Liberals Don't Do Realpolitik, Do They?

This one's been bugging me for a while... there was a story in the Stars & Stripes a few days ago, the day the peace jirga started, that one of our busybody Congresscritters (female D from MD, I forget the name) [I couldn't find a story in the Stripes online, but I believe HL is referring to Representative Donna Edwards. -the Armorer] was propounding that any political settlement that the Afghans come up with, it needs to include womens' rights.

Now, womens' rights are a good thing, and you can't fully do individual rights in the western classical liberal tradition without including them, but really, Madame Congresscritter, do you really think you're being helpful at this juncture? Did you ever stop to think that "When the Americans say womens rights, it means they want to turn all our women into sex crazed harlots" isn't a quite handy, culturally useful information operations tool for the bad guys over here?

Let's stop and think about this for a minute. You want to give Afghan women full up, western style equality, legally and socially, right now today. Did you ever stop to think for a minute how long it took us the the West to get to where we are? Let me give you a hint: It took over 130 years after the adoption of the Constitution for women in the US to be guaranteed the right to vote by an amendment to that same document. And the ratification of the Constitution came a couple of centuries after the beginnings of what we call western classical liberalism.

The Afghans, as a society, haven't really reached the point of the dawn of classical liberalism as of yet. So you're basically trying to ram several hundred years worth of social change down their throats, right-the-hell-now. Is it any wonder they might be just a tad resistant, and that that might be making what we're trying to get done over here more difficult? (Nevermind the aspect of an outsider trying to tell the Afghans how to run what they rightly view as their internal affairs. How would Americans have reacted to some Brit MP nattering on about "However you Yanks end that civil war of yours, it needs to include equality for the negroes." We'd have told them to get bent, and rightly so.)

The endstate we're trying to achieve here is one with a stable Afghan government that is in enough control of its own territory that it can prevent homicidal Islamist assholes like OBL and crew from setting up shop here. Whether such a government includes the Taliban or not, and whether women wear burqas or not, is really beside the point. As long as we get to that endstate, that's where our national interests lie.

So kindly STFU and stop making my job harder.