BY LYNETTE DUMBLE
Operation Enduring Freedom will not be remembered as US President George Bush and his global messenger British Prime Minister Tony Blair would prefer, by global peace movements, by the Islamic world, or by the world's women.
Echoed by Australia's John Howard and his opposition counterpart Kim Beazley, Bush junior and Blair have been deaf to Mohandas Gandhi's frequently quoted wisdom that "an eye for an eye leaves both parties blind".
Equally, despite the fact that RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, has for the past two decades courageously drawn international attention to the education, employment, healthcare and every other imaginable freedom being denied to women and girls in Afghanistan, it was only after the stage had been set for Operation Enduring Freedom, that the Bush allies began to highlight the appalling plight of women under the Taliban.
In the first three days of extracting "infinite justice" from the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden, chief suspect for the terrorist atrocities of September 11, Anglo-American forces have rained more than US$100 million worth of sophisticated missiles on suspected al-Qaeda training camps, airfields, anti-aircraft batteries, and relatively primitive military command centres across Afghanistan.
According to US sources, cruise missiles detonate a 1000-pound warhead on hitting a target, and have an accuracy of 90%.
That statistic is of cold comfort to the already tens of civilian casualties whose last living memory was Kabul, Kandahar, or Jalalabad lit up against the night or dawn sky like a Christmas tree. And it's a statistic which will further terrify Afghanistan's poverty-stricken frail and elderly, the overwhelming majority women, who have been unable to join the 1.5 million strong exodus who fled to Pakistan and Iran in anticipation of the bombings.
As with all wars, Operation Enduring Freedom is destined to claim more civilian than military lives.
But as a result of Afghanistan's last 23 years of armed conflict, the country's women significantly outnumber men. In Kabul alone there are more than 70,000 war widows. With rare exception, all live in abject poverty due to the Taliban's version of Islam which prevents them from working.
Already the first two days of smart bombs has caused a list of casualties dominated by women, children, and the elderly. Also included are four UN aid workers and who, until a few days ago, coordinated the dangerous technicalities of dismantling the millions of Soviet landmines which still litter the Afghan landscape, a task which the UN de-mining program estimates will not be complete for another decade.
As too with recent Anglo-US military operations in Iraq and Yugoslavia, the smart bombs hitting Afghan soil are likely laced with depleted uranium and plutonium, an environmental disaster of devastating proportions and a peril which is linked with male, female and childhood cancer and with miscarriages and birth deformities.
Furthermore, there is not a single war on record where women and girls have escaped rape and sexual abuse. With the US-led efforts softening up the Taliban for a takeover by the Northern Alliance, an outfit infamous for its human rights violations, Operation Enduring Freedom promises to be no different.
Rewarding the opium-peddling Northern Alliance with power on a platter conjures well-founded fears amongst Afghanistan's women that Operation Enduring Freedom will throw them out of the fire and into the frying pan.
The message from RAWA, also newly discovered by the mainstream media, is of black experiences with the Burhanuddin Rabbani-headed Northern Alliance faction in the early 1990s, when "seventy-year-old grandmothers were raped during their rule; thousands of girls were raped; thousands were killed and tortured".
RAWA delivered Bush junior two logical reasons for avoiding a military witch hunt in Afghanistan: "further trauma and misery for the hapless Afghans will not in any way decrease the grief of the Americans", and "armed action could render thousands of deprived, poor and innocent people of Afghanistan as its victims, and spread terrorism to an even larger scale".
In playing up the humanitarian aspect of Operation Enduring Freedom, there are promises to drop two million food and medical supply parcels for the almost eight million Afghans presently facing starvation as a result of the country's worst drought for more than a century.
In the first days following the smart bombs, came 37,500 parcels of food and medical supplies. For the dead, hunger and sickness no longer count. For the bomb-traumatized living, all two million "gifts from the United States of America" mean but a single day's nourishment for one in every four Afghans. Those odds fade as some parcels disintegrate before landing, and others end up in inaccessible or landmined locations.
Operation Enduring Freedom, in addition to creating a massive clash of civilisations, turning Muslim against Muslim, and heightening South Asian regional instability, brings untold sorrow for women in nearby Pakistan via the prospect of a million or more Afghan refugees.
Last week's Women, Globalization and Peoples' Struggles conference in New Delhi concluded with a message of peace from each continent.
That from Asia was delivered jointly by a tribal woman from India and Azra from Pakistan. Azra sobbed while describing the past 23 years in Pakistan where they have awoken almost daily to the dead bodies of their Afghan sisters and brothers, often those of raped women, and emaciated children, on their doorsteps.
Representatives of the international movements for gender, social and environmental justice wept openly with Azra as she prayed that Operation Enduring Freedom might be "a war that no-one will go to".
To date Azra's prayer remains unanswered, but the US-led alliance must be urged to rethink the myopia of a Taliban eye for a US eye, the price of which is written in the blood of women.
[Dr Lynette Dumble, medical scientist and international co-ordinator of the Global Sisterhood Network, is a former senior research fellow in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, and visiting professor of surgery at the University of Texas in Houston. <ljdumble@connexus.net.au>]