Women of Influence: Malalai Joya

Women for Afghan Women, an NGO that runs counseling centers and domestic-violence shelters in Afghanistan, recently put out a statement saying, “Women for Afghan Women deeply regrets having a position in favor of maintaining, even increasing troops… We predict that if Afghanistan falls again to the Taliban, we will once more see on our high-definition TV screens, in the comfort of our American homes, women and girls being hauled into the Kabul football stadium to be beaten and executed for having committed acts that would not be considered criminal by any international human-rights laws, including those signed by Afghanistan.”

Sunita Viswanath, one of the board members of Women for Afghan Women, is immensely frustrated by those on the left who are calling for the occupation’s end. “I want the answer to [this] question,” she says. “What do they think will happen to women and girls?”

Joya’s response is to argue that outside parts of Kabul, women’s situations are as bad as they ever were, and it’s getting worse. “It is as catastrophic as it was under the domination of Taliban,” she says.

“Everyone, they are talking that when these troops leave Afghanistan, civil war will happen,” says Joya. “Mainstream media especially try to put more dust in the eyes of the people around the world. But nobody wants to talk about today’s civil war.” The longer American troops stay, “the worse civil war will be, because [the American] government [is] giving more money and more power to these warlords and also Taliban. That’s why, day by day, my people believe [that the U.S.] just waste their taxpayer money and the blood of their soldiers by supporting such a mafia corrupt system of Hamid Karzai.”

Joya doesn’t want the world to forget about Afghanistan; she is desperate for more humanitarian and educational support. But she rejects entirely the notion that the American military can be a force for good, or a force for feminism. “I believe that women’s rights is not a bunch of beautiful flowers that someone gives us,” she says. In her book, she writes, “I feel confident that if foreign countries stop meddling in Afghanistan and if we are left free from occupation, then a strong progressive and democratic force will emerge.”

That might seem terribly optimistic, even naïve to most Americans. But if we think we’re fighting for women like her, we should at least listen when she begs us to stop.

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Michelle Goldberg is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World and Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, and many other publications.

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