REKHA BASU My mother warned that America's 1980s allies threatened women in Afghanistan. They've continued to, as our enemies.

While working for Afghan women, Rasil Basu predicted no good could come of U.S. military involvement for women or the country.

Rekha Basu
Des Moines Register

As the second Mother’s Day without my mother approached, Rasil Basu reappeared via an unexpected Google alert.

U.S. historian and writer Noam Chomsky and Indian counterpart Vijay Prashad had resurrected my late mother's prophetic warnings from the late 1980s about the plight of Afghan women and girls under our proxy war with the Soviets.

Chomsky and Prashad examine the legacy of America's two decades of war in Afghanistan, now set to end by Sept. 11 under President Joe Biden's order. (In a rare instance of agreement, Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, had planned on a pullout.) But the authors, who have long argued against a U.S. military presence in favor of our brokering political talks between factions, are concerned about the impact of still leaving several thousand U.S. troops and contractors there. As Politico reported, top military leaders advocate keeping them "to keep the Taliban in check and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for terrorists."

MORE COMMENTARY: I became a quadruple amputee in Afghanistan. It's time for America to leave.

Chomsky and Prashad argue the U.S. military presence has just piled civilian (71,000) and troop (over 2,000) casualties atop destruction of the country's physical infrastructure and social bonds. On the other side, the decision to pull out has raised warnings of a security gap from current and former U.S. military brass. David Petraeus, the former U.S. troop commander in Afghanistan, believes the Taliban will probably take over again and allow al-Qaida and the Islamic State to reconstitute.

This leads to my mother's warnings, back in the late 1980s and again in 2001, when the current war began. From 1986 to 1988 she worked in Afghanistan under a contract with the United Nations as senior adviser to the Afghan government on women’s advancement. Having observed progress for women under the Soviet occupation, she worried about a Taliban-type Islamist government repressive to women if the U.S. continued to fund and support Taliban precursors against the Soviets.

Chomsky and Prashad recall my mother telling them that the Afghan Constitution of 1987 specified equal rights for women "which allowed women’s groups to struggle against patriarchal norms and fight for equality at work and at home. Because large numbers of men had died in the war, Basu told us, women went into several occupations. There were substantial gains for women’s rights, including a rise in literacy rates."

Thanks to the link they provided, you can read Rasil Basu's perspective in her own words, written after the U.S. invasion following Sept. 11, 2001. She wrote that, though "unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace and in the family, women had made great strides under the Soviet occupation with illiteracy declining from 98% to 75%." They had been granted equal rights to men in civil law.

All that progress, argue Chomsky and Prashad, "has been largely erased during the U.S. war over these past two decades."

My mother was unsuccessful at getting her piece published in major U.S. media. Titled "The Rape of Afghanistan," it began, "An unexpected fall-out of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was the sudden concern of the American and other governments with the plight of Afghan women."

George W. Bush had declared war on Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and then sough to justify it to skeptical observers by pointing out the ruling Taliban's mistreatment of women. To that end, the seldom-heard-from Laura Bush was deployed to give a speech on U.S. forces arriving to liberate Afghanistan's suffering women.

But, as my mother had tried warn in the 1980s, the U.S. had, at the time, supported precursors to the Taliban in its proxy war against the then Soviet occupation: men like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who reportedly threatened to throw acid in the faces of women who publicly dressed in Western clothes instead of hijab. As she wrote, "Ironically, the U.S. favored the three fundamentalist resistance groups … over the more moderate mujahideen groups."

And now that same Hekmatyar, identified as a Hezb-e-Islami leader, reportedly wants to form and lead a government in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the U.S. has agreed to the Taliban having a role in a new government.

At any rate, even though the U.S., NATO allies, and the Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces killed tens of thousands of its forces during the war, the Taliban shows no sign of going away. As The Nation put it, "The Taliban, which has battled the world’s most fearsome military machine for two decades, remains standing, and continues to expand its control in rural areas."

“The U.S. has spent $6.4 trillion on the war on terror since 2001," according to Stephanie Savell of the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. That includes caring for veterans and interest on money borrowed to fund the wars. Yet there are more terrorist groups than there were in 2001, recruiting more people in more regions of the world. It all comes back, Savell rightly observed, to the fact that terrorism isn't a problem wars can solve.

Just two days after Chomsky's and Prashad's piece was published, a bombing near a girls’ school in Afghanistan’s capital claimed up to 85 victims, mostly female. The Taliban has denounced it and no group has claimed responsibility, but similar attacks in the area have been attributed to Islamic State in Afghanistan.

That was the day before Mother's Day, making an already sad day a tragic one. And there is reason to fear that the damage done in a tragic decades-long legacy of our involvement in Afghanistan won't quickly reverse course.