The American Crusade for Sexual Freedom in Afghanistan (is Bad)
Gay rights could never have come from a colonial occupation. Stop mourning it.
“Support for the taliban” is no longer a political position, let alone a moral one. You don’t get to choose what side you like best anymore. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is now a war-torn nation at serious risk of a famine and there has been no meaningful response from any segment of American society of any sanction or deprivation of the Afghan people by the western financial institutions.
If there’s any chunk of ideological coherence in these people, they’d be attacking Western Union and the other financial institutions, which are based in their own countries and have responded to the loss of their war by robbing the people of Afghanistan after fostering a dependence on their haraam, anti-Islamic banking infrastructure for 20 years.
The most pressing needs in Afghanistan are clearly to maintain rule of law and avert a potential famine, not to start another war because bourgeois colonisers don’t like the government.
Instead the “anti-”imperialists turn to me and ask me about the gay people who are allegedly “running for their lives”, as if expecting the principled Marxist-Leninist stance to be dictated by whoever’s being most histrionic on social media or in the British tabloids that day and how valid they are.
I. Before anything else, a pro-occupation strategy is simply stupid.
It should be taken as a simple fact that the occupation government in Afghanistan was always doomed, because it was based on the oppression of the people. Anyone who placed their hopes in it is ignorant. Anyone who wanted it to continue wanted the oppression of the people to continue, which, morality aside, is strategic lunacy. No state can remain at eternal war with its people. The most powerful militaries on Earth have consistently demonstrated their incapability against some of the most powerless peoples. They are people who placed their hopes in a side of a war; a doomed side. The Islamic Emirate has declared amnesty to such people, which is a correct position.
This above photo is taken from an article NBC actually ran, which praised “the extraordinary progress on gay rights in the U.S. military in recent years”. The article ends by asking, completely sincerely:
I’m curious: since when does Tony Perkins think we should appease the cultural beliefs of Afghan Muslims? Some of these same Afghans might vehemently oppose the ongoing presence of U.S. troops in their country, too. Does the Family Research Council think we should avoid flying the American flag out of fear this might offend them?
Or is it more likely Perkins doesn’t want to see a gay pride flag in Afghanistan or anywhere else because he doesn’t like gay people?
So this is the real nature of the big diversity win in Afghanistan. In a manner not entirely dissimilar to the Israeli Zionists, certain elements of the LGBT movement have decided that there is no way for them to achieve their aims without the support of a genocidal world power which nakedly displays its antagonism towards the people. That is, assuming they’re real people and not something made up wholesale by a British tabloid, which I obviously won’t rule out.
Another article from i news, which is, correctly or not, considered fairly reputable in comparison to other British tabloids, but which is still owned by the Daily Mail, says the same thing in not so many words, describing the people of Afghanistan in literally dehumanising terms.
“These people are not human,” it literally says, quoting an anonymised source under the pseudoym Aziz. “This society has nothing but hate and barbaric actions towards gay people. If I get out if will be like going to heaven for me.” Aziz and the other anonymised sources in the article give conflicting reports about what could happen if they’re discovered to be gay, from “they will just shoot him on the spot” to being “beaten and thrown out of the house” to “forced marriage” or “they’re just entering people’s (sic) houses and robbing them.”
It isn’t clear whether Aziz thinks they’re specifically robbing gay people. Before the time of this article’s publication, it was known that there was a massive issue with organised street crime in Kabul, and that some people were pretending to be Taliban and going around robbing people. It’s possible that Aziz didn’t know this, but it’s a clear neglect of journalistic obligation by i to circulate this uncritically, especially as it is now well known that the IEA has done an unprecedentedly excellent job of containing looting and burglary, on which we’ll touch again later.
But even according to i, there’s clear cause for hope. Another anonymised source, “Sadat”,
tells of how a security official arrived at one gay man’s house to murder him but was from the same ethnic group as his intended target and knew his family.
“He had remorse and second thoughts, so didn’t carry it out. He actually admitted it. He said: ‘I was sent here to kill you, but I’ve changed my mind.’
[…]
[Sadat] would hear occasionally of someone coming out to their parents who would not be beaten or whipped but accepted.
“If that was happening under the democratically elected government (sic), you don’t think it’s going to happen under the Taliban?” asks Sadat, meaning it in a very different sense than is implied by my framing here. However, I do believe that Afghanistan is going to continue to be a three-dimensional society where some people do support their family members regardless of who’s in the government.
The security official, by the way? Not Taliban. An American goon.
We do not live in Shouldlandia. But if tomorrow the shouldists seize power, they should let Aziz and Sadat and whoever else wants, go wherever. I don’t think the UK is a good idea. But fine. People have to assess their own levels of risk and I sincerely don’t have anything to say about that in regard to any particular individual in this situation. I can’t stand living in my country of birth either, and it’d be hypocritical to tell anyone else they Should. But let’s return to the real world we actually live in — the one where this obviously isn’t a real solution.
An agenda of any social reform which works by oppressing the people is doomed, whether we like that reform or hate it. Like I wrote last week, the Taliban is vulnerable to a loss of support from the tribal networks that constitute its primary power base. Ordering people to kill members of their families over bullshit is a pretty good way to piss off tribal networks. If it’s made policy, it will be a policy that will seriously compromise the Emirate’s power. Morality and “sharia” aside, it’s not good politics, and is unlikely to be pursued by a government pursuing stability and the rule of law. If it is, it’s, before anything else, a tactical error. Any sort of geographical shuffling which brings in outsiders to carry out death sentences may also be considered a violation of tribal rights.
Moreover, there’s little reason to believe that any sort of broad-sweeping social change is going to come from a change in regime. That isn’t how it works. Any social change that didn’t come from the barrel of an American gun is going to stay in place. But that change has been stunted for 20 years.
If i is to be believed, what we’re dealing with is at least some elements of a “movement” that placed their efforts entirely in the losing side of a war. (I suspect there are other gay people in Afghanistan who maybe had a little more foresight, but this article doesn’t quote them.) Before anything else, this was a doomed strategy and we can now see why. To quote Aziz:
He has words for the US President: “You said, ‘Our mission is accomplished in Afghanistan’. But we fought alongside you, this government fought alongside you, to accomplish your mission. You abandoned us as our people are dying and suffering.”
It may be Joe Biden himself who said it best: “no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan. What’s happening now could just as easily happen five years ago or fifteen years in the future”.
We should not mourn for the monstrous occupation government. We should see its destruction as a necessary historical step.
Not just in Afghanistan, but worldwide, any movement that aligns itself with neoliberalism, which heralds and praises neoliberal policies, whose “safety” is contingent on these policies continuing forever, is doomed and illegitimate. As the backlash intensifies against these policies, it also intensifies against its rainbow-clad mascots. It’s a non-viable strategy even if America maintains its occupation forever. Afghanistan is just a more explicit visual of the global trend.
I wrote back in June that
As the contradictions of this moribund economic system become more and more apparent, LGBT people become increasingly scapegoated due to being increasingly thrust into the spotlight by an unelected neo-priesthood of [well-connected and charismatic LGBT celebrities] appointed by the ruling class to “represent” us. We are a sacred cow today, scapegoat tomorrow.
Begging for representation in a system imploding with contradictions is not a wise move even for what it aims to accomplish, it is tactically asinine because it relies on wavering alliances of convenience.
Afghanistan is not some upside-down bizarro world that follows its own natural laws. In any country on Earth, social change comes about through communication of ideas from one segment of society to another. For that reason, communication between parts of society must be possible in order to make social progress. Not only has social progress been stunted under the American occupation, but “legal” progress has been stilled as well, likely partly due to the fact that it is pointless to talk about legal reform when there is not rule of law. In 20 years of neoliberal occupation, nobody has looked twice at the fact that the death penalty for “sodomy” has remained a part of the “law”. Also, as I wrote last week, if you want people to stop acting like they live in a feudal opium colony, you have to actually develop the country beyond a feudal opium colony. You can’t just bomb their hospitals until they skip the social movement and go straight to gay rights, and if we’re going to talk shoulds, any gay rights paradise you can acquire that way should be worse than hell for any decent person. It isn’t a sympathetic objective. It’s flatly evil.
So how is it the fault of the Taliban that you pursued a failed strategy?
II. Since you can’t just have a coloniser displace the society, you need to engage with its circumstances the hard way.
There’s a very convenient liberal myth where historical sodomy laws are primarily about consenting relations between adult men. This nonsense has been used by liberals to malign everyone from Jesus to Stalin, who the liberals propose declared some kind of open war against modern gay dudes by advocating or implementing any kind of law against literally anything that gets a dude’s rocks off.
However I think it is very good that the Taliban is aiming to abolish pederasty, which is an issue that the Taliban has been consistently progressive on, to the point that a 2015 New York Times article wrote, emphasis mine:
Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.
The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.
“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”
Apparently the Americans feared endangering their relations with “local culture” and considered that it was a matter for the local police, who themselves have been reported to participate in and enable it, and that interfering would be a “violation of Afghan sovereignty”.
Yeah, that was the big concern, apparently. Apparently the sovereignty of Afghanistan is a big concern for them. Only when it comes to raping children though.
A 2002 article from the same source confesses, over the din of the Bush-era “make a big glass crater out of the fuckin’ middle east” ethos, emphasis again mine:
Though the puritanical Taliban tried hard to erase pedophilia from male-dominated Pashtun culture, now that the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is gone, some people here are indulging in it once again.
‘’During the Taliban, [fucking children] was difficult, but now it is easy again,’’ said Ahmed Fareed.
The Taliban, for their part, have always opposed this practice. By “oppose” I do not mean that they wrote the New York Times and said that they were “sick to their stomach” as the soldiers in the above article do. The Americans did not fight the custom to destroy it as it has been destroyed in much of the world including Afghanistan before they got there.
Apparently, this was an extremely common practice among the American backed security forces and even American contractors. It’s a culture that was fostered by the occupation. Contrary to any shit Khaled Hosseini and his ilk have to say about it, it’s an occupation problem, and not a Taliban problem.
So when we talk about it being a violation of Afghan sovereignty to persecute pederasty, what we’re saying is that by persecuting it, America would be undermining confidence in the “security forces” and local police to address the problem. I understand the concern, but I think what really undermined confidence in the occupation government’s police was the widespread, well-documented problem of them abducting and raping young boys. This was a reflection of a wider problem maintaining rule of law in the country, that problem being that nobody was doing it.
When the IEA emerged victorious in Afghanistan, they announced that they wanted to build an inclusive government. They announced not only amnesty, but that they wanted to incorporate elements from the occupation government who had governing experence. According to Abdul Qahar Balkhi, of the Taliban’s Cultural Commission, who spoke to Al Jazeera on the 22nd:
Our foremost priority is discipline in our own ranks and not enforcing laws on others but enforcing it on ourselves first and then giving it as an example for the rest of society to follow suit. So we are the first ones, and our members, if they are involved in such things, will be the first to be prosecuted.
All this taken together is to say that the Taliban needs to prove that it is responsible in ways that the collaborationist government were not, and that means taking up the tasks it could not and maintaining rule of law. This is the foremost obligation of any serious state and the stability of the entire country relies on that before anything else. I am not reminding them. I am reminding you. This is how the IEA claims and demonstrates an authority that the Americans didn’t dare; this is how they demonstrate that while there was no state before, there is one now.
This, not rainbow flags, and not “puritanism” (lol), is what Afghanistan’s sodomy laws are actually about. The elimination of pederasty is a just initiative by the IEA and in light of it, it’s easy to see why “sexual freedom” is not high on the Taliban’s list of priorities.
In this context, I think it’s before anything dishonest to paint the IEA as being “homophobic” in exactly the same way that American evangelicals are homophobic. They don’t live in Shouldlandia, they live in Afghanistan, where shit’s rough, and they don’t have all the options that people in places like America do.
In this context, the gay community, not so much because they are gay but because they are human, should be fully in favour of the Taliban’s initiatives against pederasty and should seek to resolve the legal and legislative issues in differentiating that from relations between consenting adults. It is vital for them to actually take part in the communication of information from one part of their society to another. Not every single person, but someone must do this task which is vital to any social movement. It is vital for people to actually acquire the skills important to social movements and for that matter to building a society which badly needs skilled individuals, intellectuals, economists, etc. If you can read me, why can’t you read The Proletarianisation of the Albanian Peasantry or Imperialism and the Revolution?
There won’t be any shortcut for most of them where they get to fuck off to Seattle or London or some other liberal hellhole. That’s not how you actually define the role of a social group in society. There aren’t any shortcuts here. I say this not to be an asshole but as a veteran of this struggle for most of my life, who’s spent blood and money, sacrificed safety, career, and family in the path of it. But I’ve never asked America to bomb my family and abduct young boys for it.
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