An "Appeal to George W. Bush," published as a paid ad on the editorial page of the May 24 New York Times, is spearheaded by the group Equality Now and signed by 19 individuals, including Eleanor Smeal, president of The Feminist Majority; Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women; Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine; and actresses Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda.

The organizations and individuals listed on the ad call on the president to "keep his promise" and deploy more troops in Afghanistan in order to "protect the lives and secure the future of Afghan women."

Working people in the United States and all defenders of women’s rights should reject this reactionary campaign. Instead, we can expose the real nature of the war against and occupation of Afghanistan and demand Washington get every one of its soldiers, ships, and warplanes out of the region.

Within days of the publication of the ad, working people in one Afghan village were raising an international protest over a nighttime assault on their community by U.S. forces who killed at least one man and took away 50 others. The villagers were particularly incensed, according to reporters, by the fact that the troops bound the hands of one woman and that a young girl trying to escape the onslaught was killed when she accidentally fell into a well. So much for their "lives and secure future."

As the incident shows, this campaign calling for more U.S. troops to be deployed has nothing to do with advancing the fight for women’s rights in Afghanistan or anywhere else. Rather, it gives political cover to the most rapacious and brutal imperialist power in the world--the ruling class of the United States--in its drive to strengthen its influence in the region by establishing a protectorate in Afghanistan.

The ad asserts that women in the United States supported Washington’s assault on Afghanistan, "in large part because they believed your promises that it would liberate Afghan women from abuse and oppression." The appeal continues, "The war against terrorism will only be successful if the struggle for peace and democracy succeeds. September 11th taught American women that the safety and security and well-being of Afghan women is the safety of us all."  
 
War on working people
But from start to finish the "war on terrorism" is in fact a war on working people--in Afghanistan, the United States, and around the world. The Bush administration’s aim is to enforce the domination of capital, which is the source of the modern-day oppression of women and of every reactionary holdover from pre-capitalist forms of class rule. To give any support to this assault sets back the struggle of workers and farmers worldwide to put an end to capitalist rule, which is the only way to open the road to the full emancipation of women.

Aside from whether or not "U.S. women" all believed the cynical expressions of concern for Afghan women from the president, his wife, and of Secretary of State Colin Powell as U.S. forces were pummeling Afghan villages with missiles and cluster bombs, the appeal helps cover over the fact that the very same parties have led a decades-long bipartisan assault on women’s rights at home. (Working people should never forget that General Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a reporter in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War that the number of Iraqi men, women, and children killed in that U.S.-led slaughter was "really not a number I’m terribly interested in.")

The pro-imperialist position of the bourgeois feminists comes as no surprise. When the Carter administration reinstituted registration for the draft as part of the U.S. rulers’ renewed militarization drive following their defeat in Vietnam, the national leadership of NOW took the stance that if there was going to be conscription, women should have the "right" to be drafted alongside men. It’s useful to read how the Socialist Workers Party rejected this position in 1980.

"The question of the draft cannot be separated from the class character and function of the military," the party said. "The military is the centerpiece of the bourgeois state--the armed ruling class against the working class. Moreover, the U.S. imperialist army cannot fight a progressive war. It can’t advance the struggles of the oppressed and exploited one iota anywhere in the world. We say, not one soldier for this army. Are women excluded? Good. It is that much less cannon fodder."

SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters explained in "Washington’s Third Militarization Drive," printed in New International no. 7: "By linking the fight for the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] with extending draft registration and the draft of women, figures in NOW and other women’s rights organizations gave the kiss of death to the ERA. The idea that ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment might bring closer the conscription of young women was used demagogically by the enemies of the ERA. Many women and men who had been inclined toward it, or undecided about it, turned against the amendment."  
 
The ‘white woman’s burden’
The appeal for Bush to "protect" Afghan women reeks of what Rudyard Kipling dubbed the "white man’s burden." In the early 1900s many in Europe who called themselves socialists justified support to the colonial policies of their own bourgeois governments in the name of bringing "civilization" and "enlightenment" to the darker-skinned peoples of the world. Just as Equality Now and Co. propose today in Afghanistan.

For those who are genuinely fighting to advance women’s rights in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the pamphlet Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara is well worth reading. Sankara was a leader of the 1983–87 revolution in Burkina Faso. That revolution gave a glimpse of what is possible, even in one of the poorest countries in the world.

At the time of the revolution Burkina had the highest infant mortality rate in the world at more than 20 percent, 92 percent of the population could not read or write, and the overwhelming majority of the population lived under semi-feudal conditions. Peasant women made daily trips of as much as 10 miles to collect water from the nearest well. The revolution there took on all of these questions, and viewed the advancement of women as essential to advancing all of Burkinabe society.

Speaking to thousands of women March 8, 1987, at an International Women’s Day rally in the capital, Ouagadougou, Sankara explained, "Inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society, where men and women will enjoy equal rights, resulting from an upheaval in the means of production and in all social relations. Thus, the status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them. In fact, throughout the ages...there has been a close parallel between class exploitation and women’s inferior status."

He went on to detail the revolution’s efforts to combat the specific oppression faced by women, including the dowry price and so-called female circumcision and to increase access to water, child care, and education.

But to begin taking these steps, the toilers of Burkina Faso first had to organize to fight imperialism and establish a popular revolutionary government. The same challenge is posed in Afghanistan, and throughout the world.

In the United States, the most important contribution working people can make to the emancipation of women--and all of humanity--is get the boot of imperialism off the back of workers and farmers around the world. This can only be done as part of a revolutionary struggle to overturn the rule of the capitalist class and replace it with a government of workers and farmers. Then, together in collaboration with brothers and sisters from other countries, we can begin a common battle to put an end to the exploitation of capitalist society and the oppression of women that is deeply rooted in class society.  
 
 
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