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A post from DoubleX contributor Alison Buckholtz:
In a groundbreaking study that will surprise very few people,
researchers have found that military wives whose spouses experience
long-term deployments are at a higher risk for mental-health problems
than their counterparts whose husbands live and work near home. The
study, published in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine,
found that 36.6 percent of U.S. Army wives whose husbands had deployed
had at least one mental-health diagnosis, compared with 30.5 percent of
women whose husbands had not deployed. Among these diagnoses are ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
Dana Goldstein's article about the few feminist groups
that came out in support of a long-term occupation in Afghanistan sure
has tongues wagging, as is inevitable every time a perceived gap
between liberal and feminist interests opens up. Eleanor Smeal and a
few other feminists object to President Obama's plan to leave
Afghanistan in 18 months because they correctly believe that leaving
will cause reactionary forces to swoop in and eagerly oppress women to
the fullest extent possible. But the few feminists Dana covers hardly
represent majority feminist opinion on this front. Many of us believe
that we should leave Afghanistan sooner rather than later, even as we
sympathize with Smeal's concerns.
How can I, as a good feminist, believe that we should just get out
of Afghanistan, knowing full well what will happen to women when we do?
It's a good question. On one level, the answer is actually quite
simple: I don't buy the idea that you can shove good values such as
feminism down people's throats with violence ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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The news of the hour is a new vote in Afghanistan.
This is good news for Peter Galbraith, a United Nations representative
in Afghanistan who had been fired from the U.N. team for blasting
Afghanistan's “tainted vote” in public. This new Washington- and Kabul-sanctioned runoff election, to be held on Nov. 7, may well delay an official White House announcement on more troop levels for “the good war.” But when discussing the Afghan crisis, which Daily Show co-creator Liz Winstead has taken to calling “Noplanistan”—the plight of women in the feudal, fractured, straight-dangerous nation should spring to mind ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from Emma Gilbey Keller, editor of DoubleX's Your Comeback blog:
It strikes me that today’s military moms bear some resemblance to
the medical moms of yesterday. Both doctors and soldiers choose intense
schedules that pit saving lives against time away from the lives of
their children. Both make huge sacrifices but can benefit from a
significant financial payoff. Both continue to struggle for flexibility
and recognition in a traditionally paternalistic system. The battles
fought by mothers who were doctors 10 or 20 years ago sound remarkably
similar to the professional struggles of those who serve in the armed
forces now.
Yet the difference is obvious and stark. If ever there was an
example that choice means giving rather than taking, it can be seen in
the mothers in the military who are prepared to die for their country.
The minutiae of their domestic tribulations pale in comparison to this
greatest what if: What if they don’t come home and their kids are left motherless? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
Philip Gourevitch’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times adds
another compelling argument to the ones I’ve been making recently about
why releasing more photos of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan is
a bad idea. Obama first supported the release of the latest batch of
photos but subsequently changed his mind, saying
that the pictures in question are associated with “closed
investigations” in which the perpetrators have already been identified
and sanctioned, and that they “would not add any additional benefit” to
our understanding of detainee treatment in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gourevitch, who has written a book about the soldiers who took many of the photos at Abu Ghraib, rightly notes that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On May 12, the New York Times ran a photograph featuring a
soldier in his underpants. The photo was eye-catching—I know it caught my
eye—and appeared above the fold on the front page. The photo was taken by David
Guttenfelder for the Associated Press, and its subject was Spc. Zachary
Boyd of Fort Worth, Texas. But what made it a standout was that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
The announcement that Gen. David McKiernan is being removed from command of NATO forces in Afghanistan—apparently the first firing of a U.S. commander in a theater of war since Korea—is
a very big deal. But what does it actually mean? One thing it means is
that the dust has yet to settle in the transition to a new U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan, which suggests that any fruits of that
strategy remain distant. Laid out in a white paper this spring,
the new strategy stems from a wholesale rethinking of our approach that
has been underway at least since Gen. David Petraeus took the helm at
CentCom last fall. It includes, but isn’t limited to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Ms. magazine reports a brief story today about the suspiciously high
number of women registering to vote in Afghanistan's upcoming election.
Officials are starting to think something is up, given that some of the
areas reporting record registration are regions where women don't
travel.
Normally, that headline wouldn't merit my second glance, but today
it held me. Late last night I finished reading Åsne Seierstad's 2003
account of her infiltration into an Afghani home, The Bookseller of Kabul. Her
glimpse into the kitchens, bedrooms, and walled-in courtyards that make
up the entire world of many Afghani women is terrifying and
tear-inducing. It provides the backstory to today's news and reveals
exactly why those officials sense fraud. They know that women don't
have the freedom to show their faces, fall in love, or earn money, let
alone to vote. And when I read the headline, all I could think about
was the stories of Leila, Sharifay, and Sonya.
Stories trigger paradigm changes the way news can't. So just wanted
to give a shout-out to all the women journalists out there, like Åsne,
whose work transforms far-away issues into intensely personal ones.
Let's hope future presidents around the world have the chance to echo
what Abe Lincoln supposedly said when meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe,
author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "So you're the little woman
who wrote the book that started this Great War!"
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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Others have remarked on the mainstream media’s penchant for
lumping together hip hop with all that’s wrong in the world,
up to and including radical Islam. But I was reminded of it once again by a
breathless CNN report
on the latest video from Al-Shabaab, an Islamic group in Somalia, which the
network compares to reality TV “complete with a hip-hop jihad vibe.” The video
(which you can watch in part here) is said by al-Qaida watchers to feature
Sheikh Abu Mansoor al-Amriki or “the American,” a white, goateed young man who
speaks American English, a sort of Adam Gadahn
for the Somali music scene, if you buy CNN’s line. The problem is that
al-Amriki looks and sounds a lot like some of the guys I went to school with,
white dudes whose rap skills ended where their comfortable middle-class
backgrounds began. If he’s a rapper, so am I.
Rap has of course become a favorite protest genre for
underclasses everywhere, and the originating impulse of American hip-hop is
deftly echoed in its French and Palestinian offshoots (“You don’t listen to our
voices, you silence and degrade us,” goes a song by Palestinian group DAM.
“We fight for our freedom, but you’ve made that a crime.”) Insurgents often
echo this sentiment; the problem is that while the music in the Al-Shabaab
video sounds sort of like rap, it sounds a lot more like the often beautiful
battle songs and Koranic chants that are sung behind al-Qaida and Taliban
videos coming out of Pakistan and Afghanistan, a selection of which can be
viewed here.
You can hear at least two American-sounding voices singing in the Al-Shabaab
video, one of them presumably al-Amriki’s. There’s a bit of something like rap
there, but to me the tone is more devotional than angry, much like the Qaida
video songs, which are often set hauntingly against a background of explosions
and gunfire that resembles a drumbeat. The relationship between Al-Shabaab
(which means “The Youth”) and al-Qaida is unclear—CNN calls the Somali group
“al-Qaida-backed,” yet the Council on Foreign Relations notes that any institutional connection between the groups is “weak, if it exists at
all.” The latest video strengthens the case for that relationship, at least in
regard to production and soundtrack selection, but does nothing to link hip-hop
to global terrorism. Chanting and choral arrangements are much more in line
with al-Qaida’s musical taste.
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Two notable pieces of news about women's rights and rape.
On the domestic front: Could the recession end up leading to a drop in rape convictions? Yesterday, ProPublica noted that the Los Angeles County police department is severely backlogged in processing rape kits—which sometimes contain DNA that leads to arrests and convictions. According to the site,
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has 4,700 untested rape kits, which potentially contain DNA evidence taken from sexual assault victims. The police department's backlog, which was the subject of a ProPublica and Los Angeles Times investigation [2] in November, is currently more than 4,000 cases. LAPD officers never sent many of the kits to the department's lab, which is underfunded and understaffed. ...
This LAPD says they hope to catch up on their backlog within four years.
Meanwhile, on the foreign front: Is Afghanistan sliding backward in its treatment of women? According to the United Nations, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has signed a bill that is a blow to women's rights; and it looks like he did so in a craven bid to gather votes before the summer elections. From what I can tell, not a peep yet from the White House about this bill. But activists are already demanding a response, and you can see why. According to the Independent,
the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home. ...
The bill draws explicit lines in the sand about consensual sex within marriage. It apparently "stipulates that a man can expect to have sex with his wife at least 'once every four nights' when travelling, unless they are ill." There is, however, a silver lining, as Beliefnet points out: The bill's proposed marriage age for girls was originally 9; in the final version, it's 16. It also originally contained "provisions" for temporary marriage, which some believe to be a form of legalized prostitution; those provisions were removed.
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If you have a pessimistic nature we live in gratifying times. There are two op-eds (here and here) in the New York Times today that are reminders that while we wait to see if the economy will stabilize or continue its free fall, parts of the world continue to bubble along ominously. These pieces describe the utter catastrophe of the resurgent Taliban both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's hard reading: the bombing of schools (the particular life-threatening danger to girls who are brave enough to become literate); the slitting of the throats of journalists and government officials; in Swat, the stringing up of decapitated corpses for being "un-Islamic." One op-ed ends with an ominous line that reminds us why these are not just troubles in distant lands we have had enough of:"[Pakistan] risks becoming a nuclear-armed Afghanistan". And in the Washington Post today is a story about what preventing this—if we can—will cost us. It is about the burial at Arlington Cemetery of 29-year-old Army Capt. Brian Bunting; his not-quite 2 year-old son was given the flag from his coffin. Capt. Bunting was killed last month in Kandahar by a roadside bomb along with three other soldiers. Bunting's widow, Nicki, learned a few days after his death that she was pregnant with their second child.