Women: A Call to Arms

I agree with Mary Eberstadt when she wrote, in a recent article, that women and military service don’t go together, especially if that service requires a young mother to deploy in some unknown part of the world and win a war for her country.

But policing is another matter. It takes place on the domestic front. Its goal of maintaining peace and order is carried out within the parameters of a local community.

And policing by women takes on a special meaning in societies where women are oppressed and treated as second-class citizens. Hear me out.

Last week, two Afghan women were in town to receive the International Women for Courage Award from State Secretary Hillary Clinton. One of them is Colonel Quraishi, who “earned her title as one of 900-plus Afghan National Police,” and now serves as director of gender, human and child rights at the Afghan Ministry of the Interior. In this Washington Post piece, “Saving the World, One Woman at a Time,” the author said that upon interviewing the colonel and other honorees, she noted that all of them would reiterate a dominant theme: “we are not victims.” There was Roshaneh Zafar, a Pakistani woman who founded a microfinance organization to help poor women, who said that “Like women everywhere, we want to be empowered.” “And no, said the colonel, women do not need to do handicrafts. When you think of an Afghan woman, in other words, don’t think of an embroidered tapestry; think of a cop. Tapestries are lovely, and we all want one, but Quraishi prefers that women have guns. Her immediate goal is to expand the number of women in the police force to 5,000.”

Arming women in a principled, legitimate way in societies where they are being oppressed (Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere) is brilliant. Where some of them are being stoned to death for not wearing a veil, or being burned to death for marrying someone who is above or below their caste, or having acid poured on their faces for cooking a bad meal, or getting raped just because they have a different ethnic background, arming them with police authority gives them dignity, respect, and power.

I hope that a chunk of foreign aid funds handed out by the State Department to countries that oppress women include a proviso requiring that a portion of it be used for integrating women into the police force; and the rest, of course, for their education. For education and guns can indeed be empowering.