Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Economics Prize, 1998. Pic Courtesy: Outlook Magazine

‘Tis the Nobel season anyways, and while we are yakking up Obama and his Nobel Peace Prize, here is another winner. Albeit for economics, and from another year.  Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 for his work in welfare economics. While I have never had the stomach to digest his massive tome The Argumentative Indian, I did manage to read through his interview with Vinod Mehta in Outlook magazine.

Asked how many cheers he would give Indian democracy, Sen replied he would give it more than two and somewhere less than three.  “If you take the view, is democracy functioning as well as it could, it may even be one. But given the adversities we have had—a very poor country, largely illiterate, border wars with China and Pakistan, with Pakistan going its peculiarly difficult way, the relationship problems that we have had with the United States and the global powers—have we done as well as expected? Yes. Except in one big respect, namely that I had expected that non-dramatic deprivations would receive more attention than they ended up getting. Famines did go away with democracy, as I had expected, but I thought other things like gender inequality and the huge undernourishment of children would get more attention, but they did not get enough. That’s the disappointment.”

Famines did go away with democracy, as I had expected, but I thought other things like gender inequality and the huge undernourishment of children would get more attention, but they did not get enough. That’s the disappointment.

On Prakash Karat’s (General Secretary of the Communist Party of India) ridiculous statement that Cuba is a good role model for India, Amartya Sen  laughs and says that there are things to learn from Cuba about health-care and basic education, not about democracy and not about media freedom. He notes that it is a very unfree country. Sen also points out there are things to learn from America, but not about medical care for the masses , adding there is no country that provides us with a model.

Read Amartya Sen’s full interview here.

In her new piece for The Nation, Ann Jones has ripped the heart out of the argument that we should continue our mission in Afghanistan to prevent the plight of women. As someone who has worked with women there, Jones comes to this conclusion out of frustration at the Karzai administration, the extremist judiciary and the misogynistic rural warlords who have done so much to retard the advancement of women that there are not many steps backwards for women’s rights to take.

Jones kicks off her depressing account of the Afghan woman by treating us to the country’s constitution, which promises , “The citizens of Afghanistan–whether man or woman–have equal rights and duties before the law.”

While some in the west might see the borrowed language of equality and freedom, the Afghan court interprets the phrase to suggest that men have a right to work while women have a right to obey their husbands. Not like rural women are really bringing class action lawsuits to challenge that assumption in the first place.

Next, Jones explains how President Karzai signed the Shiite Personal Status Law through run of the mill horsetrading with different conservative blocs. He didn’t think twice about selling out women’s rights (his own wife, a doctor, is rarely allowed to leave home). This law, also known as the Marital Rape Law includes the following provisions:

1. Husbands are authorized to deny food to a wife who does not provide sexual services once every four days (assuming the man has four wives, the maximum allowed under the law).

2. Only under rare conditions can women inherit, divorce or have guardianship of their children.

3. Women cannot marry without permission, and may be forced into marriage, beginning at the age of 16. (It apparently took a serious lobbying effort from women in Parliament to up the age from nine)

4. Women cannot leave the home except for “legitimate purposes”, as defined by their husbands or fathers.

5. Raping a woman outside of marriage is considered a property crime, requiring monetary restitution to the aggrieved man, not the victim.

In case anyone was wondering, the Afghan Supreme Court has declared the law constitutional. After its passage, even a female member of Parliament (one not under the control of her local warlord) forlornly conceded, “without a written law, men can do whatever they want.”

The marital rape law brought to mind the great philosophical challenge to democracy: what to do when, as in Nigeria, a law can be passed calling for a woman to be stoned to death for adultery, even if she was a rape victim?

Anyone who has traveled abroad, or even in parts of the United States, knows that sexism is a matter of gradation, and that women face appalling conditions all over the world. But the stuff coming out of Afghanistan is hard to match in its monstrosity.

Here is the reality: right now female activists are murdered when they go public. We aren’t just talking about rabble-rousers though- popular local TV performer Shaima Rezayee, who was shot and killed after complaining of her gender driven ouster from television, and an actress, Parwin Mushtakhel fled Afghanistan after her husband was murdered for letting her out of the house.

According to UNIFEM, 87% of women are beaten regularly at home, and rape is nearly as prevalent, although women are unlikely to be forthcoming about rape, since it can land them in jail for adultery. UNAMA researchers concluded after one case, “For women, “human rights are values, standards, and entitlements that exist only in theory and at times, not even on paper.”

Because it is U.S trained policemen who are hunting battered and raped women to throw them in jail, one can understand why the U.S plan to accelerate police training and arm more local men doesn’t exactly have women fired up and ready to go.

Interestingly, Jones makes the case that in pre-Soviet Afghanistan, half of the nation’s doctors and civil servants, along with three-quarters of the teachers were women. Jones suggests that the endless cycle of violence has permanently elevated ruthless, violent men to power in Afghanistan, and destroyed the civil institutions where women once played a prominent role.

Unfortunately, Jones doesn’t have an easy answer- she opposes staying the course and escalation, and admits that life wouldn’t get better under the Taliban.

As Mark Danner explained to Bill Moyers the other night, though, sometimes the journalist is just the journalist. There’s nothing worse than a writer squeezing in a half-baked solution to close out a well thought-out fact piece (my paraphrasing). Ann Jones is one journalist, and while her perspective deserves more credence than most, there are probably some foreigners and locals that would claim she understates the heightened malice the Taliban would bring. But her article is too comprehensive to recreate in one diary without heinous copyright infringement, so I’ll simply encourage people to check out the whole article.

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As a post-script, it always bears mentioning that hypothetical conversations about “the Taliban taking over” completely disregard the fact that the Taliban or various anti-American insurgents dominate most of the countryside

Read Janos Marton’s entire blog post at outofafghanistan.blogspot.com

Last week President Obama conducted the fifth strategy meeting with his national security team on Afghanistan. Looking how quickly the U.S. is sinking into this hole, I decided to do a little bit of poking around of my own in New York City to get a sense what Afghans living here had to say about what was happening.

As expected, many expats were either extremely reluctant to comment or were decidedly politically correct- one of them even quoting Gandhi and Martin Luther King to me. But it was interesting nonetheless to head out Kissena Boulevard, in Queens, which is home to almost 10,000 Afghan expat families.

Many of the Afghans in NYC fled Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of the country from 1979-89. In recent years, continuous fighting between NATO-led troops and militants in Afghanistan has prevented many of these families from returning to their homeland. “What’s the point?,” asked Ahmad Waish, a law enforcement officer in New York who hasn’t been back home for 30 years. “The Americans may shoot me, thinking I am an Afghan fighter,” said Waish who was dressed in a traditional Chapan (Coat) with a Keffiyeh around his neck, “And the fighters may attack me saying I am American.” Waish has also been unable to visit his father who lives in Kandahar. “My father can’t go outside – he will be bombed to pieces.”

Outside the Masjid Saliheen at Kissena Boulevard the streets empty out ahead of the evening prayers. Men in beards and tunic-pants hurry to make it to the mosque in time. Two blocks down, in a park across the street, three men sit in a circle playing Chess or Shatranj on a board made of stone. “We are veterans of war,” says one Afghani who did not wish to be named, referring to the Soviet invasion, the Taliban and the American forces. “We have seen so many killings, homicides. We don’t support war in any form. War is destruction,” he said, adding he was against any troop increase in Afghanistan. As he moved his pawns across the chess board, his companions – a Hispanic immigrant and another Afghani from Kandahar puffed silently on their cigarettes. “I remember the first time America attacked Kabul – the rockets firing- bombs left and right in the city. Sometimes I feel like the war was imposed on America – Sept 11 forced America into this war.”

Other Afghanis like 27 year old Yama Qadari are weighed down by a similar sense of war fatigue and are against putting more boots on the ground. “If there was actually any progress on the ground, then why would we need to send more troops to the country?” asks Qadari, adding there needs to be a cohesive strategy to end the carnage in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan started off as a multilateral effort in 2001. At present, there are 39,000 NATO troops along with 65,000 Americans. If the President decides to dispatch another 45,000 more U.S. troops, the longest American war would also potentially turn into its deadliest. “Afghanistan for the last 30 years has been at war,” added Waish. “ Most people under 30 were born under bullets. Children were born under war. What is the condition of people like that? Their main instinct is ‘kill in order to survive.’”

Others expressed cynicism at the President’s Peace Prize. “What peace are they talking about,” asked Akram Jalali, a former medical worker in Queens.” Everyday there are bombings in Kabul, people are dying all the time, they don’t know the meaning of peace,” he fumed. “People are suffering, innocent civilians are dying. Anyone who has been reading the papers knows the carnage there,” said Waish. Meanwhile, as the Chess game continues in the park, one of the Afghani immigrants sums up the feeling in the community. “Everyone here is tired,” he said. “If only people paid more attention to the teachings of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.”

Despite the gloom surrounding the state of affairs in Afghanistan, some immigrants like Yama Qadari are hopeful for the future. He smiles as he says “No country is beyond repair.”