An Encounter With The Latest Poster Girl For Dizzy, Bourgeois Vanity.

"Bravest woman in Afghanistan" my ass, Brian Platt, my colleague at the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, observes. Brian also discovers that to ask the only pertinent question of Malalai Joya - have you even thought about the implications of what you are demanding? - is to be dismissed and shouted down by Joya's fans for asking an impertinent question.

During my many conversations with feminists and progressives in Afghanistan last year, one thing that came through loud and clear was that the "troops out now" posture so commonplace in polite society in western countries has no support among Afghan women's leaders. What was also clear was that Joya and her backers with the so-called Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, to the extent that they are thought about at all, are regarded as faintly ridiculous and marginal characters, at best.

Apart from slandering the leadership of the Afghan women's movement, engaging in weird and disruptive sectarianism and busying themselves with the attention-getting exhibitionism of transgressive, Maoist sloganeering, what the hell has RAWA done for anyone lately? And what has Malalai Joya ever done?

Six years ago, Joya was elected to the Afghan parliament - an event that wouldn't have even happened if all her rich "troops out" friends in Southern California had gotten their way. In 2003, she made a speech in the Loya Jirga that made her famous for its resort to unparliamentary language of the kind that would have earned any politician, anywhere, at least a suspension. In 2007, she said similarly mean things about certain of her hillbilly parliamentary colleagues in a television interview. That's about it. So what?

In Afghanistan, Joya is dimly remembered for these things, but is otherwise beautifully useless, and is in fact understood as largely an invention of the western media, anyway. For all the stenography that accompanies her travels in the masquerade of "journalism" in western capitals, it isn't at all clear what her real story is. Malalai Joya isn't even her real name.

It is only in "the west" that she serves any purpose. She can be summoned as a sort of celebrity spokesmodel for that caste of the west's rich liberals who have a weird need to believe the lie that there is something "feminist" or "progressive" in the narcissistic, reactionary isolationism they have adopted as the defining mark of their own political virtue. It's the reason why so much effort is expended in building up a cult of celebrity around Joya. That's all that's going on here. It has absolutely nothing to do with what Afghan women want or need.

Even in the "west," real feminists understand this: "Though we'd prefer that all U.S. funding be spent on development aid, we cannot in good conscience advocate the immediate military pullout that some are suggesting. The 2009 UN Humanitarian Action Plan noted that in 2008, "Approximately 40% of the country, including much of the South, remains inaccessible for most humanitarian organizations." Last year, 92 aid workers were abducted and 36 were killed, double the number from 2007. In recent public opinion polls, Afghans put security in their top three concerns right after food. Without stabilizing the country, there can be no significant redevelopment effort."

You want a real, brave Afghan feminist? Just one, among thousands, is Sima Samar, head of Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission: "Finish the job you started. It's not just for protecting Afghanistan, or protecting Canadians. It is about the protection of humanity. This is a human responsibility. It isn't possible to escape this kind of responsibility."