Where is the Line?
I was not a huge fan of Obama picking Clinton for the position of Secretary of State, but one area that I was sure she would positively impact was women’s rights around the globe. Yesterday, she addressed the UN, declaring:
The status of Afghanistan’s army, the lives of women and girls, the country’s education and health systems are far better today than they were in 2001. So if all of us represented here work with the government and people of Afghanistan, we will help not only to secure their future, but ours as well.
And what does this newly enlightened state for the women of Afghanistan entail? President Hamid Karzai is backing a law that, among other things, legalizes marital rape and makes it illegal for a woman to leave the house or go to a doctor, school or work without her husband’s permission. Don’t worry though, there has been work done by the women in the Parliment to raise the legal age for girls to marry from the originally proposed 9 to 16.
Karzai, at least for the moment, is our guy, the one who we support by virtue of the fact that he is not Taliban. Just another round of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game the U.S. likes to play. So where is the line? When do human rights trump Not Taliban, or Not Russian or Not XX when it comes to desirable allies? Obviously, this is not a law condoned by the U.S. and the situation is precarious, but actively supporting a governmant that is going to pass a law tantamount to instituting slavery for 50% of the population goes a step too far in respecting culture. And when are people going to stop using the catch-all of culture to excuse treating human beings like chattel anyway? Hillary Clinton even spoke about this issue at her confirmation hearing , specifically mentioned the Taliban
keeping women unfed, uneducated, unhealthy. . . is not culture, this is not custom, this is criminal. . . We can not have a free, prosperous, peaceful, progressive world if women are treated in such a discriminatory and violent way.
So here’s Clinton’s chance to stand for women whose voices have gotten lost in a government that we helped establish, ostensibly to make the world a safer place. This law is, quite possibly, none of our business, and Clinton has noted her displeasure and reportedly talked to Karzai about it in private. However, I personally am hoping that Clinton lives up to her tough feminist hype, nails Karzai’s balls to the floor, and finds another horse to back for the Afghani presidential elections in August.
H/t: Jezebel
Yuck.
Worth getting angry about. I’m with Liz.
Comment by Rojas — 4/1/2009 @ 11:34 pm
When this is coupled with her trip to China, this administration seems to be acting in basically the realist fashion of 20th century American foreign policy. I’m really not qualified to judge whether a return to the style is good or bad. Foreign policy has always been a huge gray spot in my political ideology. I sympathize with the plight of the people affected in the foreign country, yet I also sympathize with the fact that sometimes the least bad answer is still a bad one. Karzai might be the best Afghanistan is able stand right now. His fall from power at the behest of the American government, or even direct pressure on his administration, could cause disastrous consequences in an already tumultuous country.
I really don’t have an answer.
On the subject of Afghanistan, check out today’s The Big Picture photo blog entry.
Comment by Cameron — 4/2/2009 @ 12:45 am
Link fixed:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/recent_scenes_from_afghanistan.html
extra quote mark removed.
Clinton has to make statements like this because she was just as hawkish as Bush when he was making Afghan policy. She is still as trapped by her political history as she was during the primary campaign.
Comment by thimbles — 4/2/2009 @ 2:09 am
I don’t know, Cameron. There wouldn’t really be a fall from power. Karzai’s up for reelection in August, he’s declining in popularity in Afghanistan. This law was supposedly in response to a group of very conservative swing voters he is courting. Surely there is another person that we can back this summer if he doesn’t back down.
China is different. We didn’t establish their government. We operate as equals with them, not as puppet masters. I do understand that the situation is hairy, but by us propping up a man who is supporting a law that makes the condition of women more restrictive and abusive than it was under the Taliban it sends a really clear message that the US is all talk when it comes to human rights; we’ll support them when it is convenient to do so.
Comment by Liz — 4/2/2009 @ 10:06 am
And I do agree with you, thimbles, that Clinton’s political past makes it a little more difficult, but she is also a card carrying feminist. It’ll be interesting to see if she does anything other than talk sternly about it.
Comment by Liz — 4/2/2009 @ 10:11 am
This is one of the few areas left where I can’t satisfactory apply any given ideology.
I suppose I really am, at least to some degree (where it concerns sovereign nation-states) a moral relativist. But I’m also to a great degree a natural rights proponent, and this is the arena in which that often comes into direct conflict. It’s easy to apply domestically—the whole “your rights to extend your arm ends where my nose begins” thing—but that just doesn’t work in an international arena, and I don’t know where to draw the line. Darfur, for instance, strikes me as an area where the United States (and the international community) would be justified in intervening to some extent (i.e. using force or the threat of force to force a human rights concept) whereas Afghanistan does not, even given Liz’s distinction of a proxy state vs. a sovereign state (which is also pretty unsatisfying). But I don’t know that I can articulate that line.
It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. Just create a list of “human rights” and enforce it. But is, say, a woman’s right to vote, or something like protections against marital rape, human rights or civil rights? What about the death penalty in countries where we can’t be sure of the sanctity of the judicial system? What if the state only wantonly executes people every once in awhile, or in very small (but targeted) batches?
I guess that’s why, since I can’t answer those questions, I more or less revert to a hardline “national interest” stance. Human rights are easy to define and protect in a system that, ultimately, is within your practical realm of control. But it’s a very small step from the sort of standard that Liz is obliquely pushing to a genuine “world policeman” paradigm, which is just practically untenable. So it comes down to a matter of picking your battles very, very carefully, taking things on a case by case basis, and only intervening in the areas where your collective conscience can just no longer stand the status quo (which is, when you think about it, pretty imperial).
Ramble ramble ramble.
Comment by Brad — 4/2/2009 @ 12:34 pm
Liz wants us not to aggressively intervene on the side of the man who’s pushing this agenda. It’s not as if she’s calling for us to use the military to expel him or something.
This seems to me to be a fairly easy call. The US can’t be a partner in this kind of policy in the name of a dubious “regional stability.”
Comment by Rojas — 4/2/2009 @ 12:47 pm
Exactly what Rojas said. I’m not talking about taking interventionist actions or policing the world. If he’s elected, he’s elected. I just don’t want the U.S. to be head cheerleader for a misogynistic asshole. I don’t think that’s remotely unreasonable.
Comment by Liz — 4/2/2009 @ 1:22 pm
But he exists in his position already exactly because of that interventionism. What’s more, it’s unclear to me that, even if we’re talking a democratic Afghanistan, that he’s not taking positions required of him to maintain power in the domestic political environment (an excuse Rojas often uses for Israel militarism, I might add). We could of course only back candidates that would adhere to a Western conception of civil liberties and human rights, but then we also run the risk of not being able to do so in a genuinely democratic framework (i.e., a democracy would produce X, we prefer Y, so we in a practical sense override the democratic framework to get Y, or at the very least get Y in such a way that makes it much much harder for Y to advance the country along the lines we need it to advance before anything else can be discussed), at which point you’re trading one kind of freedom for another. And that’s where I run into problems. When two things we consider human rights but which can also bleed into the realm of civil liberties conflict, how do you place one over the other. How much freedom from tyranny for women is worth freedom for a citizenry to plot their own course (and of course, who defines who makes up that citizenry, in the political sense).
I would say it’s an easy answer if Afghani Leader X is, say, a misogynistic asshole and Afghani Leader Y is a relatively liberal progressive, and all else is equal and it’s only a matter of which one we back. But pretty clearly, it’s not even in the same ballpark as that simple.
Comment by Brad — 4/2/2009 @ 1:47 pm
Liz’s post title asks the question which Brad is also asking.
It seems to me that, even for those who are afraid that the perfect might be made the enemy of the good, the legalization of marital rape is probably a bit much to tolerate.
Comment by Rojas — 4/2/2009 @ 1:52 pm
Well yeah, Liz is asking the same question, she’s just much closer to answering it than I am. But that is the question; it just reduces me to rambling each time.
Comment by Brad — 4/2/2009 @ 2:09 pm
How is not backing a candidate interfering in Afghanistan’s democratic process, whether set up through interventionism or not? They have a Parliment, they have elections. It isn’t like we have an actual vote in the matter.
I know it isn’t easy. Personally, I’d rather we didn’t have a preferred candidate at all – it isn’t our business. But our blatant support of Karzai as he is actively pursuing this policy is wrong.
And outrage over rape is not merely a “Western conception of civil rights”. That reduces it into a culture clash as opposed to a brutal act of violence.
The world is a very grey, very complicated place, but there are still things that are right and things that are not. We would not support a candidate that was pushing a law to enslave a race, so why is it acceptable to dismiss the slavery of women as differing opinions on civil rights?
Comment by Liz — 4/2/2009 @ 2:12 pm
So what happens when Karzai wins the presidential election, as he is likely to whether or not we back some other candidate (unless we take material steps to back that candidate)?
Do we oust him? Do we just express our dissatisfaction with this particular law and write a strongly worded letter? What happens if we do back another guy, and in so doing back Karzai into a corner wherein he becomes more hardline on Islamic moral tropes than he might have otherwise, and he wins anyway? What happens if our choice is a candidate who is more progressive on women’s rights but less able to deal with the basic stability of the country (i.e. more likely to create a civil war)? Is it worth the moral high ground if in taking it we ensure a greater risk of the disintegration of the government and national political fabric altogether? Do we then have that blood on our hands?
I too would prefer we didn’t back anybody, but that’s not exactly where your line of thought leads I don’t think. In fact, that’s a lot closer to the “armed neutrality” line of thought that I tend towards, but in many ways that really can be seen as a legal encapsulation of moral relativism. And as far as slavery of women, Canada didn’t declare marital rape a crime until 1993. Female genital mutilation was not declared a crime in America until 1995 (technically anyway). And whether or not parents can deny life-saving medical care to their children, say, is still very much an open question legal question in America. NONE of that mitigates what you’re saying in terms of the “wrongness” of this kind of thing, but it does significantly cloud the idea that we can have a standard list of human rights violations and a standard set of responses to each. And hell, maybe we can. Like I said I don’t know.
Comment by Brad — 4/2/2009 @ 2:42 pm
I really don’t know either, obviously. It’s very sticky. There’s a lot of gut reaction here, but I think that there is room here to act (or, by not supporting Karzai, not act) without toppling Afghanistan’s democracy. There would be no reason for words or strong statements in the even of his re-election if we’ve already made our stance perfectly clear by withdrawing our support. Which probably turns the whole thing into merely a symbolic gesture, but I’m all for symbolism as opposed to, say, interventionism or flat out ignoring the human rights violations.
And I did know that about Canada. Canada, however, did not pass a law that 1 – makes a woman obligated to put out at least once every 3 or 4 days, 2 – restricts her movements to the house unless given explicit permission and 3 – takes away a woman’s right to custody of her own children, even at the death of her husband. It isn’t really comparable.
Comment by Liz — 4/3/2009 @ 1:49 pm
Yeah. I’m already being sort of relativist for the sake of it, but I suppose my point in pulling the Canada example is…where’s the tipping point? What makes for a country with a law (or lack of law) repugnant but which we can still have friendly dealings vs. a country with a law (or lack of law, or laws) which cross the line into a human rights violating regime with which we can’t give even the risk of an implicit endorsement? I mean, it’s not just supporting Karzai or not supporting Karzai. It seems pretty clear that, in this case, Karzai made the calculation that making this move was worth it for the domestic political benefit even accounting for the international political cost. And hell, the latter might even amplify the former (certainly it’s not hard to game out scenarios wherein a public break with America and Karzai works to the advantage of Karzai and the forces of barbarism). My guess would be most any leader in Afghanastan would do the same, at least any with the chance to be politically viable under any system approaching democracy (and maybe there’s that conversation to be had too). But what about aid to Afghanistan? Can we justify spending billions a year to support a country that explicitly engages in those kind of actions? I don’t think we can, but then again, how can we not?
None of this is really directed at you, certainly not as refutation or rebuttal. Really, it’s an expression of envy that you have a line to draw where I can find only spider threads billowing in the wind. Which is why, not having any comfort in my own ability to find that line and stick to it (or, for that matter, America’s ability), I tend towards an intentionally artificially rigid system domestically—the Ron Paulian model say—coupled, ironically perhaps, with a more robust international system (admittedly moderated to death by debate and geopolitics). But those are pretty hard standards to apply to Afghanistan, where we do (unfortunately) now have a giant moral stake in a cohesive government existing which has a monopoly on the use of force. How to do that in any way approaching a democratic one—wherein, let’s face it, most of the voting population tends more towards Karzai’s view than yours (not even getting into how few women probably actually vote, or will in the future)—well, beats the fuck out of me.
I think I’ll leave this thread now. Sorry to muck it up. :(
Comment by Brad — 4/3/2009 @ 3:36 pm
You mucked up nothing. It’s definitely less black and white than I am trying to make it. And as someone who believes very strongly that every nation has the right to govern itself, I totally understand what you are saying and even intellectually agree in many respects. But then we hear about this (which is even less clear because of the political situation), or the women in the Congo, or the child soldiers in Africa, or any number of countries where atrocities are a way of life and it’s just so difficult to maintain principled detachment. I do not think we can, or even should try to, save the whole world on a government level, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there are just some really heartbreaking things out there that make me WANT to.
Comment by Liz — 4/3/2009 @ 4:00 pm
The more I think about it, the more I think it reduces to one fundamental and perhaps (probably) unanswerable question:
Which comes first: civil rights or a civil state?
Comment by Brad — 4/4/2009 @ 12:45 am
Well, some good news. For one, I guess the law only applied to Shiite communities—10 to 20%, which is a lot of people for sure but at least not a blanket law. I didn’t know that.
For another, Karzai is at least allowing the the law might not be the final word on the matter.
That is of course worth the paper its printed on, but still, it at least indicates that Karzai is being opportunistic here, rather than a raving ideologue with whom a rational discussion can’t take place.
Small consolation maybe, but consolation nonetheless.
Comment by Brad — 4/4/2009 @ 3:57 pm