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Written by Bilal Nikyar
TIME magazine is famous for its featured stories along with an image on its cover. That has been their trademark for decades; it’s also a great marketing strategy to attract customers’ attention. It’s well-known around the world and has a distinct style. Frankly, it’s my favourite magazine too. However, on April 3rd (two days before the Afghan elections) the magazine published a cynical and distorted cover story, which has stirred some criticisms amongst the media-savvy Afghans.
The story is about Women versus Taliban—two famous topics in the Western media about Afghanistan and the two topics that to some extent justifies everything the West does in Afghanistan. The story is about how Afghan women suffer and are badly treated by their male counterparts after all these years of international assistance and how their situation won’t change with the election, which was scheduled to take place on April 5th.
Ironically, the most disturbing part of the story is that the Taliban are going to come back no matter what the Afghans think or want. Therefore, everything is going to go back to square one, including the rights of women.
Later, Bobby Ghosh, TIME magazine’s world editor, goes into Morning Joe program to boast about how much hard work his team put into this cover story and how TIME knows the return of the Taliban is inevitable, which is going to diminish the rights of Afghan women.
So let’s just look at how wrong the TIME magazine was in its assumptions in this piece. First, it’s true that women’s condition in Afghanistan isn’t perfect and it needs a lot of attention. However, it’s definitely better than how it was 13 years ago. The important thing is that women have come a long way since the Taliban were ousted from power. It’s only going to get better from now on as the country is slowly but surely coming out of over three decades of war.
Afghanistan just had a successful election on April 5th (praised by the International community) in which more than 7 million people voted, of which 35% were women. It’s defiantly not the case as the TIME magazine suggests that Afghan women are left out there to the wolves. Afghan women are more active than ever before. They go to schools & universities; they are active members of the Afghan parliament and civil society. They are in a better position now than ever before to defend their rights.
Obliviously, there are still some challenges facing Afghan women, but you cannot resolve everything in a matter of a few years. It takes time and Afghans are surely on the right track to finally be a more pluralistic society. For TIME magazine to say that Afghan women are waiting for the Taliban is incorrect. No, they are not waiting for the Taliban; they are waiting for a stable and prosperous Afghanistan.
Secondly, the most troubling part of Time’s piece is their misinformed and ludicrous claim that the Taliban are returning. What the magazine doesn’t recognize is that Afghans don’t want the Taliban to return at any cost, and the best way to realize that is to look at last Saturday’s turnout during the elections. If only the TIME magazine could wait for the election and then published its featured article, things would have been a lot different
We had a successful election with old, young, men and women marching towards polling stations. They all have made it loud and clear that Afghans support democracy. Afghanistan has changed; the fact that the turnout was higher in this election than what experts predicated shows the political maturity of Afghans. It’s almost impossible to think that we will have the Taliban regime again in the near future.
I don’t understand how TIME magazine came to that conclusion. Afghans don’t want to go back to the times of medieval. If TIME thinks that the spike in pre-election violence is an indication of Taliban’s return, then they must know that they know almost nothing about Afghanistan. Couldn’t the recent spike in violence, as is the case in every destabilised nation when election arrives, be the job of regional intelligence agencies to disrupt and discourage people from voting? Couldn’t it be the job of other political mafias?
We Afghans don’t see every bomb blast and killing as a black & white scenario. There are numerous other actors that hide behind the name of the Taliban in order to cause insecurities. So to say that the Taliban are returning to Afghanistan is fable. Therefore, TIME magazine needs to double check its facts and come up with a more realistic view of the current situation in Afghanistan.
The problem with Afghanistan is that there are too many bad pundits and very few good pundits as well as there are too many foreign experts and too few Afghan experts. The experts who know Afghanistan either speak/write too little on Afghanistan or can’t make it to the mainstream international media. On the other hand, people who have very little knowledge of Afghanistan get a lot of space to comment on Afghanistan based on what they read on the internet. This really has been the root cause of most of the problems and misunderstandings in the last 13 years. Anyone who has been to Afghanistan once or twice in their entire life presumes to know everything about the country. Most of them call themselves experts based on what they read and see on the internet.
It simply doesn’t work that way. You have got to know the country’s culture, history and people in every place to understand Afghanistan and its issues. There is a lack of Afghan journalists and analysts to talk and report about Afghanistan in the international press. Hence, the void that’s there has been filled by distorted reporting such as the one in the cover of TIME
Afghans must take charge from now on to introduce their country better to the international audiences and to iron out most of the myths that have been circulating around the world such as the one that the Taliban will return.
Bilal Nikyar is a freelance writer, he tweets: @BilalNikyar
source : http://www.pashtunwomenvp.com/index.php/2013-01-28-03-21-27/current-issue/443-time-s-loathsome-cover-story
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