Twenty years ago, weeks after being stricken by the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan. It looked very much like a war of vengeance—US troops would sometimes write messages such as “love from NYPD” on the deadly shells before they dropped them. But at least parts of the Bush administration, amplified by New Labour politicians and sections of the British commentariat, embraced another justification: the liberation of Afghan women. The war on terror, as first lady Laura Bush put it, was also “a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”
The case was clear. In the summary of the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, then a leading liberal voice for the war, the Taliban ran a country “with girls’ schools shut, women forbidden to work, sent home and locked indoors,” manifesting a “pathological loathing of women.” As many in the west saw it, she wrote, “the burka was the battle flag” of the invasion. Toynbee visited the capital, Kabul, a year after the defeat of the Taliban and—while already worrying about the west failing in its commitment—took heart from the women she saw as newly empowered to leave their homes, “their joy at escape” and the “sheer enthusiasm” of girls returning to school. There is absolutely no doubt that some Afghan women, especially in urban areas like Kabul, benefited enormously from the overthrow of the Taliban.
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