Feminist framing of Afghan women’s oppression concealed harm from U.S. bombing and food-aid disruption.

Evidence

The co-opted feminist focus on how women in Afghanistan are deprived of education and employment and forced to wear the burqa conceals how conditions of war, militarization, and starvation are harming women. To cite one example of overlooked consequences, the U.S. war on Afghanistan in the years after 9/11 led to starvation because U.S. bombing impeded the delivery of food aid. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 576

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the ‘oppressed Muslim woman saved by Western intervention’ narrative — complementary to the reader’s article on cross-cultural dress moral panics. — connects to: Media coverage of Afghan women spiked eighteenfold only once it served war aims — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 288; NGOs function as imperial weapons in feminist guise in the Afghan war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 311; Afghan women’s conditions did not improve and even worsened after invasion — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 288
• SEED: Potential article angle: how co-opted feminism functions as a rhetorical cover for military intervention, using the Afghan starvation example as a concrete anchor.