Gendering Human Security in Afghanistan

In a Time of Western Intervention

Ben Walter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138640641
• eBook ISBN: 9781317265191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Central Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book employs the concept of human security to show what the term means from the perspective of women in Afghanistan.

It engages with a well-established debate in academic and policy-making contexts regarding the utility of human security as a framework for understanding and redressing conflict. The book argues that this concept allows the possibility of articulating the substantive experiences of violence and marginalisation experienced by people in local settings as well as their own struggles towards a secure and happy life. In this regard, it goes a long way to making sense of the complex dynamics of conflict which have confounded Western policy-makers in their ongoing state-building mission in Afghanistan. However, despite this inherent potential, the idea of human security still needs refinement. Crucially, it has benefitted from critical feminist and critical social theories which provide the conceptual and methodological depth necessary to apprehend what a progressive ethical program of security looks like and how it can be furthered. Using this framework, the work provides a critical reconstruction of the effect of the US-led Western Intervention on women's experiences of (in)security in the three provincial contexts of Nangarhar, Bamiyan and Kabul. This reconstruction is drawn from a wealth of historical and contemporary sociological research alongside original fieldwork undertaken in Delhi, India, during 2011 with women and men from the country's different communities.

This book will be of much interest to students of human security, state-building, gender politics, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

1
Introduction

At its heart, this book attempts to tell a story about furthering security in Afghanistan in the time of Western Intervention that was occasioned by the overthrow of the Taliban in October, 2001. The story of security that I tell here refers to much more than just the abatement of armed violence wrought by warring factions. It is more thoroughly concerned with the pursuit of a holistic vision of security premised upon the well-being and happiness of people in their own communities.

Given the priority of human beings in this story, it was a straightforward decision for me to engage with the framework of human security. This concept prioritises the lives of concrete human subjects in counter-distinction to long-standing practices of national security aimed at securing the abstract bodies of states. In so doing, it makes security democratic by highlighting subjects’ own perspective of security and, potentially, revolutionary in its challenge to dominant and institutionalised practices associated with national and international security.

Nevertheless, to make human security a viable vehicle for engagement in Afghanistan, it must present an account of security which is meaningful to human subjects themselves. For this reason, I build my account of what human security is through an exploration of the lives of women and their experiences of oppression and marginalisation in Afghanistan. Women’s experiences of gender-based violence, whether physical, economic or emotional, provide a substantive account of security that speaks to the conflicts and hierarchies of power which jeopardise the well-being of society in Afghanistan more broadly. In so doing, the story of women speaks also to the lives of men and the insecurities and challenges they face within existing hierarchical gender structures.

Engaging in this reconstructive account of what human security means in Afghanistan from the perspective of women and men is not a simple task. To begin with, the expression of what security means in any given context ultimately involves an ethical claim which enjoins societal action to urgently redress harm. Thus, the possibility of arriving at a legitimate expression of security involves philosophical and sociological reflection about how ethics should be practised in global politics. At the same time, the heterogeneity of the social landscape of Afghanistan defies attempts to define or characterise it. People’s social identities in Afghanistan exist at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, language, religion and socio-economic considerations. What makes this research even more difficult and ethically fraught is that women’s lives in Afghanistan are all too often objectified and caricatured for the agenda of an external agent.

Women in Afghanistan beneath a Western gaze

Consider the image of a woman clad in a blue burqa (Arabic word for full body covering garment) in Afghanistan. Following the rise of the Taliban in 1996, and especially after their fall in 2001, this image became embedded in Western imaginations. As Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood (2002: 339–341) observed, in the weeks and months after the September 11 attacks this image saturated Western media coverage of Afghanistan. It was routinely championed by a variety of prominent public figures, including male political leaders and first ladies (Weber, 2005: 371), feminists (Russo, 2006: 557–558) and talk-show hosts (Fluri, 2009: 245) as exemplary of everything at stake in the West’s impending intervention into Afghanistan.

The very facelessness and voicelessness of this feminine figure invoked ideas of oppression, victimisation and backwardness: through no fault of her own, this woman was subjugated, brutalised and held back by violent and ignorant men as personified by the Taliban and other patriarchal authority figures (Moghadam, 2002: 245). Yet, at the same time, the existence of this woman’s all-veiling burqa also presented the possibility that she could be unveiled. Thus, she existed in Western imaginations as a subject in transition from the personification of a barbaric and backward time to that of a modern liberated citizen of a democratic Western-liberated Afghanistan.

As many critical feminist scholars observed, this well-worn discursive framing of Afghan women helped Western governments legitimise the military intervention for their domestic audiences (Shepherd, 2006: 19–21). At the same time, these feminist scholars repeatedly raised concerns about the way in which this objectification of women in Afghanistan served to silence the voices of women and obfuscate their perspectives on the Western Intervention (Daulatzai, 2008: 420–421). Crucially, the framing of Afghanistan entailed in this image had even wider ramifications beyond merely being a rhetorical argument that legitimised war. This crude depiction of a burqa-clad victim was emblematic of the broader objectifying gaze Western politicians, policy-makers and academics used to perceive and, even more worryingly, problem-solve gender politics in Afghan society. Gender politics here refers to the discourses and practices within society which organise gender relations, gender identities and gender roles. In this regard, gender politics is concerned with the way in which power, position, choice, opportunities, access and rights are afforded to women and men in society.

Unfortunately, the narrowness of these conceptual lenses meant that the complexity of gender relations and gender politics in Afghanistan remained largely invisible to Western eyes even as their dynamics played out in full view. At the same time, the normative content attached to this vision of gender progress for women was highly problematic. According to this moral framework, women were cast as “victims” in need of “empowering” while men were characterised as patriarchal, if not misogynistic, figures who, as a sexual class, were holding back women’s liberation. Much of the normative content which informed this analysis of Afghanistan was overtly Orientalist in its depiction of the Afghan subject as an alien “other”. Here, Orientalism refers to the process in which Europeans characterised the lives of different societies as alien and “other” and incorporated this caricatured account of “Orientals” into their own worldview (Said, 1979: 72–73).

At the same time, the Western Intervention relied implicitly on the universalising and Eurocentric assumptions of Enlightenment-based philosophies like liberalism and modernisation theory. Based on these philosophical traditions, many politicians, academics and policy-makers maintained that sexual inequality between women and men in Afghanistan could be socially and technologically problem-solved through building a democratic government that enshrined women’s rights and protections and gender-specific aid programmes that promoted women’s empowerment.

The clumsiness of this attempt to socially transform gender relations in Afghanistan was not lost on the people of Afghanistan themselves. As Lina Abirafeh (2009: 55–57) observed from her own interviews with women and men in post-Taliban Kabul, there was a widespread anger at the way in which gender programming treated men and male viewpoints as patronising and an obstacle to women’s empowerment. Moreover, such efforts to transform gender relations were not new in the Afghan context which had experienced similarly intrusive gender programming during the rule of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the Soviet Occupation during the 1980s. As in the past, the present intervention fed into a highly gendered social and political landscape which was already shaped by competing hyper-masculinist discourses of custom and religion. This coming together of foreign and local gendered discourses has served to make women’s and men’s lives a daily exercise in navigating a gendered battleground within which infringements are violently policed.

The research puzzle

The goal of this book is to revitalise the concept of human security by making it meaningful to women who, as a sexual class, represent some of the most subjugated and insecure subjects in Afghanistan. The way I go about this task is with recourse to the conceptual and methodological insights of feminist, critical and post-colonial theory. Conceptually, these theories help re-vision a lens of human security (hereafter HS) such that the experiences of marginalised women can be apprehended. Methodologically, these theories allow insight into the way in which progressive moral agendas, such as those associated with redressing inequitable gender relations, can be furthered.

Like feminist theory, HS emphasises the need to focus on the lives of concrete human subjects as opposed to artificial bodies, such as the territorial state, which assume precedence in national and international framings of security. However, as many feminists point out, despite its seeming overlap with feminist theory, the mainstream iteration of HS still suffers from problematic assumptions which stem from Enlightenment-based philosophy. Most importantly, the individual human subject who informs its analysis and prescription is for all intents and purposes a masculine agent. Thus, rather than providing an account of security which is sensitive to gender dynamics, the HS concept inevitably universalises the social, economic and political needs of an idealised masculine actor.

Despite these issues, a growing number of feminist practitioners have contributed to a constructive discussion on how HS can be re-visioned and repurposed within feminist theory. This book seeks to both borrow from, and contribute to, this theoretical discussion with the intention of showing how a feminist HS framework could respond to pressing normative questions, such as those associated with redressing hierarchical gender relations in Afghanistan.

The insights I make use of within this feminist framework are drawn from a variety of critical literatures of global politics as I will articulate in Chapter 2. Obviously, feminist scholarship on the concept of HS plays a major role in the very instigation of this argument. At the same time, this framework benefits from the insights of post-colonial theory which shares the robust normative commitment of feminist theory and provides strong insights into understanding the political and cross-cultural differences entailed in post-colonial settings. Furthermore, the feminist politics advocated in this framework benefits greatly from recourse to the insights of critical feminist and social theory regarding the possibilities of apprehending and engaging with a moral debate.

The central message which emerges from these complementary, critical theoretical endeavours is that any attempt to articulate ethics must incorporate a very strong understanding of society itself. For, if it cannot articulate an ethic that is immanent to the societal relations of the world, it will remain a utopian project. Thus, the key to promoting a positive conception of security is through exploring the societal setting which forms the context in which people’s lives are variously made secure or threatened. Within this setting, efforts to improve security involve challenging and transforming the hierarchical relationships of power which threaten people’s lives and constrain their ability to go about their lives freely.

When I write this argument about Afghanistan, I write at a time of Western Intervention. The US military has now been engaged in America’s longest running war in the history of its Republic, having spent 15 years fighting the Taliban and anti-government factions there. The US has held the greatest material influence on Afghanistan’s post-Taliban history through its military and economic support. Nevertheless, it is important to note that a broader coalition made up of NATO and other supportive states, international organisations and humanitarian agencies have participated in what could be broadly dubbed a “Western Intervention”.

It is this external intervention which provides the context within which I attempt to articulate what HS in society looks like from women’s perspective. I am keen to explore the disjuncture between a rhetorical promise to improve women’s lives with the way in which this intervention has impacted women, and their communities, at a local level. In this exploration, I am not attempting to provide an explicitly policy-oriented account for problem-solving human insecurity. However, I am interested in showing the possibilities for ethical progress that are revealed by people’s own struggles and challenges for change. Such instances reveal areas in which external agents could gainfully converge to discuss mechanisms for change; however, the actual form and content of such a dialogue-driven policy-making would need to unfold organically and reflectively.

My positionality as a researcher

Prior to elaborating on the specific methodological framework employed by this monograph to re-conceptualise HS, it is important to discuss how this research project came into being and what is my relationship to it as a researcher. This is all the more important given that I am a non-Afghan, white, male researcher, trying to understand women’s lives and gender relations in Afghanistan. As suggested previously, Afghan women’s subjectivities have perennially been misappropriated by external agents for their own ideological agendas historically and contemporaneously. The dangers of trying to “save” Afghan women or presume to speak for them has always been a pressing issue of concern to me as such exercises of power can occasion epistemic as well as concrete violence to these subjects.

It is a well-worn metaphor to liken the research process to a journey. Nevertheless, this framing neatly captures the many different paths I explored and the many moments of consciousness-raising and self-realisation I experienced on the way to finding a promising road of enquiry. In late 2008, after having completed my master’s programme in International Relations (hereafter IR), focussing on mainstay courses like international security, foreign policy, arms control and IR theory, I entered a doctoral programme with a “hard-nosed” interest in understanding armed violence and security in Afghanistan. However, during my first-year review of the literature on conflict studies and empirical examinations of conflict in Afghanistan, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the story being told by this field in which conflict boiled down to the armed violence between government forces and insurgents or anti-government elements. In the context of Afghanistan, people’s identities were summarily classified according to little-understood ethnic categories, such as Pashtun, Tajik and Hazara, and their political subjectivities were framed simplistically as either being for or against the US-supported government of Kabul. What particularly struck me reading this literature was the extent to which it was written by Western scholars and researchers for Western policy-makers to better “problem-solve” the ongoing foreign military interventions in which their governments were enmeshed.

My “light bulb” moment for resolving this dilemma came midway through 2009 when I took a moment to reflect more seriously on the people who most needed security in Afghanistan. I realised that the human beings in most need of security and well-being were Afghan women. This initial realisation was attended almost immediately by the observation that, for all the rhetorical concern expressed by Western leaders about women’s lives in Afghanistan since 2001, there had been very little effort made to find out whether Afghan women felt their lives had improved after the intervention. Thus, in a rather happenstance fashion, I came to a realisation which had already been elaborated upon and unpacked at great length by critically-minded feminist scholars. As I found out through exploring this literature, these feminist scholars had shown how masculinised discourses helped facilitate a war in the name of “saving” Afghan women with the effect that Afghan women’s lives and voices became instrumental objects. I felt that my own project could productively contribute to these established feminist critiques by initially exploring how women’s lives had been affected by the intervention and, subsequently, by providing a deeper analysis of gender relations and gendered hierarchies of power contributing to women’s, but also men’s, human (in)security.

Despite this potentially interesting subject matter, I still felt ill-prepared to meet the conceptual and methodological challenges in undertaking a feminist-oriented research project on post-colonial subjects. How could I meaningfully comment on women’s and men’s lives in Afghanistan and claim to know their voices and aspirations from my secluded office desk at the University of Queensland in Brisbane? How could I be sure that my research would not facilitate further epistemic violence to Afghan women by appropriating their subjectivities to legitimise more destabilising interventions in the name of “saving” women in Afghanistan? Unsurprisingly, the answers to these questions did not avail themselves to me instantaneously. Instead, I began to read feminist literature relating to IR more carefully. Ann Tickner (1997: 611–613; 2005: 3–4) furnished me with an immensely important critique of the way gender inflected the meta-theoretical assumptions of IR. As Tickner (1988: 432) suggested, IR’s ontology was filled with androgynous (but inherently masculine) individuals and state actors whose existence was posited as reflecting an objective and universal condition. Meanwhile, when engaging with the question of Afghan women’s subjectivity, I found the scholarship of Chandra Mohanty (Mohanty, 2002: 409–503) extremely useful in understanding the post-colonial dimension of feminis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gendering human security
• 3 Community, tradition and gender in Afghanistan
• 4 Modernisation and fragmentation in Afghanistan
• 5 Nangarhar Province
• 6 Bamyan Province
• 7 Kabul Province
• 8 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index