Today, International Women's Day, Afghan women's rights activists are calling for the withdrawal of western occupation troops from the Hindu Kush. In the West it is usually claimed that in Afghanistan the only alternative is between a Taliban regime and the support for the pro-women, western supported Hamid Karzai regime, explains the oldest and most illustrious Afghan women's organization RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan). This is false.[1] Even Karzai, at best, pays "lip service" to women's rights but is ready at any time to throw them overboard for tactical reasons. This was confirmed with the president's passage of an infamous law legalizing rape of Shiite women in wedlock. RAWA indicates that prominent female opponents, for example the parliamentarian Malalai Joya, are particularly criticizing western cooperation with the influential warlords. The hopes of 2001 - that the West would turn to democratic forces in Afghanistan - have not been fulfilled, says Joya. The Karzai government is "a group of warlords, criminals, who [waged the] civil war in Afghanistan from '92 to '96. They are photocopies of Taliban, but with suit and tie."[2]

Western human rights organizations have begun expressing unambiguous criticism. Human Rights Watch recently published a report on the situation of women in Afghanistan, which confirms a serious degradation. The report explains that women, to a growing extent, are exposed to brutal physical persecution, where even the murder of female politicians is not prosecuted. Forced marriages, even of children, as well as honor killings, according to the report, are still at a high rate. Women have little access to justice. The special teams of women with the police, which had been created with such high profile publicity, are, in practice, hardly functioning. More than half the girls of the country are still excluded from all educational possibilities, not least of all, also because girl's schools are a symbol of occupation and are often targeted for attack. Human Rights Watch has also ascertained that the West's cooperation partners in Afghanistan don't care about the rights of women. "The dominant political factions of Afghanistan remain ideologically hostile to many of the rights that women have started to enjoy since the fall of the Taliban."[3]

As a matter of fact, it is not in spite of, but rather because of, the repeated western interventions that women in Afghanistan are so extremely discriminated against. Throughout the 20th century, particularly in the 60s and 70s, Afghan women had won their equality, at least on a formal legal basis. At the end of the 70s it was unthinkable that the Afghan educational and health systems and even the administrative services and production could function without the participation of women, report women's rights activists.[4] A disastrous turning point occurred in 1979. The pro-Soviet government that came to power in 1978 continued to insist on real equality, which incensed the most reactionary milieu of the country against it. These were supported by the West and brought into position against Kabul and from the end of 1979, also against the Soviet troops that had entered the country. Democratic parliamentary oriented circles received hardly any western support and often were forced to flee the country. When the West's protégés marched into Kabul in 1992, a backlash into an era of religious fundamentalist backwardness began.

It was Afghan women who have suffered most under the reign of the warlords, who plunged Afghanistan into a bloody civil war in 1992. "The position of the woman was their main target of attack," explains women's rights activists concerning the backlash of the warlords against their communist and democratic parliamentary adversaries.[5] Even years before they came to power, the Taliban had defamed girls' schools as "centers of prostitution". In 1995, Amnesty International published a comprehensive report on the Afghan women's situation designating their predicament literally as a "human rights catastrophe". Even the worst crimes against women were not prosecuted, even though the culprits were often "members of the predominantly mujahidin groups and warlords," the West's protégés.[6]

An Afghan women's rights activist told the 19. Congress of the Socialist International in Berlin in September 1992 "We would like to call on the international community and the Socialist International of Women, to give special attention to the plight of Afghan women," because of the crimes committed by Afghan warlords particularly against women. Her intervention received as little attention as those by other Afghan women calling for western support after the Taliban had come to power in 1996. It was only after the Taliban began rejecting cooperation with and openly opposing the West that NATO countries used the oppression of women to seek to legitimize and win popular support for their aggression against Afghanistan. The fact that the warlords in the 1990s violated women's rights no less than the Taliban today, is usually passed over in silence. Only Afghan women rights activists like RAWA, or the former parliamentarian, Malalai Joya, are publicly indicating that numerous warlords - like Atta Mohammad Noor, who enjoys great influence in the region occupied by the German Bundeswehr [7] - are among the West's favorite cooperation partners.

Under western occupation, RAWA writes, "the sworn enemies of human rights, democracy and secularism have gripped their claws over our country." But "freedom and democracy" as well as women's rights, "can't be donated; it is the duty of the people of a country to fight and achieve these values." [8] Germany has shown through its interventions in the past that it is not a partner in the struggle for Afghan women's rights. Berlin had already played a leading role in NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia and in the subsequent occupation of Kosovo that brought sexual slave traders into government offices in Pristina. (german-foreign-policy.com reported. [9]) There, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Germany was using the most brutal elements of the country to bring about a change of power. The fact that Germany, on several occasions, accepted the dominance of these forces to pursue its geo-strategic goals reveals the real motives of western aggression. Various international human rights organizations point out that the claim of intervening with the objective of installing emancipating conditions is part of the arsenal of war propaganda.