Veiled woman carries child, Kandahar, February 2011. Photo by Basetrack.

Why can't the left handle criticism of the Taliban, admit that they are the biggest problem in Afghanistan — they oppress all people, and particularly violate women's rights; they kill the most civilians; they traffic in heroin which is causing addiction and numerous deaths of users in the region; they are aid and abet terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda which causes mayhem elsewhere. 

So why don't "progressives" on the left and the human rights that tilt left, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, care more about the terrible threat from the Taliban, likely to grow worse as NATO troops withdraw from this war-ravaged nation by 2014?

After all, "progressives" and of course human rights groups are supposed to care about human rights and social justice. How can they be so myopic about the obvious in Afghanistan?

There aren't any human rights or social justice under the Taliban, and the PR spinning they are doing these days, to the effect that they may tolerate girls' education or aren't what they were in the 1990s — oh, please.

Yet here we go again with Human Rights Watch not mentioning the Taliban except in passing in their address to Hillary Clinton on women rights in Afghanistan! They make it seem as if the Afghan National Army is the problem!

I've talked about this troubling myopia before here and here — the NATO summit, when all eyes were turned on NATO as it makes a plan to withdraw from Afghanistan was a missed opportunity when again, HRW made it seem like our problem is the potentially (or actually) abusive Afghan National Army and the Karzai government — merely because they are nominally in charge as state actors — and not the non-state actors who cause most of the harm.

Now this week again, HRW astoundingly can't see its way clear to naming the Taliban as the major threat to human rights in Afghanistan.

Their appeal only goes to Hillary Clinton — as if she's the problem, even though she has arguably done more for women's rights than any leader in office — even before she was Secretary of State, as the First Lady.

The statement to Clinton implies — but does not ascribe root cause to — that after 11 years of Taliban rule, women have "no such commitment" to their rights — as if it's an address-less problem of the weather.

But instead of naming the Taliban explicitly as the ongoing problem, HRW engages in the usual surrogate advocacy — going to those tangential to the problem who might influence others not really the problem, and making them "own" the problem merely due to their proximity.

In HRW's prescription, the Karzai government and its backers such as the US must continue to press the Afghan government — and not name and shame the Taliban and make any kind of public demand on those supporting them to stop.

The US is urged to issue "prompt public responses to Afghan government actions and
statements that violate Afghanistan’s domestic and international
obligations to the rights of women and girls" — but the overwhelming majority of violations come from the Taliban, such as the shooting of Malala — and there is no prescription for this terrorist movement.

Other prescriptions amount to bromides like "pushing for women-friendly leaders" in key Afghan institutions — that isn't quite the same thing as actually calling for women to be in those positions, of course! –  or ensuring "a central role for women in all Afghan peace-building processes."

HRW almost comes close to admitting the problem when it says Clinton should pressure the Afghan government to:

Ensure Afghanistan’s security strategy focuses not just on support for military and police but also on security for women and girls;

But here HRW is assuming this benign and protective nature of the Afghan security forces that it doesn't have — look at the dozens of cases of these soldiers turning on their colleagues in the US and allied armed forces in the "green on blue" incidents.

This myopic, frustratingly *irrelevant* sort of statement is what human rights groups do when they are painted into a corner by mandate or a literalist interpretation of international law. They can't advise governments how to wage war on human rights abusers — that's not what they do. They feel as if calling on the Taliban to stop abusing human rights is futile. They also have to appeal to those who make commitments under international law — and obviously the Taliban didn't sign any human rights treaties.

To be sure, HRW does occasionally do this literally — by including a brief pro-forma sentence in their reports or releases, such as this one mainly appealing to the Pakistani government to do something about Malala's attackers. Says HRW:

Armed groups including the Taliban, al Qaeda, and their affiliates
should cease attacks that target children, educational personnel, and
schools.

But that's just checking off a box, and it isn't where their heart is. It's not the headline; it's not the main focus. You can tell by the urgent calls the organization's representatives actually make:

“Parts of Pakistan are among the most dangerous places in the world to go to school today,” said Ali Dayan Hasan,
Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s time Pakistani
authorities understand that expressions of outrage alone are inadequate
and such attacks will only end if they hold abusers accountable.”

Can't we call the Taliban and their allies to account first, guys? After all, the problem with the Pakistani government isn't that it is "inadequate" but that it is in cahoots with the Taliban, yanno?

Sticking in the line about "holding abusers accountable" is like Obama insisting to Romney that he did mention "acts of terror" in the Rose Garden and implied Benghazi. But he didn't. And the entire philosophy he holds — like the "progressives" at HRW — is still one in which weak local and Western governments are more to blame for the unhappy childhoods of terrorists than the terrorists themselves — and the state who engendered mass murder and displacement in the 1970s and 1980s — Russia.

In a world where the lion's share of victims of wars are civilians, and where so many of them are killed by non-state actors, it's ok to broaden the scope of concern more robustly, and not make it merely a a pro-forma line in statement after statement whose center of gravity falls towards governments, not non-state actors.

After all, it's only a strict construction of "human rights" that wouldn't involve international humanitarian law at all that would make one feel as if appeals to non-state actors committing mass crimes against humanity somehow have "no place" in the international human rights regime.

Until the international human rights movement leaders broaden to take on victims of terror and non-state actors who commit massive abuses of human rights, they will continue to be niche and elitist and irrelevant in most of the world — and offer no model for non-violence and no capacity for succor for one of the world's largest categories of victims these days.

When HRW lists the "challenges" that women still face that the Afghan National Army is supposed to fix for them, curiously, they don't put first on the list "violent attacks by the Taliban and its allies". Yet attacks on girls going to school, and attacks on women and demands for harsh oppressive practices for women are rampant.

It's not just threats against women in public life; it's women in private, life too. There's just something woefully inadequate about listing the problems of women in Afghanistan as "lack of access to justice" or "high maternal mortality" or "imprisonment for moral crimes" when they are first of all wrapped up in cumbersome burquas if they step out in public and running for their lives if they try to go to school. Lack of court access or maternal mortality are real problems, of course, but they all stem from the fundamental flaw of dysfunctional Afghan society — the failure to grant women dignity and equality in the first place.

HRW wants Clinton to have "a clear and viable strategy that is taken as seriously as military strategy". But she already does. Clinton has done everything possible for women and raising women's rights in every fora, and there are all kinds of programs of aid and engagement. The problem is the Taliban. Now some might then credit the Obama Administration with fighting the war required to defeat the Taliban, including with immoral drones.

But I don't think we have to conclude that a flawed military strategy is required because of the difficulty of making a sturdy human rights strategy. A human rights strategy can start with a simple naming of the real problem — the Taliban and its allies — so that we don't mistake it for anything else.

After that problem is named for what it is, there is nothing naive or futile about calling on the Taliban to stop harming women and to begin respecting their rights, and condemning their attacks on girls like Malala. HRW of course recognizes this problem, but they don't put the pieces together in something like a letter to Clinton.

The reason why it isn't futile and naive to call on the Taliban to stop their abuses and to change. They are, after all, terribly cunning about PR and are especially prone now to whining that they aren't getting fair press coverage, or claiming that they really do intend to allow more educational opportunities, as they are struggling for political advantage. Now more than ever is the time to name the problem and go to the right address with it — the Taliban — instead of ducking and dodging and going to tangential surrogates.  The Taliban has to feel the pressure of the world's ostensibly impartial moral forces — not just Hillary Clinton.

The US can't substitute a military strategy, as flawed as it was with collateral damage, that actually tried killing the Taliban and keeping it from gaining supporters with some sort of "heightened consciousness" about women's rights, mouthing platitudes more loudly.

Instead, especially at a time when the supporters and the enablers of the Taliban are going to have to face choices, we need to call on all of them to stop violating women's rights and move toward equality.

Women in burquas in street in Kandahar, February 2011. Photo by Basetrack.