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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is Brittany Schaefer.
Imagine, Butler Schaefer having a brilliant daughter.
I guess that kind of makes sense, huh?
She's a writer and a filmmaker and author of the book Why Mommy Loves the State.
And you can find at least some articles at LouRockwell.com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
I'm sorry.
I should have Googled around more.
Do you have a website of your own?
I do, actually.
It's www.
Brittany.com.
The hard part of that is my name, which is B-R-E-T-I-G-N-E.
Okay, well, and we'll have a link to it in the archive of this on Antiwar.com slash radio later on.
Okay, great.
For everybody to find, too.
You know, this is really something else.
This is a really good article.
Saving Women and Preventing Genocide, the Real Reasons We're in Afghanistan Now.
I like the title.
It starts out good right there.
And so, you know, I guess obviously what brought this up is the Time Magazine cover of the young girl with the mutilated face.
Yep.
And what happens when we leave.
So, well, what's your take?
Well, I mean, that piece, and it wasn't just that one.
It was also, you know, the one in the Wall Street Journal, you know, comparing a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan to, you know, the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields.
I mean, and literally, I'm not exaggerating that at all.
And it just struck me, you know, the sort of insanity of, you know, failing to recognize, A, that, you know, in the case of Cambodia, that happened because of the U.S. presence.
I mean, the Khmer Rouge only rose to power because the U.S. had been bombing, you know, these villages indiscriminately and just killing thousands and thousands of Cambodians.
They would not, you know, most experts, most people who know a lot more about this than I do, say that just they wouldn't have run to the Khmer Rouge had it not been for that.
You know, they were being decimated.
They were terrified.
So they ran to the arms of this, you know, crazy communist faction, which then rose to power and killed everybody.
Yeah.
Well, hold it right there.
Slow down a little bit.
We've got a little bit of time.
I think that's a very important point, and I think you're absolutely right as far as my best understanding of what happened there.
And you link to John Pilger in your article.
But, you know, where I first learned that was watching Swimming to Cambodia with the guy that played the ambassador in the movie of The Killing Fields.
And he gave this great explanation about how the Khmer Rouge were a bunch of bark-eating crazies in the jungle nobody paid any attention to until and they were the enemies of the Vietnamese, north-south communist or otherwise.
And then they saw themselves being bombed to smithereens by the same planes that were bombing Vietnam all the time.
And then they made friends with the VC, and they got AK-47s and training.
And then Pol Pot, of course, came back from France, took over the thing, and marched on Phnom Penh.
But it was absolutely made in America, the whole thing.
In fact, you could argue that that's the kind of danger we're messing with in Pakistan right now in the Vietnam analogy.
Yeah.
If we keep bombing this friendly country next door that allows us to bomb them, we end up creating a situation where you could have the crazies take power instead of the so-called moderates, the American puppets.
Right.
And in a sense, that kind of already happened.
I mean, by all reports, the Taliban is just getting stronger the longer we're there.
And in fact, I mentioned at the end of my article what Afghanistan used to be like before the Soviet invasion, which also was sort of our – we kind of instigated that.
Before all that happened, you look at these pictures of men and women going to school together, women doctors, people wearing very much Western clothing.
It looks like a nice place to be.
These are photos of Kabul, and it looks like this nice, civilized place.
And to go from that is just – it's shocking.
I mean, to imagine going from that level of living to where they are now, I mean, something changed.
This is not something that's inherent in the Afghan people or the Afghan culture.
Something changed.
And we were the ones who supported the Islamic fundamentalists early on, and what's happened now is people are turning to them because they're promising to fight us.
And, you know, I think it's very similar to the Cambodia situation in that, you know, you've got this radical, crazy group of people who are, you know, hurting the Afghan people and hurting women in particular, yet people are turning to them and giving them more support because at least they promised to fight the people who are bombing them and killing them.
Well, and, you know, rather than just leave that the way you said, I'll refer people again to this great article at luerockwell.com, Saving Women and Preventing Genocide, where you link to two very powerful pieces of evidence there, an Amnesty International report and a Human Rights Watch report that says that women's rights have been getting worse.
You start the thing pointing out that this girl on the front of Time magazine, she was butchered eight years into the American occupation.
We're not preventing that at all.
But you actually cite these studies where they really looked into this.
Things are getting worse and worse for real for women there.
We're not saving them at all.
Yeah, absolutely.
And just as a caveat to that, you know, it is difficult to get exact numbers.
You know, everybody who writes about this says, okay, you know, there was a time when, you know, they weren't even collecting numbers on this, so they don't even know what, you know, how many rapes, how many forced marriages, how many, you know, attacks on women there were, you know, in the early years.
But it's clear that the trend is going upwards.
It's clear that violence against women is increasing.
It's getting worse.
And when you talk to people on the ground there, there's actually a documentary I linked to too, which is really worth watching.
It's from an anti-war organization, you know, so it's got its own slant too.
But it talks with people who I think are pretty credible.
I mean, you've got, let's see, someone from the Afghan Women's Mission, someone from the Afghan Women's Network, the Global Fund for Women, ironically the Afghan correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, all speaking about their experiences, you know, being on the ground, being close to this, and they're all saying, you know, yeah, it was bad before, it was awful, but it's only gotten worse.
Partly because, you know, they're now, as the journal correspondent put it, you know, yeah, they're still confined to their houses, they're still subject to violence, they're still kept away from education, but now they're also living in a war zone.
And as one of the commentators also put it, you know, because of the restrictions on women's activities, because of their prohibitions on working, and that kind of thing, even though it's allowed by law, you know, women get death threats for having jobs.
Because of all of that, if their husband gets killed in combat, or if he's killed by a bomb that happens to hit their house, you know, she's really in trouble.
The whole family's really in trouble, because she's risking her life to go out and try to work.
Oftentimes all that's available to them is prostitution.
And, you know, it's just not good.
I mean, it seems like an obvious point to make, that being in a war zone doesn't make things better.
And, in fact, the ills that they're claiming to address, you know, have just gotten worse.
Well, you know, I think it's funny, just as a side note here, wouldn't it be cool if there was some kind of rule that the writers for the Wall Street Journal editorial page had to actually read the reporting from the other part of the newspaper?
Because Anand Gopal, he's a real good reporter.
I've talked to him on the show a couple of times.
I've read a lot of his articles.
That's real journalism, Anand Gopal.
That's who you're referring to there.
And then the editorial page is like, these people live on the dark side of the moon somewhere or something.
I don't know.
Well, that's funny, because I actually used to work for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
Oh, are you serious?
Yeah.
So what is it?
Because it's not acid.
Because I know how acid works.
Is it PCP, or is it barbiturates?
What is the matter with these people?
Well, I was in the Hong Kong bureau, and it was a very different scene there.
I worked with some wonderful people there, very small office.
I was focused on Asia issues, and I left soon before 9-11.
So I didn't have to deal with that kind of thing.
But, yeah, there's a huge divide between editorial and news side.
In Hong Kong it wasn't so bad, but in the States it's like outright hostility.
They're just not friends.
But, yeah, it's a good point.
I mean, he actually knew what was going on on the ground there, and yet you've got this editorial piece coming out saying, ah, we've got to stay, we've got to stay, or they're all doomed.
Well, you know, I read about these soldiers and all the PTSD and the flashbacks, the slideshow in their head that they can't turn off and all that, and there's one of mine that I just got from watching it on the computer, and that's from the very end section of Rethink Afghanistan by Robert Greenwald, everybody can watch it on Google Video or YouTube, and it's the women in the refugee camp praying for God to come and kill them because they just can't stand to live like this anymore.
That's the reality of what America is doing to Afghanistan.
I beg people to go watch that, and hang tight.
We'll be right back with Brittany Shafer after this.
Shop at amazon.lrn.fm, and a portion of Amazon's profits benefit the Liberty Radio Network.amazon.lrn.fm Get set up for another day Gotta live my life this way Call straight, office complaints, yeah No, no, no, any convention There's one of these ones Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Brittany Shafer.
She writes for lewrockwell.com.
She's got her own website, and you'll just have to Google it, because you're not going to memorize the way I spell her name out loud for you anyway.
But Google will correct your spelling.
It's a magic thing, that Google.
Alright, so here's the thing.
I've got to try to challenge you and play devil's advocate and whatever.
Obviously, I don't even believe there should be a Washington, D.C. at all, so there's no military to do anything.
But that's the premise I'm coming from.
I know you're an individualist from reading your Facebook posts and so forth, and reading some of these articles.
It seems likely, since you're Butler Shafer's daughter and everything.
So how do individualism and feminism and your own principles of liberty coincide with...
I mean, I guess we kind of already did explain that things are getting worse there or whatever, but then again, turning these women over to the tender mercies of the Taliban from here on out could be a really brutal thing.
In fact, it's in the news, assuming it's true at all.
I don't know, but they're saying, apparently with multiple sources, that the Taliban stoned a couple to death just yesterday.
These guys are coming back to power.
This is who they are.
They've thrown an adulterous woman or one accused of being adulterous down a well, if they feel like it.
Yeah, I mean, that's a good question.
It's a fair question.
I'm sorry I didn't phrase it in the form of a question.
It would have been better, probably, if I had.
Yeah, it's clear what you're getting at.
I think the first thing to look at is what the U.S. government is doing now.
Is it actually helping?
Is it making it worse?
It's pretty clear to me that it's making it worse.
So at the very least, you stop doing the thing that's making things worse.
And that's the thing that kind of drives me crazy about this country.
I don't know if it's just Americans, maybe it's human nature, but there's this sort of tendency to want to do something.
You have to do something.
And if the person telling you that what you're doing is causing the problem or is it making it worse, you then turn to them and say, well, what would you do?
And if they can't come up with an answer, you say, well, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing.
It's this craziness of insisting on doing the thing that's making things worse just because you have to do something.
So I would say the first part of the answer is stop doing the thing that's making things worse.
Stop doing the thing that's strengthening the Taliban, that's driving people to support them as the lesser of two evils.
At least do that.
At least get out.
But then, okay, let's say we do that and the Taliban is already strong.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is.
They're there.
They're strong.
They're killing people.
They're doing horrible things.
What do you do?
I don't have an easy answer for that.
I don't know what the solution is.
And I'm with you.
I don't think the U.S. government should exist anyway.
I don't think the military should exist anyway.
But it does.
And is there something positive that it could do to at least ameliorate some of the harm that it's caused?
My crazy, whacked-out fantasy is, yeah, declare amnesty for Afghan women.
Create an underground railway for women to come to this country.
And people who object that, well, then U.S. taxpayers are going to have to subsidize them or they're going to use all our public service.
You know what?
They're taking your money anyway.
The war is taking all your resources anyway.
So I'm not saying I would support that.
I have a lot of problems with that.
But if you're looking for a positive alternative for the – and my other problem with that would be with the government running it, you're probably going to end up achieving the opposite of what it's intended to do anyway.
But that would be something where, God, at least you're doing something genuinely to try and help these people as opposed to going in and blowing people up, shooting people from the sky, and having that masquerade as a humanitarian effort, because it's not.
So I guess the answer is I don't really have an answer.
I don't have a solution.
But my sort of larger point is the U.S. government, to a great extent, created this problem.
They really set the stage for the Taliban to become as strong as it has.
And the bigger issue that I see here, not to discount the plight of women in Afghanistan right now, but the bigger issue is let's stop doing this.
Let's not do this in the future.
Let's keep doing this.
Let's not go to Iran and do this now.
Let's not think that this is a solution, because it's not.
This makes things worse.
Well, you know, one of the things that it seems it's just a tragedy or something, but one of the realities – it may have been a non-Gopal actually where I read this, but maybe not.
But anyway, it was that the black turban signifies that I can prove I'm a descendant of Mohammed, basically.
And that's really part of the base.
Of course, there's the very conservative modesty issue and whatever.
But it's also the oppression of women is a matter of preserving and being able to claim 100 percent, I know for a fact whose son this is, and that's why we can pass on the black turban.
And this is at least in Pashtun society and maybe more widespread than that.
It's the way that they make sure that their family tree is what they say it is, and it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that 100 years' worth of occupation or 1,000 years' worth of Western literature is ever going to overcome.
Well, and that's part of the thing.
The West went in there and they created all these new laws with the U.S. occupation.
There are all these new laws in support of women's rights, and all the proponents of our occupation in defense of women will cite these laws and say, oh, but look, there's a law now requiring a certain number of parliament to be women, requiring women policemen, requiring schools be available for women and all this stuff.
But what that kind of is, it's a very top-down approach, and what it misses is that the people on the ground don't respect those laws.
And a lot of times they don't know about them, and they're not being enforced.
Like you say, you can't change these deeply ingrained traditions and beliefs.
You can't change them from the top down.
An interesting thing that I saw in Asia was that things, and obviously a totally different set of beliefs and degree of harm being done, but with women in many parts of Asia, with economic development, they were getting more freedom.
They didn't have to get married.
They could work.
And a lot of it was really kind of funny.
This was like the late 90s.
In a lot of Southeast Asian countries, there was this sort of problem where women just didn't want to get married.
And people were talking about low birth rates, and women don't want to get married, and what are the men going to do, and all this stuff.
But they were more interested.
For them, it was better to work for a while, and to have some independence, financial independence.
And that, just having the financial freedom, having the economic freedom that came with development, that came with all these sweatshops that everyone so loathes, really helped a lot of women to have the freedom to make that choice.
So I think economic development is part of this story.
I don't claim that's going to change something so, so deeply ingrained, but I think it definitely helps.
That's a piece of the story.
All right, everybody.
That's Brittany Schaefer.
Check her out at luerockwell.com.
And what's your website one more time?www.brtigne.com All right.
Thank you very much for your time on the show.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Again, I read the article, Saving Women and Preventing Genocide, the real reason we're in Afghanistan now.
