. . . the Taliban, the AK-47 toting terrorists who took over Afghanistan in 1992, stringing up decapitated corpses in town squares and shoving women into the confines of their homes. Nobody paid much attention then, and perhaps never would have, had the Taliban not become host to Osama bin Laden.

FROM WHAT I LISTEN TO ON YOUTUBE, this interview and question session with Rafia Zakaria from Powell Books  came up in the sidebar this morning.   It's important, helping to explain the problems of women in other countries, including Pakistan and Afghanistan AND IN THE UNITED STATES and the role that white supremacy along with the white supremacy embedded in Western military and foreign policy plays in making things worse.   

Her central point, that it is Women in other countries with other cultures and Women of Color here who are best situated to determine what is most needed by them and even feminists from the West cannot do that for them is one I first wrote about a long time ago.*   Her point about the ubiquitous Western practice of analyzing crimes against women as indicting an entire country, region and culture while never making the same critique of a man in Nebraska murdering his wife to the same extent is certainly worth thinking about hard.  As I've mentioned here a number of times the FBI has estimated that about four women a day are murdered in the United States because they are women, a terror campaign that we are so used to we cannot seem to see that for what it is, the same kind of thing that will be reported as an indictment against Islam or Hinduism or some other, "other."

I wouldn't think the title of her current book, Against White Feminism is the most helpful one because Zakaria is a feminist and she is not targeting feminists who are white but the habits of white supremacy but her choice is hers to make.  The explanation that she reads at the beginning of the video and later in it expands on is to some extent made necessary by it.  Her critique of racism and white privilege is too important to let the title get in the way and the title will be grabbed onto by media liars to attack her and her important ideas.  We can't change that they will lie but we can avoid giving them the tools to do it more easily. 

 

I had known Zakaria from her columns, especially in The Guardian,  this one talking about the disdain of the New York literary world for her because she lived in Indiana made me smile in recognition.  Though I never aspired to be that kind of writer and I pretty much saw through the NYC lit'rary scene before reading her.  I think there are few places in the United States more impervious to listening to people outside it than the NYC literary and media scene.  I suspect that one of the reasons she's able to say important things like she does is because she never got taken in by it.   Her review of Directorate S by Steve Coll is one I should have remembered because it starts with these paragraphs. 

"No man who has read a page of Indian history will ever prophesy about the Frontier. We shall doubtless have trouble there again.” So wrote Lord Curzon, then viceroy, in 1904. The British were by then a little weary of the burdens of empire; they were having trouble with the tribespeople of the Frontier, who seemed uninterested in the sort of governance the colonialists wished for them. The smugly racist Curzon blamed it on the “fanaticism and turbulence” that “ferment in the blood” of the Pashtun. The neocolonialists of today cannot explain things away so easily. As Steve Coll documents in Directorate S, the current war has for ever altered the fates of all three countries involved – the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and, after 15 years, there is no end to the “trouble” in sight.

Directorate S, from which the book gets its title, lies buried deep in the bureaucracy of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s spy agency. Ensconced thus, the directorate works to “enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence in Afghanistan”. It goes about this task, Coll explains, by supplying, arming, training and generally seeking to legitimise the Taliban, the AK-47 toting terrorists who took over Afghanistan in 1992, stringing up decapitated corpses in town squares and shoving women into the confines of their homes. Nobody paid much attention then, and perhaps never would have, had the Taliban not become host to Osama bin Laden.

I can't help but wonder if a lot of the punditry and talking head babbling about this now isn't about as expert and interested as the same about Olympic figure skating show downs between Russia and Canada when people who never pay attention to it otherwise suddenly become experts in it.  I saw figures on how much the American networks have spent on covering the  Afghanistan war over the past several years and I think there is a clue in that which matches what Zakaria says about the inability of white western feminists to speak for women not them, such women and their lives will not be the primary focus or interest of anyone other than them.  Her is Lorainne Ali from the Los Angles Times:

By contrast, covering U.S. conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and other locales around the globe has been a sporadic effort at best. The media parachute in when our troops invade countries overseas or leave them in defeat, while remaining largely absent for the slog in between. When a major story broke out in combat zones, it was commonplace in these interim years for outlets to use Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya reporting and camera footage from places where they weren’t — like Kandahar Province, Fallujah and other hotspots where our troops risked and lost their lives. Beyond the grim spectacle of “shock and awe” and the killing of Osama bin Laden, if you watched the nightly news — or even 24-hour cable news — in the last two decades, you might be forgiven for believing America’s last major war took place in Vietnam. That’s how intermittent the attention has been.

Watching this weekend as Afghanistan fell under Taliban rule, again, was horrifying — particularly the footage of victorious fighters pouring into Kabul unchallenged, and the humanitarian crisis unfolding around the airport, which may well indicate even greater terror and dread throughout the rest of the country. But for all the valiant efforts of those on the ground there relaying the news, much of American TV seemed ill-prepared to take on such a grave and complex series of events. CNN scrambled to dig up experts on foreign policy and conflict such as Fareed Zakaria, who looked like he was on vacation in a cabin in upstate New York. Viewers learned that MSNBC does in fact have an Iran bureau chief, Ali Arouzi, though you might not have known it as recently as last week. They patiently explained that this disaster has been building for more than a decade, over four different presidencies — something one might have expected to glean from, say, watching the news.

I would like to see an analysis of how much time the TV networks spent on the war in Afghanistan in the previous 20 years as compared to any number of lesser stories, including garbage in pop culture and I will bet you that it wouldn't make the top hundred in minutes spent on it.  That is the trash that the free press puts into the minds of Americans and we wonder why they can't think.  

George Packer and his ilk can fuck off and fall into obscurity, if he got what he deserves. Not a position in the pundit class.  There should be no pundit class.  "Pundit" should be taken as someone the media puts up as an expert because they went to the came college or have professional and so social connections.  Pundits should all fuck off and die and so should the media that elevates scum to that rank rank. I will add as an afterthought.  I don't think Rafia Zakaria and Lorainne Ali are in much danger of becoming pundits.  Wrong color, wrong gender (mostly),  know too much.

* It was an important day for me when I realized a billion and a half Muslims didn't care about what I thought and that there was no more reason for them to care anymore than most Westerners care what they think.