Rescuing Women and Children

Emily S. Rosenberg

Nine weeks after planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on November 17, 2001, Laura Bush became the first First Lady to deliver the president's Saturday morning radio address to the nation. "The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists," she explained. "Women have been denied access to doctors" in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, and they "face beatings for laughing. The Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish," she said. The day before, the Department of State had hosted Eleanor Smeal, head of the Feminist Majority Foundation, and representatives of several other women's groups to help publicize the release of its "Report on the Taliban's War against Women," which emphasized that the U.S. war against terrorism was, in part, a war on behalf of women and children. The report detailed measures put in place by the Taliban-controlled Afghan goverment—the enforced wearing of the burka (a loose gown that drapes the entire body), the prohibitions against women's driving or even taking taxis unaccompanied by a male, the ban on educating women over the age of eight, and the heavily restricted access to health care. "With one of the world's worst human rights records, the Taliban has perpetrated egregious acts of violence against women, including rape, abduction, and forced marriage."1	1
The First Lady's speech and the State Department's report joined a broader campaign—long waged by a diverse array of Afghan, American, and transnational women's groups—against the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan. Three weeks later, when signing the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act (a bill that had been sponsored by thirteen women senators led by the Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas), President George W. Bush received standing ovations when speaking to an audience of women activists.2 Who, before September 11, could have imagined such a scene of common endeavor between the Bush administration and feminist leaders?	2
During the next several weeks, the U.S. media embraced this theme of overthrowing the Taliban in order to rescue Afghan women and children. The same day as the First Lady's address, CNN premiered a new documentary by the much celebrated team that had produced Beneath the Veil. First shown in June 2001, Beneath the Veil features Saira Shah, an Afghan now living in London. Shah, assisted by underground activists associated with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), had smuggled cameras into Afghanistan to document the plight of women and children. In a particularly dramatic scene that RAWA had filmed earlier, a Taliban official stood in the middle of a public arena in Kabul and executed a kneeling woman, shrouded in a burka, for a seemingly minor infraction of the Taliban's restrictive laws. The successor, CNN-sponsored documentary that premiered on the day of the First Lady's address, called Unholy War, had been filmed in October in the midst of the United States/Northern Alliance fight against the Taliban. Like Beneath the Veil, it mixed an adventure tale of Shah's dangerous journey into Afghanistan with an exposé of the Taliban's victimization of women and children. Adding an explicit theme of rescue, the central drama of this film was Shah's quest to find and assist three girls, featured in the earlier documentary, who had been traumatized by seeing their mother killed. Both documentaries played repeatedly in the weeks following. Major news magazines and newspapers that week also featured stories that paralleled, and drew from, the State Department reports on the plight of women; news talk shows brimmed with stories of women's sufferings; and on November 21 the PBS show The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer featured a panel of three Afghan women who discussed the recent history of restriction and abuse.3	. . .