In the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, U.S. politicians and media pundits alike have argued that Afghan women’s rights are now in peril as they weather life under the repressive and cruel Taliban. Many have gone on to make the case that the United States’ presence as a force for securing women’s rights was in fact a necessary one, further reinforcing the idea that in the end, the United States was a benevolent force in the country.
While Afghan women activists and leaders have fervently resisted the Taliban’s resuscitation — as demonstrated by the many protests that have taken place in cities like Herat, Kabul, and Ghazni over the past few weeks — this hardly signals the view that the 20-year U.S. occupation was liberatory. In fact, as many activists have been clamoring for years, the United States played a significant role in exacerbating existing structures of corruption, warlordism, and bribery that allowed the Taliban to return as a major political player, two decades after they were ostensibly ousted from power.
Despite the wanton violence the United States and its allies wreaked on Afghanistan through their military intervention, bookended by one of the most chaotic military withdrawals in contemporary history that has left hundreds of thousands of people stranded under a regime they had no part in bringing to power, it remains difficult for the American public to frame the U.S. mission in Afghanistan as anything but a gift to the Afghan people. Though the invasion and occupation were done without the meaningful consent of Afghan civilians, self-determination and sovereignty are now being depicted as opportunities that the United States has afforded Afghanistan in the wake of its irresponsible exit.
The notion of “benevolent governance” as a system of power relations refers to the idea that certain forms of authoritative rule are an expression of generosity on the part of those who rule, usually under the pretext that a given population lacks the infrastructure, reasoning, and public will to rule themselves. It is a discourse through which imperial projects justify themselves as anchored in an ethics of care as opposed to what they really are: a politics of exploitation, extraction, and geopolitical grandstanding. As Women’s Studies scholar Carole Stabile and Media Studies scholar Deepa Kumar have noted, “suffering women are subjects for political and public concern only insofar as their suffering can be used to advance the interests of US elites.” In 972 Mag.