The chilling reports coming out of Afghanistan right now are more than enough to anger any feminist. As hundreds cling to US planes, scrambling to leave the country, women and girls predict a violent backlash and LGBTIQ people fear for their lives. I can understand why you might want our world leaders to act urgently.
But, British feminists, how could you have forgotten already? We’ve been here before. I’ve been shocked by the knee-jerk and lazy reactions across social media, with many calling for intervention to ‘rescue’ women and girls in Afghanistan. There is no feminist case for sending UK troops to another country.
I’m a British feminist, my politics were formed very much by the impact of 9/11 and the so-called ‘war on terror’. I haven’t forgotten the way Western leaders in 2001 used the plight of Afghan women and girls under the Taliban to justify occupying the country – “white men saving brown women from brown men”, as feminist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak put it.
