If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?  Unless you are a philosophy major sitting in a Starbucks drinking a double humped something-or-other, your first answer most likely will be Who cares?  At least that’s mine.  Of course, implicit in my answer is the assumption that the tree was not right next to a person’s house and said tree falls on top of the house.  What I’m getting at is two part; first, the question as asked tends to side track the importance of the event, and second, even if the event was not witnessed by you doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry lasting implications for you.

I bring this up as an analogy for what appears to be occurring in Afghanistan (and other parts of the world) with respect to women’s individual rights.  When we (the US and partners) went into Afghanistan, our government needed to justify it as a way to bring to justice the man behind 9/11 and the government that supported him.  For Iraq, our government used the threat of WMD’s and continued infringement of UN resolutions.  After many years in both and using those reasons for our efforts, many see our actions as failures.  Our government sits in a state of mental paralysis analyzing the information that led to the fears of WMD’s and where bin Laden could be hiding.

To me, all of that misses the greater point.  In the aftermath of 9/11, we finally had enough.  We were fed up with groups that had taken control of people and repeatedly shown no respect for human life and personal advancement.  When I look back at that time, I think we had to use these other excuses because it had become wrong to think a culture could be evil.  Wait, you say.  How dare you, JBH,  impose your definition of evil onto a whole mass of people and their beliefs.  We, the enlightened, are not to judge if a culture outside of our own is right or wrong.  Well, that is where I disagree with “enlightened ones.”  Any group that institutes a culture that condemns rape victims to death, that marries off young girls to old pervs, that allows anyone to look down on and enslave someone based on sex IS wrong.  Actually, that culture just SUCKS.  And IF the religion behind that culture encourages those actions, it sucks too. 

For some reason it is okay for us to protest the Japanese for whaling but we can’t condemn those in the Middle East for beating the crap out of women.  It’s their religion and who are we to judge their religionmay be said by some.  It’s not their religion, it’s a group of bad individuals that have taken people hostage and stood behind religion as a way to defend themselves.  In my opinion, we needed no other justification for using force to topple the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq than that of freeing at the minimum half of their population and to break the leadership of nations built on fear and tyranny.  But it’s not our place to take these actions.  We can’t ask our soldiers (our children) to sacrifice their lives for non-Americans may be the response.  That, to me, is a desire to turn away and hope it changes on its own.  That is the way of most European governments.  If we ignore the problem, it’s no longer a problem.  I find that very short sighted and irrational at its core.  (Like it or not, we have to interact with these nations.  They control a lot of the oil production and our opium supply.  If we trade with them, we are enriching them.  If we are enriching them, we are empowering them.  And I have no desire to empower a group of individuals that thinks of us as the enemy and their women as sheep).

We have become disengaged when it comes to combating basic evil with that evil being the infringement of individual liberties.  And when we do engage, we need to provide an excuse that, for some strange reason, avoids our underlying desire to help people out from underneath oppression.  Now, some will suggest that there is a fine line of helping and imposing our belief system which I would agree with but do we need to be diverted into inaction/misaction now when the evil is so obvious? 

I would point you to this article and this one that got me stirred up.