Today I rediscovered my friend PJ Tobia's Afghan Desk blog at True-Slant. PJ is living the modern J-school dream--not just the crazy work of being a freelance war-zone correspondent (here's a WaPo article from last December), but also blogging and working at a media nonprofit, the Killid Group.).

The post he has up top right now put a big smile on my face. It's called "Girls in the Trunk of a Car" and while it's a traffic safety nightmare, it's also pretty adorable.

Further down he has a post that makes you want to cry, especially after you've seen those beautiful smiling girls. It's called "This is What An Abused Afghan Woman Looks Like," and he describes two horrifying, misogynistic injuries to two Afghan girls, linking to a photo of one. The other is a quote from Johann Hari's Slate review of Nicholas and Sheryl Kristof's new book, "Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Half the Women Worldwide." And what is our duty in all of this? PJ writes,

The US could take a much stronger tack in pursuing an agenda of women’s rights in Afghanistan, but doing so would likely jeopardize relationships with the above-mentioned warlords, who we need to make any kind of progress here. It sickens me that with tens-of-thousands of US soldiers on the ground here (some of whom, I might add, are women) females are still essentially prisoners in their own homes and considered property to be used for barter.

He acknowledges work American soldiers have done opening womens centers and schools, but bemoans a lack of policy aimed at pushing Afghanistan towards a more egalitarian legal system. Caitlin Kelly, another True/Slant blogger who recently wrote a book about American women and guns, chimed in, wanting to know what, exactly, PJ thought America should be doing. He admitted he didn't have any easy answers--but were we really using the power we have as leverage on behalf of these girls?

There are plenty of people who think we have no business being in Afghanistan at all, and that it's absurd to talk about helping little Afghan girls when we so frequently end up bombing them. I'm still trying to educate myself about the whys and hows of Afghanistan, and will refrain from comment on the mission itself. (Though I will take a moment to plug one of my favorite charities, CIVIC, which aims to fight civilian casualties instead of merely ignoring them.)

Let us take it for granted, for the sake of discussion, that we have a genuine security and humanitarian interest in Afghanistan, and that our mission is at least roughly aligned with the interests of both the Afghani state and the Afghani people. What, exactly, can we do as a government and a military ally, in order to forcefully insist that the laws of the countries we deal with not be genocidally misogynistic? (And, by extension, what sort of policy action can we as citizens pressure our government to undertake in our name?) The controversy this summer over Karzai's passage of an oppressive bill stirred up the usual problem: if you're going to encourage a country to have elections and representative government, you can't really force the legislative body to vote a particular way--even if you think their elections might not be fair. As a military ally you can either participate or not participate, and America has committed to participating regardless. So are there additional pressure points within the framework of alliance? Economic pressures? Political pressure? A way of speaking directly to the Afghan legislature? Because as long as this horrific misogyny persists, we cannot properly "stand on this earth as men and women".

While I think it's important to keep trying to find political tools for these big scale problems, in the mean time, people can always try to help each other across borders.