Sunday, October 20, 2013

The politics of honoring Malala

Statecraft

HAPPYMON JACOB


Malala Yousafzai is undoubtedly a brave girl and for having the sheer courage to continue to speak of the need to educate girl children in a place like Swat in Pakistan after having been shot in the head by the Taliban, all at the young age of 15, she deserves praise. Like many of you, I also wish there were many more like her amongst us, that our girl children had the courage to speak out against gender discrimination and that we listened to their dreams and hopes more often than we normally do. And yet I am not deeply saddened by the Nobel Peace Committee’s decision not to award Malala the coveted price this year. Indeed, if the Nobel Committee were to award her the peace prize, it would have convincingly persuaded us to forget about the politics behind honoring the young girl from Swat. Let me explain.

Malala is not the first person to have braved the bullets of obscurantist forces or fought for equality or justice. Many men and women among us have done that, and continue to do so. Picking Malala out of those countless people shows the manner in which the Western media and governments have tried to portray the political situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa  (KPK) in a simplified, black and white manner – the bad Taliban Vs. the good saviors of the West.

The timing of honoring Malala is even more curious – about a year before the scheduled withdrawal of the US and NATO forces from Afghanistan. The truth is that the Western forces are facing the embarrassing situation of having to withdraw from Afghanistan without achieving much success. There is no way that the West’s Afghan campaign can be considered a success. But perceptions and interpretations of their countries’ military campaigns matter a lot in the Western drawing rooms. 

Western governments know they can’t sell the story of ‘Afghan victory’ to their people and yet there is a need to justify the humanitarian angle of their soon-to-end Afghan campaign. It is important to instill a sense of ‘mission accomplished’ belief among people. Human-interest stories sell. Honoring of Malala by the Western leadership and governments has done precisely that.  

Selective Amnesia
Western governments habitually engage in self-imposed selective amnesia. The ongoing discourse about the Taliban brand of religious extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas, for instance, is seriously ahistorical. The Western governments who would like to ‘rescue’ the native women from the clutches of obscurantism and inequality should remind themselves of the dirty role they played in creating the conditions for it. The simple question that the White man (and Woman), charged with high levels of missionary zeal, should ask himself/herself is whether their own governments had a role in bringing extremism to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s. Not only did the American and other governments fund the Mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s with help from Pakistan but also did a great deal to create the necessary social, religious and intellectual conditions for the fight against the Soviets. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani academic, says that US grants were extensively used on the intellectual war front.  Large amounts of American money went in to publishing textbooks that blasted Marxism and instilled faith in and fervour for militant Islamism. He picks a crudely comic example from a fourth-grade mathematics textbook to illustrate the weird methods used to influence the mind of the Afghan child: “One group of mujahideen attacked 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians are killed.  How many Russians fled?”

A 2002-report published by the International Crisis Group says that these textbooks were published in Dari and Pushtun, designed by the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, under a USAID grant in the early 1980s.  While these books were printed in Pakistan, the university received $51 million for the work it did. They were then distributed in the Afghan refugee camps and Pakistani madrasas.  

Are the natives fundamentally uncivilized? 
The subtext of the Western discourse about the situation in Pakistan’s KPK and Afghanistan is that the people and societies therein are essentially uncivilized and the rest of the world would need to do a lot of work in civilizing them. While not many of us would have a problem in critiquing the kind of religious extremism and social obscurantism that is prevent in some parts of those societies, we would be doing a great intellectual disservice to ourselves if we forget to recall the progressive history of those places. There is enough literature out there providing ample evidence of how progressive Kabul and surrounding areas were in the 1960s and 1970s. There was a time when educating girls was a social norm in Kabul and it was not compulsory for women to wear a veil covering their heads. The CIA-directed Mujahideen war in the 1980s and the rise of the Taliban (helped by the ISI and unimpeded by the CIA) in the 1990s put an end to all of that. It is convenient for the Western governments today to talk about the need to bring about women’s liberation and girls’ education in KPK and Afghanistan and easy for the western media to publish heartwarming stories about Malala. But it would neither be easy nor convenient for them to recall how their own governments played a crucial role in the making of contemporary Afghanistan and KPK.

(Source: Greater Kashmir, October 20, 2013. URL: http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Oct/20/the-politics-of-honoring-malala-5.asp)