"Did Gender Studies Lose Afghanistan"

For those who love foreign policy and military policy and every manner of muscle flexing, a writer who dubbed himself Cockburn has written in the Spectator that we lost Afghanistan because we decided that it was a good place to plant our latest theories about gender.

How come no one thought that we ought perhaps to teach the virtues of the free enterprise system? How come no one thought to open up mining operations in areas that contained massive concentrations of rare earth minerals? You can feel confident that the Chinese and the Russians will be doing same. We were imposing gender theory on people who had no sense of what it was. We did not care what these people thought or felt. We were imposing what we imagined to be a higher truth.

By Cockburn’s lights, gender studies lost Afghanistan. That means, the more the Afghans were exposed to dopey Western gender theorists the more they concluded that perhaps the Taliban was not so bad, after all.

So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to U.S. government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.

Presumably, this suggests that we spent over a billion dollars on gender studies reeducation-- you know, the kind that we foist on American children every day.

Cockburn opens with an obvious point:

For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for “gender.” 

That makes sense, since the distinction between “sex” and “gender” was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution sets a 27 per cent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in “democracy” created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.

Diversity quotas-- now that was what was missing in Afghanistan. And yet, Cockburn suggests that no one was willing to fight or die for gender diversity and inclusion. Fancy that.

He continues:

The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a “National Masculinity Alliance”, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their “gender roles” and “examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.”

One recalls, to one’s chagrin, that in Sweden, a country now become the rape capital of the Western world, nearly all of the rapes are committed by individuals who belong to a specific religious grouping. One doe not want to say which one, becuase one does not want to hurt anyone's feelings.

One also recalls that the worst rapists, reportedly, the men who are the most abusive to women, are the Afghans. The reason, someone once opined, was that these men had received sensitivity training in Afghanistan, courtesy of the American government.

What else did gender studies bring to Afghanistan:

Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. 

Even as America built an Afghan army ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.

Could it be that the Afghan army, burdened with gender quotas, perfectly coedified, could not function? One might ask the same of the coedified American army, led by thoroughly modern Milley.

The ideological indoctrination produced by gender studies caused local people to rebel.

According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.

One closes this post by recollecting the remarks made one Andrew Stiles, in jest, apparently, to the effect that the Biden Afghanistan policy reflected the awesome might of girlpower. My post linked here. After all, Stiles said, beyond the figureheads of Sullivan, Blinken, Austin and Biden, the rest of the team was filled with females. I refer you to my post on said subject.

Despite the fact that Stiles was proposing satire, the truth remains that, gender being fluid, the mindset that produced and is still producing the debacle and the appalling failure that is our current Afghanistan policy is decidedly female. It is more about emotion than about action.

Yesterday, Chris Wallace asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken-- a man thoroughly reviled by the late Sen. John McCain-- the following question:

Mr. Secretary, does the president not know what's going on?

Considering the dangerous ineptitude that Biden has been displaying of late, it was a fair question-- more than fair, if you will.

To this Blinken replied (emphasis mine):

“Chris, all I can tell you is what I’ve heard. And again, this is a powerful, emotional time for a lot of allies and partners, as it is for me, as it is for us,” Blinken responded. “But I’ve also heard of this, I’ve heard across the board, deep appreciation and thanks from allies and partners for everything that we’ve done to bring our allies and partners out of harm’s way.”

The boldfaced remark was a repetition of Blinken’s prior assertion that:

This is an incredibly emotional time for many of us.

Why does this matter? It matters because it is girl talk. How many men do you know or have you ever known who talk about how emotional it all is? If they do, it means that they have undergone gender diversity training and have learned how to talk like girls.

After all, while governments of Britain and France and even the Ukraine take action to save their citizens, the American government whines and complains about how little it can do. Does that sound very manly to you?

By now, it appears that the true face of the Biden administration is the giggling schoolgirl Kamala Harris.

Again, Andrew Stiles might have thought his report was satire, but he seems to have grasped one of the basic truths, one of the causes for our failure in Afghanistan-- we were not just selling democracy-- you know, the kind that barely even works here-- but we were selling woke cultural politics. We were selling a cultural aberration, a rank deformity, and trying to impose it on people who did not understand a word of it. Not only did Afghans not understand gender studies, but they thought that it was batshit crazy stuff. And that, of course, includes Afghan women.