From Humanitarian Intervention to the Beautifying Mission: Afghan Women and Beauty Without Borders (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was quick to assimilate the terror attacks into a simplistic binary opposition of good and evil, absolving the U.S. of any foreign policy role in triggering the anger which prompted the attacks. As in the buildup to the first Gulf War in 1990, when Americans were asked to choose between two versions of masculinity, George Bush senior and the forces of good and Saddam Hussein and the forces of evil, we are haunted by colonial patterns of representation resurrected long after the death of formal colonialism, patterns which posit anti-American forces as the West's civilizational other. The mainstream media trumpeted Orientalist pronouncements on the attacks and urged indiscriminate military retaliation. Without offering the public any proof that Osama Bin Laden bore direct responsibility for the World Trade Center and Pentagon strikes, the U.S. commenced its war on a nation-less concept, "terrorism," by bombing targets within a nation, Afghanistan. This war was initially waged, according to the Bush administration, as a punitive measure, a kind of retributive justice, against those who planned the September 11 attacks, and as a preventive strike against future terrorist operations. [2] Even as U.S. bombs destroyed Afghan hospitals, Afghan homes, and a U.N. land mine clearing office, the Bush administration insisted that its war was against "terrorism" and not against the Afghan people. As the military strikes continued and civilian casualties mounted (nearly 3,800 Afghans died between 7 October and 7 December 2001), the media began to suggest that U.S. policy was a form of "humanitarian intervention" designed to liberate Afghans from the brutal rule of the Taliban (BBC). Several themes dominated the claim to humanitarian intervention in articles published in the New York Times during this period: an emphasis on the danger of widespread famine and the construction of the U.S. as the purveyor of food aid; a foregrounding of the law and order problem in the region and the assertion of the U.S. as a model for democracy; and, most prominently, outrage over the horrifying status of women under the Taliban and the presentation of the U.S. as a liberator of Afghan women.