Against White Feminism Read online

  I also refer to the war as “feminist” because the propagation of women’s rights was front and center as an actual goal. American women were liberated, and now they, along with male service members, would go to Afghanistan to root out the misogynist regime of the Taliban. America, thus, was not a cruel superpower bombing a small and hapless nation but a force for good that would actually help bring gender equality to a war-torn country. The effort to eradicate terror (read: Islamic terror, not white nationalist terror, despite the latter’s considerably larger tally of dead Americans) was one of providing schools and health clinics and even beauty parlors, assisting in legal reform and the development of domestic-violence shelters, drafting progressive constitutions. The small matter of devastating bombings that left thousands dead and more disabled, forever splintered families, and wrecked livelihoods was a necessary means to that shining feminist end. When a white American woman (such as Chastain’s Maya in Zero Dark Thirty) did something unimaginably violent or cruel, it was part of the larger noble project of helping Afghanistan or Iraq become countries that valued women just as America valued them.

  To fulfill the women’s liberation portion of the War on Terror, there were efforts to create Yemeni and Iraqi and Afghan “Mayas”—women trained in warfare drawn from behind enemy lines and reconstituted as double agents, something unusual if not unprecedented in the Middle East and South Asia. Millions of dollars were spent on counterterrorism training for women, including at least one elite all-female Yemeni counterterrorism unit and two programs, Sisters of Iraq and Daughters of Fallujah (designed to provide incriminating information on the Brothers of Iraq and the Sons of Fallujah, respectively).5 These programs were based on the premise that Brown women could be weaponized against the Brown men who were their family and friends—that their intrinsic identification with and loyalty to a Western definition of freedom and feminism would supersede their bonds to their communities. But the irony that some Americans could be bombing one village in the morning while other Americans inaugurated a school in another in the afternoon could not pass unnoticed by Afghan women, on whom the interests and aspirations of white American feminists were inscribed.

  The point here is not so much that the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs (the new branding given to anti-terror programs) were a failure but rather the smug white feminist assumption that Afghan women were so disconnected from their fathers, brothers, and husbands (all cruel and barbaric in the American imagination) that they would be happy to serve as spies and intelligence gatherers for the Americans. It is this failure, or refusal, to recognize that Afghan women were inextricably connected to Afghan men, and that bombing the men directly affected the women, that explains the failure of many programs initiated in the region.

  The entanglement of the “liberating women” agenda with America’s endless and ever-expanding War on Terror gave birth to “securo-feminism,” a term described by the scholar Lila Abu-Lughod to indicate the collusion between international women’s rights advocates and the global security enterprise referred to as CVE. Securo-feminism holds that fighting against terrorism is in itself a kind of feminism. The national shock and grief around the 9/11 attack located this foreign war in a very different category from any that America had fought before. The threat was not abstract or hypothetical, and it was not happening somewhere far away. It felt tangible, immediate, personal. In his book Bland Fanatics, the author and historian Pankaj Mishra recounts just how readily the War on Terror and all of its incipient brutalities were accepted even by the intellectual class, which had traditionally been critical of America’s military adventures in the developing world.6 The particular neo-imperialist flavor of the moment was captured in a bit of triumphal reporting by the Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan, who gleefully wrote that “Welcome to Injun Country” was the refrain among American soldiers all over the world, who imagined that their mission was playing cowboy to kill and dominate darker-skinned enemies by any possible means.

  But the task of saving Afghan women could put a shinier gloss on the job. As the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod points out in her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Americans promoted a “liberation lie” that positioned them as the saviors of downtrodden Afghan women.7 From this superior perch, white liberal feminists imagined gender-based violence as something found only in faraway lands. Among public commentators and journalists, the “liberation lie” facilitated blindness about both U.S. foreign policy and the problems women face in the developing world.

  In 2002, a coalition of Western women’s organizations sent an open letter to President George W. Bush, asking him to “take emergency action to save the lives and secure the future of Afghan women.” Its signatories included Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation in Virginia, together with other notable feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Meryl Streep, and Susan Sarandon. U.S. women overwhelmingly support the war, they noted, because it will “liberate Afghan women from abuse and oppression.”8 The National Organization of Women (NOW) put out statements in support of the war and its allegedly “feminist” objectives. Everyone in the mainstream American and British establishment, including white feminist heroines like eventual Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, signed on wholeheartedly to the cause of fighting the War on Terror via any means that the military, the CIA, or the president thought necessary. The disconnect between the practice of American brutality and preaching of American saviordom managed to escape notice.

  In July 2004, three years into the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush announced victory: “Three years ago, the smallest displays of joy were outlawed. Women were beaten for wearing brightly colored shoes. Today, we witness the rebirth of a vibrant Afghan culture.”9 More recently, a New York Times headline tried to celebrate victory even while noting that women themselves had a different experience: “Shelters Have Saved Countless Afghan Women, Then Why Are They Scared?”10 The article did not note that the “countless” were a fraction of the 32,000 civilians that Americans and Western forces had killed during the occupation.11

  Thus, a new flavor of white American feminism was born. Bolstered by the history of white supremacy within feminism, it resurrected nationalistic themes and made the international propagation of feminist values, such as gender equality, a necessary component of American feminism itself. Securo-feminism, a term coined by Columbia scholar Lila Abu-Lughod, stands for the collusion between countering violent extremism (CVE) initiatives and global gender rights advocacy. Securo-feminists were not simply invested in fighting the War on Terror, they were also committed to using American military power to promote American values all over the world. Just as imperial feminists during the British colonial era had convinced themselves of their own benevolence in improving the lives of native women, so too did securo-feminists believe that they were “saving” Afghanis and Iraqis from themselves.

  The birth of securo-feminism was not an accident or a coincidence. The Bush administration’s discourse on the Global War on Terror propagated the notion that belief in women’s dignity and women’s equality required support for the War on Terror. Yet the history of racial privilege that made white women so comfortable in claiming moral authority and in exercising power over Brown men went largely unexamined.

  When Iraq became the second venue after Afghanistan for the great American experiment in democracy promotion, it became necessary to establish securo-feminists there too. As President Bush put it, Iraqi women had to have rights because “the security of our own citizens depends on it.” The continuing American march to “advance of freedom in the Greater Middle East,” Bush claimed, has “given new rights and new hopes to Iraqi women” who would “play an essential part in rebuilding the nation.”12 Upholding “women’s dignity” was, in this view, directly linked to fighting terrorism since “men and women with dignity do not strap bombs to their bodies and kill innocent people.” American values respected women’s right to equality, and so
the imposition of American values was crucial to getting people in these lesser states to learn to respect women’s rights. There was, in the grammar of the War on Terror, only one way to get to gender parity, and it was in the establishment of American-style liberal democratic institutions.

  Securo-feminism, thus, bound white American feminism to the neoimperial and neoliberal project of nation-building around the world—one that Harvard professor and historian Niall Ferguson had articulated in his theory of “Anglobalization,” proposing that young Americans should be taught to go overseas and transform other nations in their own image much as Britain had done. Caught in its fevers, American feminists did not question loudly enough the wisdom of exporting feminism through bombs and drones. Trickle-down feminism, everyone assumed, would miraculously fast-forward the realization of a gender-equal, free-market world created in the self-image of America.

  In 2012, securo-feminism gained even more clout by becoming the basis upon which the United States would engage with other women around the world. In the words of Jane Mosbacher Morris, who drafted the first “U.S. Women and Counter-terrorism” strategy and the U.S. Counter-terrorism Department’s plan on Women, Peace, and Security, “We really started to solidify what the different ways are in which you can engage women on the issues of terrorism and counter-terrorism and what as a department we can be doing to get women to engage.”13 The new plan wanted women in countries involved in the War on Terror to engage in “counter-messaging and other examples of the fight against terror.” A 2016 report by the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) declared, “Women’s rights and place in society are central to the narratives of violent extremist groups, and these narratives are the terrain on which women in Afghanistan fight to establish their rights.” The argument being that since terror groups wanted to limit women’s rights, women should be enlisted in fighting them. Feminism thus was fighting terrorism. Notably this meant only that “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) and Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) needs to include women as target groups.”14 Notably, there was no mention of investing in Afghan women’s political participation, perhaps because if Afghan women had political freedom they would prioritize ending the American occupation over anything else. Instead, the goal was to train Afghan women to be puppets that would parrot whatever their American CVE or PVE instructors taught them.

  In the paradigm set out by this strategy, if women were unwilling to accept the American assumption that most of their young men were terrorists, and to collaborate with American forces in interrogating, imprisoning, or killing them, then it must be assumed they were also against women’s empowerment. In this way, supporting America’s foreign-policy interests had become synonymous with feminism.

  One particularly distressing example of the high cost to feminist progress exacted by the war is what happened in Pakistan after the capture of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. In the run-up to his capture, the CIA and the U.S. military allegedly worked with the charity Save the Children in hiring Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, to run a fake Hepatitis B vaccination program as a front for their surveillance operations.15 Per CIA instructions, Dr. Afridi and a female healthcare worker visited the bin Laden compound under the guise of administering vaccinations and managed to gain access, although they did not see bin Laden. In 2012, all foreign Save the Children staff were expelled from Pakistan, and in 2015, the entire organization there was required to shut its doors, despite having denied (and continuing to deny) that it was involved in this effort.

  The CIA managed to get their guy, but when the Pakistanis, irate at not having been told about the raid, expelled U.S. military trainers from Islamabad, they were immediately threatened with a cut of the $800 million aid package that the U.S. had promised, thus exposing yet again the coercive power that aid wields. The loss of aid money was not, however, the worst impact of the tragedy. As the British medical journal The Lancet reported, the unintended victims of the tragedy were the millions of Pakistani children whose parents now refused to have them vaccinated amidst rising rates of polio, a disease that vaccination had essentially extinguished in Western countries by the mid-twentieth century.16 In their view, if the CIA could hire a doctor to run a fake vaccine program, then the whole premise of vaccinations became untrustworthy. Within a few years of the raid, Pakistan had 60 percent of all the world’s confirmed polio cases.17

  Then there was the targeting of Pakistan’s Lady Health Worker Program. Developed in 1994, the program trains Pakistani women in basic healthcare.18 In a country that is struggling to give its women a voice, the program represents a bold woman-centered step forward that has actually increased the availability of healthcare for millions of Pakistani women who would otherwise have none. The health workers go from house to house, covering both remote rural areas and overpopulated urban ones (both constituencies in desperate need of better healthcare provision), disbursing basic preventive and clinical care, including prenatal and postnatal support and, of course, vaccinations.

  When vaccinations became suspect, so too did these health workers; their vans and convoys were attacked by terrorist groups like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which was running its own antivaccination/intimidation campaign. On November 26, 2014, four vaccinators were gunned down in Baluchistan, Pakistan. Earlier that same year a health worker named Salma Farooqi was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.19 The killings have continued, the latest occurring in April 2019, when women were shot at and one killed, finally leading to the suspension of Pakistan’s anti-polio vaccination drive.20

  The example illustrates how white feminists’ uncritical acceptance of the goals and strategies of the War on Terror fails woefully to account for the harm to feminist initiatives like the Pakistan Lady Health Worker Program. Once again, Brown women and Brown children were left facing the costs and consequences of the political actions of white women and their governments. The Save the Children episode was cleverly omitted from Zero Dark Thirty, as were most other accounts of the raid, conveniently side-stepping any discourse on the decision to endanger healthcare provision to millions of Brown women and children. The question that it poses is whether it is the lady health workers of Pakistan, meeting their community’s needs even under the threat of their own lives, or the torture-happy women of the CIA, who are the real feminist heroines of the bin Laden story.

  It is not just the United States that is guilty of doublespeak on feminism. In 2014, Sweden, led by their newly installed center-left foreign minister, Margot Wallström, announced that it was going to have a “feminist” foreign policy. The text of the resolution read: “Equality between women and men is a fundamental aim of Swedish foreign policy. Ensuring that women and girls can enjoy their fundamental human rights is both an obligation within the framework of our international commitments, and a prerequisite for reaching Sweden’s broader foreign policy goals on peace, and security and sustainable development.”21

  The year after the policy was launched, Wallström addressed a parliamentary committee, saying that given the country’s new feminist foreign policy, the Swedes would not export arms to countries that did not meet its democracy criterion. The main country at issue was Saudi Arabia, whose use of arms and intimidation to harass Saudi women’s rights activists was well known. However, in 2017 a civil society group discovered that Sweden’s arms-export relationship with Saudi Arabia was never ceased and arms exports have continued. In September 2019, after a bombing by Saudi aircraft that killed around 100 people, Wallström said that she would “speak to as many people as possible.” Listening, however, is unlikely to help a situation in which, according to a Swedish television report, Saudi Arabia continues to use Swedish arms to bomb Yemenis, displacing hundreds of thousands and killing at least 10,000. Despite its “feminist” foreign policy, Sweden remains the fifteenth largest arms exporter in the world.22

  Canada also deserves a special mention in this regard because they are so insistent in casting
their interventions and policies as located within the nexus of “feminism.” In 2017, Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the country was spearheading a “feminist international assistance policy” that had been developed after consultations with 15,000 people in sixty countries. Under the umbrella of the new policy, Canada would be spending billions of Canadian dollars toward “advancing gender equality” and “empowering women and girls.” The percentage of the total International Assistance Budget devoted to development projects geared toward this goal was to be increased from 1–2 percent to about 90 percent.

  Despite feminist “good intentions,” however, Canada’s International Assistance Budget had already been committed by the previous government of Prime Minister Harper until 2020, leaving no funds to support Freeland’s claims.23 Additionally, experts such as scholar Jessica Cadesky noted that the policy conflated “gender equality” with “women’s empowerment,” depoliticizing or over-politicizing gender to fit the government’s policy proposals. At the same time, the country refused demands by the Canadian Labour Organization and other rights groups such as Amnesty International Canada to implement measures that would allow them to report and track arms sales to foreign countries, including the United States.24 In June 2020, Canada doubled its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, despite having criticized the country for its abysmal human-rights record and having placed a moratorium on further arms exports.25 A September 2020 report by the United Nations declared that Canada was “fueling war” in Yemen; the United States, the United Kingdom, and France were also mentioned in the report as enablers.