In November 2001, as the US threw bombs on Afghanistan, then first lady Laura Bush spoke on a presidential radio address. She proclaimed that the “fight against terrorism” being waged in Afghanistan after 9/11 was also about the liberation of women. This rhetoric was used throughout the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, framing the US as a noble, intervening party standing between the Taliban and the women of the region. Images of women like Aisha Mohammadzai, an Afghan woman scarred by her Taliban fighter husband, made the front page of TIME, as the US attempted to pull on the heartstrings of its people to gain support for their invasion, which ultimately led to the deaths of over 46,000 Afghan civilians.
This isn’t the only time women have been thrown to the forefront of the West’s wars on Muslim-majority nations. The war on Iraq featured women as the West’s justification for violence, and so have the continued hostilities, and eventual war, on Iran.
It isn’t new. Lord Cromer, British consul-general of Egypt, justified the 1899 British colonization of Egypt as a mission of women’s liberation. All the while, Cromer actively contributed to the foundation of the “Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage” back in England.
The West instrumentalizes women’s issues in Muslim-majority countries to sell its imperialist agenda to voters. Experts refer to this process as “imperial feminism.” Imperial feminism means colonial exploits are framed as “liberation” to make them more palatable to Western states.
Critiquing imperial feminism doesn’t mean denying the systemic abuse and gender-based oppression that women face in every country — Muslim-majority countries being no exception. However, Western countries’ governments’ repeated use of women’s issues as a selling point for imperialism will never truly address the struggles of women because it was never their objective to begin with.
The West using women’s rights as war propaganda enables ruling governments across the world to reduce women’s movements as nothing more than a product of foreign intervention. For example, in Iran, the Woman, Life, Freedom protests erupted in response to the killing of Mahsa Amini for allegedly not wearing the hijab the way the state demanded. Iran’s former supreme leader Ali Khamenei claimed the protests were a product of Israeli and American foreign intervention, rather than genuine outrage against gender-based violence.
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan, framed as a war of women’s liberation, ended up taking so many civilian lives and caused such widespread damage to the nation that many experts believe it actually helped the Taliban in their recruiting efforts. This reinforced the oppressive regime’s stronghold on Afghanistan, and has led to the current gender apartheid in the country.
The Trauma, Violence, & Abuse review journal found that some of the strongest indicators for increased gender-based violence are poverty and economic stress, as well as exposure to violence. War’s impact not just on the violence observed in a country, but also on the economic insecurity and poverty it reproduces make it a wholly inappropriate tool of women’s liberation, as it creates the conditions within which gender-based violence tends to emerge.
If the West really cared about women’s rights, they would stop systemically perpetrating the instability and insecurity in West Asia that increases women’s oppression and stops their liberatory movements from taking hold.
