Victory in Afghanistan: Women are the Key!, by Kevin Crady

Special to TLE

The Taleban is the most oppressive regime towards women on the planet. Do we want people with a vested interest in seeing the terrorists and their Taleban supporters dead? Do we want good human intelligence, spies in a position to overhear the enemy's plots unnoticed? People who are equipped by the laws of the Taleban regime itself to be the ultimate smugglers? Women are the key, the golden lever we can use to bring the Taleban down, hard.

1) The Taleban and the terrorists would feel heroic if they got their Magic Carpet Ride to Allah in battle against an American military organized on the principles of that great libertarian thinker Genghis Khan, as Vin Suprynowicz suggested in TLE #140. The rest of the world would probably start to agree after awhile. We did when they were fighting the Soviets.

The Taleban and the terrorists would not think getting MCRTA's after being killed by women is a glorious way to go. The rest of the world would say, "You GO, girl!" and maybe even start liking the idea of firearms in civilian hands. Think of the effect this would have on the victim-disarmement wing of feminism.

2) Women in Afghanistan are forced to wear the burka, a black shround that covers them from head to foot in a vast, loose garment made explicitly for maximum concealment of what is underneath. A finer costume for infiltraters, spies and smugglers has not been invented. Ever see one of those movies where the Evil Tyrant has his troops in face-covering helmets, and the Good Guys borrow their uniforms to sneak in and Save The Day? The Taleban do the same thing for half their population, and put them in outfits geared for Concealed Carry of missile launchers.

3) The hardest thing about infiltrating and subverting Islamic terrorist cells is the fact that they're formed in villages where the men already know each other, and along family lines. But women are part of their families too, and "pillow talk" has always been a key part of the spy business. The women who wait on these thugs are in a good position to overhear their plots, or plant tiny electronic microphones.

4) The greatest threat America poses to the terrorists isn't its military might, but its culture--movies, clothes, political attitudes, the idea of individual liberty and pursuit of happiness on Earth (watered down though it may be). An important part of that culture is women's liberation. What would be more liberating to Afghan women than poking a Glock out of her voluminous sleeve and giving her cruel husband the gift of flying hot lead?

5) Terrorism's main weapon is the fear and paranoia it causes. The fear that they can strike anywhere, any time is what makes people willing to accept searches and various other invasions of privacy. The terrorists aren't afraid to die in the cockpit of an airliner on a collision course with a skyscraper, or in a bus station with dynamite strapped to their body. But what if, every time they see a woman swathed in her burka, they have to wonder, "Does she have a gun under there? Could she send me to Allah in disgrace the moment my back is turned?"

6) A percieved need to search women would tear at the heart of their culture. They'd rather have their wife or daughter die than send her to a doctor (female doctors are forbidden by Taleban law). That's how terrified these people are of the female body. Making women wear something "revealing" enough that they can't hide a gun, a cell phone, PDA, electronic surveillance equipment, etc. is not an option for them. They could try to lock all women into their homes and become full-time prison guards (how would the men make a living?), but weapons and other goodies are smuggled even into prisons. The very fact that such measures were put into place, and the reason for them, which would be well-known, would let each woman realize she's dangerous to her tormentors, and with a little cleverness, she can be deadly.

7) If there's to be an American invasion of Afghanistan, could there be a more receptive audience to American ideas than women who, by law, have no choice but to sit in the streets and beg while their children starve to death beside them? Could there be a more receptive recruiting pool for auxilliary garrison troops, and pro-American voters once the post-liberation democracy is established?

So, here's the plan:

Gear our intelligence and SPECWAR operations toward the creation of a Women's Afghan Resistance movement. Smuggle in cheap, compact handguns by the ton, with picture booklets showing how to aim and pull the trigger, and portraying pictorially that the world is on the women's side. Have operatives (perhaps shrouded in burkas themselves) surreptitiously pass them out to all those desperate, begging mothers along with more conventional alms.

There's talk of making cell phones so cheap they're disposable. Imagine such phones, or perhaps something like a cheap Palm Pilot, able to anonymously transmit to each other without cell towers, a wireless Internet of sorts. Employed in urban areas, they could "holographically" store information in the form of simple Arabic-language "WARnet" sites, a distributed server network with strong encryption. American operatives could communicate with users in a way that would be very difficult to trace or stop. Earplug speakers or small headphones would enable women to covertly listen to American audio broadcasts.

Now imagine that these broadcasts are created along the lines of El Neil's Libertarian Propaganda Theory of Warfare: Ayn Rand, Heinlein, Hayek, Claire Wolfe (a "Yes, It's Time To Shoot The Bastards" broadcast?), Thomas Paine, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence--and the writings of El Neil himself, of course--translated into Arabic and read with passion. Add a heady dose of feminism. No, not the whining, "Oh, government, protect us!" leftist feminism we're familiar with. Gun totin' ass-kickin Lucy Kropotkin feminism! In the unlikely event that anyone here is unfamiliar with Lucy Kropotkin, she's an indomitable take-no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners, gun-control-is-hitting-your-target-in-a-tight-group anarchist heroine of L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach.

If they try to jam the network, HARM missiles (which target strong electromagnetic signals, normally radar) could be configured to take out their jamming apparatus. If that doesn't work, maybe a nuclear-powered radio satellite or a modern version of Tesla's super-transmitter at Wardenclyffe would be in order. And, for those women who learned to read and write before the Taleban took over, there's always the low-tech option of smuggled books and pamphlets. Maybe even copies of BTRC's "Macho Women With Guns" role-playing game (think pictures of scantily-clad women with comic-superheroine figures and great big smoking guns, character types like "Bat-Winged Babes on Bikes," and skills like "hit things with other things.")

Recruit and train a corps of female guerrilla-assassins. Train them in martial arts, marksmanship, demolitions, and the fine art of poisoning (and whatever other devious methods of killing we can think of), and the language and culture skills necessary for infiltration of Islamic countries. As trained, dedicated American commandos, they could take a leading role in setting up the WAR and providing at least the first wave of assassinations. They would lead the recruiting and training efforts for local guerrillas. An Afghan woman would probably prefer to talk to and work with an American female commando in a burka than a beefy Navy SEAL in kevlar ninja togs and black face-paint.

Risky? Yes, but that's the way war is. However, even the publicly-stated promise of creating and using such a force would disrupt Taleban society. While it might be difficult to recruit large numbers of American women with the ovaries to become elite commando/SPECWAR troops, the Afghan women they'd be working with have nothing to lose. One of the greatest strengths of the terrorist network is its ability to find desperate, impoverished young men who are willing to give up their lives. The women of Afghanistan represent a pool from which America can recruit its own fanatics--fanatics for individual liberty willing to risk all so that they or their children can have a world worth living in.

Think of the potential rewards! Once it was displayed live on CNN that freedom and women's empowerment flow from the barrel of a gun--a handgun, in civilian hands--that concealed "Ramadan specials" are what brought down the nastiest male-chauvanist tyranny on the planet, the Sarah Bradys of the world would have a much more difficult time saying that a woman (or a man, for that matter) has no business packing heat.

A new Revolutionary War fought and won in the heart of Central Asia, from which radical, subversive, gun-toting individualism could spread into Russia, China, and the Middle East. From Morocco to Indonesia, Islamic tyrannies would face a choice: free the women, or else. And maybe, just maybe, the men would want freedom too.

Another advantage of this strategy is that it doesn't have to involve the U.S. government. Osama bin Laden and his allies in the terror network are waging their war as private individuals with varying levels of open and covert State backing. Maybe we should do likewise. How to fund it? Given the multi-billion dollar losses caused by the WTC attack, there have to be more than a few corporations who'd like to see the terrorists and the Taleban brought down, not to mention widespread public outrage. There's a market for an effective plan to win the War On Terrorism. Employing the same kind of transnational financial anonymity the terrorists use, we could do it even without U.S. backing. Now that would show the world that the State isn't the necessity it's cracked up to be!

Kevin Crady resides in Orofino, Idaho.

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