Of Western wars and Muslim women

If Western wars are meant to ‘liberate’ Muslim women, why did centuries of Western military intervention fail to do so?

Author’s note: Twenty years ago, the United States and the United Kingdom exploited the cause of women and girls in Afghanistan and the rest of the Muslim world to justify their invasion, occupation and other forms of intervention in Muslim nations. Their leaders enlisted their wives, Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, in the propaganda war to “lift the veil” on the Taliban, well after the group retreated under fire.   In the following years, more women entered the workforce and more girls went to school, but Afghans continued to suffer from widespread poverty, illiteracy, and patriarchy compounded by violence, repression and war, hurting women first and foremost. Afghanistan became the “forgotten war” and the cause of its women disremembered until recently when the Trump administration basically handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban and the Biden administration withdrew US forces rather humiliatingly from the country. Suddenly, the cause of Afghan women is back in the headlines for fear that the little that was accomplished may be reversible. As I wrote back in 2010 in the piece below, despite the best of intentions on the part of many, Western military crusades in the Muslim world do not solve social and political problems; they compound them.