Weekend Elections – Afghanistan and Australia

If you didn’t get a thrill from seeing Afghan women in burqas casting ballots this past weekend, don’t call yourself a proponent of women’s rights. The election may have been less than perfect – ours certainly will be too – but it is less than three years from the toppling of the Taliban to the vote. It is hundreds of years of advancement for Afghan women, not to mention for the men.

If you didn’t get a thrill from seeing Afghan women in burqas casting ballots this past weekend, don’t call yourself a proponent of women’s rights. The election may have been less than perfect – ours certainly will be too – but it is less than three years from the toppling of the Taliban to the vote. It is hundreds of years of advancement for Afghan women, not to mention for the men.

Afghan women were objectively close to the most oppressed group or subgroup in the world. In a poor, war-wracked country that needed every ounce of brainpower and entrepreneurial skill, one half of the population and skill base was shut out. Confined to their homes, forbidden an education or occupation, Afghan women were permitted outside only with a male relative and full body armor with eye-slits – and this after years of functioning in Afghan society as doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges and shopkeepers. Shoved back into closets and hovels throughout the 1990s, Afghan women, not surprisingly, had an extraordinarily high rate of depression and phobia. Mavis Leno, wife of comedian Jay Leno, was an important advocate for Afghan women in their worst days, lending her celebrity to calls for their relief.

We assume Mrs. Leno is today grateful to President Bush for the liberation of Afghan women and their restoration to functional roles in the new Afghanistan. We are.

Not only women are pleased. The Washington Post yesterday cited an Asia Foundation poll from earlier this year, showing 67 percent of Afghans holding a positive view of U.S. troops, and a more recent poll by an Afghan human rights coalition showing that 75 percent of voters felt free to choose any candidate in the elections, more than 90 percent saying women should vote and 85 percent believing the election will bring positive change to Afghanistan.

At the other end of the liberation spectrum, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia won reelection by a large margin and enhanced his party’s strength in Parliament in an election widely reported to be a referendum on Australia’s participation in the coalition in Iraq. Much was made of Spain’s decision to pull out of Iraq after the bombings in Madrid, and the 9 September bombing at the Australian Embassy in Indonesia was considered by some to be a corollary event that would push Australians to the left. It didn’t, but AFTER the vote the Associated Press pronounced Howard’s victory a referendum on the economy and said Iraq played little, if any part in it. Hmmmmmm.

We suspect that at least some Australians were rejecting the notion that Islamic fascists try to attack them because they are in the coalition. They know they are attacked by Islamic fascists because they are a free Western country with rights for all its citizens – Muslims as well as Christians, Jews and others, women as well as men. Derided as a member of the “coalition of bribed and browbeaten” by nasty Americans, Australians know better and showed better.

It was a good weekend for nation building and nations built.