Johann Hari on the use of 'Women's rights' (I hate the expression by the way because it implies that women are so particular that Human rights aren't for them) to justify the Afghan war:
The other arguments that used to be used to justify the war have become a polite after-cough. Women's rights? My friend Malalai Joya is the most popularly elected woman in Afghanistan. She has been expelled from the parliament and silenced in the media for pointing out that "things have not improved for women," because the occupiers have "transferred power to fundamentalist warlords who are just like the Taliban."
I'm always annoyed or amused depending on the eloquence of the ones making the argument when people argue with a straight face that a war is fought to liberate women when all one has to do is to look at the fact that women's bodies are still the subject of a vicious ideological battle in the US for example to see that 'men' are never going to fight for the rights of 'foreign' women to have the same rights that they have when they aren't willing to do the same in their own backyard.
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