The Afghan Elephant in the Room

Those who’ve been following the 2020 presidential race might be forgiven for thinking the Democrats care about women’s rights. The Democratic presidential candidates spent significant time debating solutions to the alleged gender pay gap. They dig into each other’s pasts for evidence of alleged sexism and sexual harassment to use as ammunition. Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, Elizabeth Warren, and Beto O’Rourke practically tripped over one another calling for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to be impeached over dubious sexual misconduct allegations.

They don’t care, though, not really. For proof of this, look at the debate on Afghanistan. 18 years after the American invasion of Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 terror attacks, and the US still contends with a Taliban insurgency. Seeking an end to America’s longest war, the Trump administration sought to strike a deal with the Taliban, over the head of the democratically-elected Afghan government, which was excluded from negotiations, and withdraw US troops from the country. Peace talks (including a meeting at Camp David) were only derailed at the last minute after a Taliban terror attack in Kabul killed 12 people, including an American soldier, but a deal could be back on the table before too long. Such a deal, and the subsequent withdrawal of US troops, would undermine the Afghan government and will probably allow the Taliban (the Islamofascist organization that harbored Al Qaeda) to retake Afghanistan. If this happens, it’s Afghanistan’s women who will suffer the most (under Taliban rule, girls were not allowed to go to school and were forced to become child brides, and women were excluded from the workforce and forced to wear burqas in public). “[W]hat’s going to happen to Afghan women?” former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker asked in an interview with Foreign Policy. “The women we encouraged to step forward, the ones that we made a major effort to get back into schools. What about them?” “[E]verybody is tired of fighting,” Shukria Paykan, a female member of Afghanistan’s parliament, told the New York Times, “but that peace should not be at the price of losing our rights and freedom as women.”

Yet what’s the Democrats’ approach to this issue? Alex Ward of Vox summed it up in the headline of his article: “The Democratic candidates’ debate answers on Afghanistan were terrible.” “Democrats’ Afghan Strategy Sounds Familiar,” reads another headline in the New York Times, “It’s a Lot Like Trump’s.” Instead of condemning the Trump administration’s plan to betray Afghanistan’s government and sell out its people to the Taliban, they’re competing with him, and with each other, to see who can get US troops out of the country quicker. Almost all the candidates have pledged to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan within their first term as president, and Pete Buttigeg and Tulsi Gabbard took things one step further by promising to do it within their first year. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden even said they’d end the US military presence in Afghanistan without an agreement with the Taliban. Rather than make a principled stand, Democrats are joining Donald Trump in the stampede to the exit. In doing so, they forfeit all right to claim they care about the plight of women. Is there anything more absurd than posturing over a gender pay gap or feigning outrage over a candidate kissing a woman on the back of the head when you plan to abandon Afghanistan’s 17 million women to the Taliban, who will ban them from working altogether and flog them if they show their ankles in public?