5
THE problem of night raids has been a thorny one for United States forces deployed in Afghanistan. The nature of their task, apprehending sneaky Taliban fighters hiding deep within huts and homes in towns and villages, is a difficult one.
If they do not find anyone or anything other than pots, pans and unmade beds, they face the charge of having invaded the private, the sacred, the realm of women and children for nothing at all. If they find someone or something, it is still a loss; they may have caught the enemy, but the steps to capture trampled over too many war-torn hearts.
Back in Washington, the loss of Afghan hearts, minds and lives is only one of the variables policymakers and military strategists use to develop their battle plans. Unsurprisingly, most see night raids as cornerstones of conquest, instrumental in catching the bad guys. Of the near 2,200 night missions US and Nato forces carried out in 2011, they assert that nearly 83 per cent yielded the capture of an ‘enemy lieutenant’ or a ‘senior leader’. In the words of US Special Forces commander Adm William McRaven, the attacks are thus “very valuable”.
However, as US and Nato forces have begun the onerous job of wrapping up their mission in Afghanistan, they have had to confront the wreckage that the poor etiquette of such invasions leaves behind. In doing so, some have come up with an inventive if tried solution that can smooth its healing salve on maimed Afghan hearts.
News reports last week announced not just that the US and Afghanistan had reached an agreement about the continuation of night raids, but that these raids would be carried out by a newly trained, elite Afghan force. Unlike any other in recent Afghan history, it would be made up entirely of women. Along with similarly trained male Afghan special forces, they would carry out night raids, able to touch and search women without offending their modesty.
The premise is clear; in having Afghan men and women conduct the raids in search of the enemy, it will be locals who will then be saddled with the burden of invading private space, violating the seclusion of women, laying bare and exposed the closely guarded and concealed sphere of the family.
More dividends of goodwill could be availed by painting this as a martial transformation of Afghan women, no longer the beaten down, cut up and shrouded lot, but brave soldiers toting guns and scaling walls. With her machinegun, the Afghan woman soldier represents not the sly subcontracting of the war on terror to the Afghan natives themselves, but the armed and consequently empowered Afghan woman. As everyone, Afghan or otherwise knows, guns and night goggles are really all you need to be powerful.
My failure to gather up admiring gasps and applause for this recent transformation of Afghan women is not based on a disdain for their desire to take over the security of their country. It emanates instead from the lie that suggests that a ‘culturally sensitive raid’ respectful of segregated societies is somehow a ‘better’ invasion of privacy than one that brutishly, unashamedly brandishes the absolute power of the raider and the powerlessness of the raided.
In the news stories surrounding the renegotiation of the terms of US-Afghan cooperation on night raids, few have even bothered to mention that the deal also included the fact that an Afghan judge has to ratify the raid prior to it being carried out. That part, of course, is purely theoretical, since while Afghan women have been trained to tote guns and scale walls to conduct raids, Afghan courts and the legal mechanisms to oversee the process of granting permission for raids or assessing the evidence for them no longer exist.
Focusing on making a raid palatable by wrapping it in the cloth of cultural sensitivity also deflects the debate away from the tremendous global cost all forces involved in fighting the war on terror have imposed on ordinary citizens wherever they may be.
On the one hand, terror groups from Al Qaeda to the Taliban have made it part and parcel of their strategy to exploit the traditional respect given to the familial sphere of women and children by using it as a cover for absconding leaders and varying facets of campaign planning. The impact of bombers using burkas and men hiding behind wives and children is not simply incidental or piecemeal but a transformation of the sacred to the sinister.
Where US forces are concerned, using female Afghan soldiers to accomplish the same illegalities once proliferated by US forces aims at an instant purification of illegitimate intrusions, a way to deny the symbiotic injustices that allow both the Taliban terrorist and the American imperialist to wage their oppression on those left in the miserable middle.
But just as the Pakistani public seems uninterested in protesting the cancerous creeping of terror into the private sphere, of protesting against any situation in which a wanted man hides behind women or uses the shroud of domesticity to disguise terror, Americans say little against the FBI spying on innocent citizens, the CIA patrolling borders with drones or even the humiliation of being patted and poked and profiled at every American airport.
The crucial question about a raid — any raid — accomplished by any force, Afghan or American, is not whether it is culturally sensitive, but whether it is legally justified, discerned to be necessary by an impartial judicial body evaluating the evidence.
The legitimacy of intrusion, in an Afghan village or an American airport, rests only secondarily and incidentally on the people carrying it out and far more crucially on the processes that have been followed to carry it out, the collection of information and the proof that necessitates it. An illegal raid, however pleasantly dressed and carefully enacted, remains an ugly injustice.
The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.
