

AFP news agency quoted Interior Ministry spokesman General Mansur al-Turki as saying the recently arrested militants were linked to al-Qaeda.

“These people, I would describe them like a base, they actually work in the area, recruiting young people, giving young people the ideology of al-Qaeda, and financing terrorism in the kingdom,” he said.

All but one of the militants were Saudi nationals, the Saudi Press Agency said, and some had been trained in the use of light and heavy weapons. They were arrested between 10 July and 2 August.

Saudi Arabia has arrested hundreds of suspects over the past year and verdicts were issued in the cases of 330 of them last month.

Source: BBC