The Cato Institute's Malou Innocent wrote a piece I read a short time ago, and its chidings form part of a lesson that undoubtedly ranks in my top ten. It falls in line with the idea that our views are rarely universal:
We had no business trying to transform women's rights in Afghanistan. We really, really screwed it up when we added do-goodery to what should have been a straightforward endeavour. Women's right are a morally noble idea to promote and protect, but there were already a ton of other things we couldn't do right. Our behavior in this regard actually aggravated tensions.
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn....o-afghanistan/
The subject of the photo used for the piece will haunt my memory for quite some time.
I am actually fairly pissed off that for all of our cultural awareness training, and the snake oil salesmen who have somehow embedded themselves in our warfighting functions via contracts to provide cultural advice and education, we screwed it up with the women's rights angle. I think the FETs were a mistake (despite how hard we want to believe they had value), efforts to try and promote women's community councils/groups were a worse fantasy, and we should have known better. I know the goals were often more Killcullenish and aimed at getting at the young males through their mothers, but I believe it inflamed tensions more than it provided benefit.
Bookmarks