Those are good questions, and I had to bear the ire of the female soldier when I had to put my foot down and say, “No, we are not going to expect these old mountain men to understand OUR way of life.
The message is lost for the same reason my message would be lost if I started off with, “Nahncee, you silly beytoch…”
You would be offended, and anything I said beyond that point would be largely lost. You see, we are not making them change, we are influencing them to change. There is very little that we actually forced them to do. Now, some methods of influencing them are more direct than others, for instance; when we wanted to stop payroll skimming, we simply observed their pay operations. The officers who were skimming simply didn’t have the chance to “tax” their soldiers unobserved. The skimming stopped.
Influencing village elders is another ball of wax. Influencing them does include the mild shock of dealing with American females in uniform, who are treated like rock stars by the children and the males. Don’t think that doesn’t influence the little girls as well. It does; deeply.
Their struggles with mysogyny are, unfortunately, their own. Our society had to come to grips (and still is, really) with sexism and finding the right balance. We must pick and choose our battles, or we may lose the most important ones. One of the key Taliban IO talking points is that we are “un-Islamic,” not meaning that we’re not Muslim, but that we are ANTI-Muslim… that we mock them and flaunt our ways in their faces, humiliating them.
The point is that they were willing to continue on under Taliban rule, and we are the ones who need them to change. Overall, a lot of Afghans see the benefit to doing things more along the lines of what we would like them to do, but it is still up to us to sell them on it. Offending them prevents that.
Under the king, who died last August, Afghanistan was a fairly progressive society. That was part of what caused the Islamic fundamentalist backlash, but the coup by the communists, intervention by the Soviets, and the ensuing civil war destroyed all of the King’s work of forty and fifty years ago. Still, in Kabul many women do not wear the burqa. Time will tell, but what I can tell you is that we must be careful what we push and what we simply allow nature to take care of.
As far as being the “occupation forces,” we are not, in fact, occupiers. The Taliban tries to paint us as such, but we are an assistance force, tipping the scales heavily in the favor of the IRoA government. That is why we have to walk a fine line.
I was always an advocate of being as gentle as possible in our dealings with Afghans. It surprising how much they actually look up to us, and I was surprised at how many of them thanked me for leaving my family (very important to Afghans) to come to their country and help them.
Still, it was easy to behave like an occupier if you wanted to. I fought against that and ruthlessly enforced my standard among our men.
Sirius, I used the term insidious tongue-in-cheek, but it’s more insidious than that. They are being taught by Afghan teachers. It’s the ability to read and the export of our culture via entertainment that will have the greatest impact. That and when Afghan girls come to the States for higher education.
But ultimately, there are some things that you cannot save others from. I think we’ve all had family members who would prove this to be true. They must choose for themselves, and they can.
