Issue #2
October 2001
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An Afghan Solution
by Gert Innsry
Bringing down the Taliban is a difficult problem. The Afghan opposition is weak, fragmented, and prone to internecine warfare. Furthermore, when they had their chance to rule, they were corrupt and ineffective. Destroying the Afghan infrastructure is useless: what roads they had have devolved into rutted tracks over decades of fighting; the country does not depend on electricity and telecommunications for its survival; manufacturing is minimal. The terrain is mountainous for the most part. If the Taliban regime is to be made to collapse, we must attack it at its weakest point: its inordinate fear of women.
They have demonstrated that fear in many ways. Hiding women in voluminous burqas, with their faces covered by mesh, betrays the desire of the Taliban seminarians to make them invisible, to erase these disturbing presences from daily life. Forbidding women from appearing on the streets unless accompanied by father or brother, banning women from schools, making medical care unavailable to them, all act to keep the mysterious power of women under tenuous control.
If the Taliban fear of women's power is so enormous, our course is clear; give the women some real power. Arm them.
We needn't arm all of the women to be successful, just a few. The level of female rage in Afghanistan has been building for years. Let's put it to good use. We should arm them with weapons that require little or no training to be effective - sawed-off shotguns would do nicely. The burqas designed to hide a woman's body can hide other things as well. A gun would be indetectable.
The first time one of the thuggish "morality police" harassed an armed women and was blown away by a shotgun blast from under the robes, the message would be sent. Even the mesh veil would now serve the woman, hiding her identity and preventing retribution. From that point on, Taliban fanatics would never know whether a women in their presence was truly dangerous; all women would have to be treated with respect. Their worst nightmare would come true: women are powerful.
The regime would collapse.
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