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| Afghanistan |
| GI Janes flaunt their sports bras |
| 2002-12-15 |
| By Jan McGirk in Peshawar I idly mention to my translator in Peshawar how a war photo published in all the Pakistani dailies has outraged everyone who has seen it. Janula Hashim Khan is usually rather bored by my attempts to make polite conversation, but he suddenly comes to life, eyes ablaze. "Yes, I know the photo. It's a disgrace to see our sisters and mothers mauled like that," he says. To my amazement, he pulls a carefully folded newspaper clipping out of his wallet. "Is this the one you mean?" The picture shows an Afghan woman being subjected to a body search by an American soldier. "Yep. That's the one..." The photo had provoked weeks of venomous letters to the editor condemning this practice. The same shot had been blown up and used for the Yank-bashing election campaign that swept the clerics into unprecedented power in the provinces closest to the Afghan border. To most Pakistanis and Afghans, this photo is hyper-offensive, showing a demure Islamic beauty disrespected by an American brute. Yes! Damn those American brutes! The latent feminist in me cannot be stifled. There is some potent propaganda to be countered. "Look a little closer," I said. "That is a woman soldier who is patting the Afghan lady down." Nah! "Impossible," all the Muslim men in the room say in unison. The masculine ambience of this frontier city near the Khyber Pass is so pervasive that, at least in a warlord's antechamber, a female soldier is utterly inconceivable, even if you have a picture of her in front of you. "Look again," I insist. "Under the helmet, her hair is bunched at the neck. The US army has plenty of women soldiers, just like this one." Pretty daggone comely for an American brute... In fact, I later learnt that the original caption, never used in Pakistan, identified her as Sergeant Nicola Hall. The bearded men are unconvinced. "Well, then look at her childbearing hips," I continue. "Broad. Like mine." Khan blanches and hesitates before he translates my words. The men scowl. "If she lived in your country, she'd be breeding stock, suckers." Again, the photo is passed around. Culturally, this is a minefield. In the Northwest Frontier provinces no one is prepared to check out a person's bum in public, certainly not in mixed company, not even in a photo. Men and women customarily cover their backsides with long tunics. Could they not know what to look for? "Most men are narrower in the loins ..." I am stating the obvious and stop abruptly. They should know that, from the occasional woman who's paraded down the main street nekkid... They shrug, unable to sex the fighter in the photo and unwilling to admit they might be mistaken. But one young lieutenant persists. "That is not a female. That is a soldier manhandling an Afghan woman," he declares with finality. Uhuh. Wrong, then right. A Western military attaché told me how grenades and rockets were often retrieved from beneath the odd burqa. Women must be checked during routine arms inspections and this presents a quandary: how to be culturally sensitive conquerors and not offend the folks you liberated last year and now want to disarm. Does present a problem, doesn't it? Some etiquette is evolving. Now American female soldiers start gun raids in Afghanistan by bounding out of helicopters and stripping down to their sports bras. Only then do they take village women aside to be searched. It is a quick way to prove their femininity to Afghan elders unaccustomed to seeing women in trousers. I reckon it must leave quite a few of the old boys slack-jawed and goggle-eyed. "Mahmoud! That soldier! He has big titties!" "What won't these infidels think of next?" |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #3 And this is a country that had a female Prime Minister - Benazir Bhutto. |
| Posted by: Jack 2002-12-16 06:01:25 |
| #2 Read somewhere else (Don Sensung's weblog, I think) that the US forces have a solution to this. Our GI Janes strip to their sports bras prior to gathering up the local women for the body-searches. Apparently this not only convinces the local women that they're being searched by women, but lowers the IQ points of the local men by about 30 points, all at the same time :-) I'll see if I can find it and post a link. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2002-12-15 17:07:10 |
| #1 For some reason, the idea of women soldiers "bounding out of helicopters and stripping down to their sports bras" reminds me of those Old Milwaukee commercials with the "Swedish Bikini Team." "When the gals from Company B of the 1/23rd got out of their Blackhawks and into their swimsuits, it got a little better . . . ." |
| Posted by: Mike 2002-12-15 15:05:28 |