As Washington continued to rain bombs on Afghanistan and moved to impose a pro-U.S. regime there, Mrs. Bush decried the conditions facing women under the Taliban government. The Anglo-American war, waged under the banner of "fighting terrorism," is "also a fight for the rights and dignity of women," she declared.

Adding his baritone to the feminist chorus in Washington, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell insisted that "the rights of women in Afghanistan will not be negotiable" in the new regime the occupation powers are setting up there. Powell said the U.S. government will accept nothing short of "a restoration of the rights of the Afghani women."

Not to be outdone, Cherie Blair, wife of British prime minister Anthony Blair, said she feels the pain of Afghani women, and put the United Kingdom on record as being in favor of bringing them civilization. The Blairs, graduates of prestigious universities in London and Oxford, are of course well versed in the history of women's rights in South Asia, where women didn't win the right to vote until after they threw out British colonial rule following World War II.  
 
Global Gag Rule
In her brief radio talk, Laura Bush didn't have time to detail the U.S. administration's sterling record of championing women's rights. On his first full day in office, on January 22, President Bush issued an executive order reinstating a 1984 measure, known as the Global Gag Rule, that bars U.S. funds to family planning organizations abroad that use even their own money for abortion-related activities--including to discuss abortion with clients, disseminate information about the right to choose, or advocate changes in abortion laws. In a bipartisan vote, the House of Representatives ratified the measure a few months later.

Women's rights organizations denounced the administration's action--which has already forced a number of women's organizations to modify their policies or decline U.S. funds, from Bangladesh and Nepal to Peru and Bolivia--as an attack both on a woman's right to choose and on free speech.

Bush has also proposed eliminating contraceptives from federal employees' health insurance plans; cutting the domestic family planning program, which provides services to millions of low-income working people; and changing existing regulations to make it harder to obtain abortion services. During the summer budget debate the White House proposed a budget that would cut off 200,000 pregnant women and young children from a food-supplement program known as WIC.  
 
A Cotton Mather
The record of U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft, who is in the vanguard of the fight for "American values" against "terrorism," may give an idea of what Powell means by "restoring the rights of the Afghani women." Ashcroft--who reminds some of the Taliban or, more appropriately, of Cotton Mather, the Puritan witch-hunter--opposes a woman's right to choose abortion, opposes affirmative action, tried to block court-ordered desegregation plans as an attorney general in Missouri, and has praised leaders of the Confederacy as examples to emulate.

Not to be unfair, both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for the series of measures that have chipped away at a woman's right to control her body, from the 1976 Hyde Amendment banning Medicaid funds for abortion to the passage of "parental notification" laws and the imposition of waiting periods before being allowed to receive an abortion. As of 1998, 86 percent of U.S. counties and one-third of U.S. cities had no abortion providers, a reality affecting working-class women above all.

In fact, it was William Clinton who carried through his electoral promise of getting rid of "welfare as we know it"--which overwhelmingly affects working-class women raising children alone. And the five-year cutoff for tens of thousands of women previously eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children funds is now about to take effect, at a time when a recession has begun and growing numbers of working people, women and men, cannot find jobs.

In her radio address, Laura Bush condemned the Taliban for the fact that "70 percent of the Afghani people are malnourished," that "one in every four children won't live past the age of five because health care is not available," and that illiteracy is high. She didn't explain how the U.S.-imposed protectorate is going to change that situation. Washington's support to the landlords and capitalists grouped in the Northern Alliance, whose forces were in power before the Taliban faction of landlords and capitalists, suggests that poverty, malnutrition, and illiteracy are not such a high priority for the U.S. government.

In fact, in the late 1970s, when the Afghan people did topple a hated regime and began to make some modest advances in land reform, a literacy campaign, expanded rights for women, and other progressive social measures, Washington responded with hostility, backing the landlord-capitalist forces that sought to overthrow the regime.

With so much concern for the conditions facing the Afghani people, you would think that Mrs. and Mr. Bush--and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress--would hail the accomplishments of Cuba.

After all, in Cuba working people overthrew a brutal dictatorship in 1959 and embarked on a revolution that has wiped out illiteracy, malnutrition, and landlessness. In Cuba women have broken down more barriers than anywhere in the Third World and play an active role in society.

That, however, violates a principle Washington considers much higher than their view of the rights of women--the "right" of the U.S. capitalists to freely exploit the world's resources and labor. God forbid that the Afghani people, or anyone else, might ever try to follow that example.  
 
 
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