Introduction: liberalism, conflict and gender

The address from which the quotation above is taken was made to the United States public a few weeks after the launch of strikes against Afghanistan, in the place of the president's weekly radio address. It signalled the launch of a campaign, spearheaded by the wives of US President George W. Bush and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair in support of the war, which focused on the plight of Afghan women and children, placing their liberation as a target of the military intervention. At that point, the legality of the invasion was still questioned, the United Nations Security Council having not issued a resolution that expressly authorised such action. A week later, and days after the Northern Alliance had entered Kabul, the Cable News Network (CNN) described the changes with reference primarily to women's rights, exemplified, amid references to education and healthcare, by the following sentence: ‘Nail varnish and lipstick have resurfaced from the back of women's drawers, and are being worn by women who no longer need a man to accompany their trips beyond their front door’. This attention to mundane and recognisably modern and Western attributes of femininity to promote a politics of gender equality was just one of the many paradoxes of that war, and the War on Terror, in which it was couched. Critical analysis has pointed to that campaign on women's rights as exemplary of how ‘women's bodies have been designated as a focal point for drawing distinctions between the free – those who have a capacity for self-government – and the unfree, whose incapacity for self-governance makes them targets [for violence]’. Liberalism is the discursive frame within which such paradoxes have been accommodated: paradoxes between the hailing of freedom and practice of violence, the hailing of equality and practice of orientalist oppression, and the hailing of legal order and the practice of flouting international law. Critical analyses and an ActionAid report have shown years later that Afghan women's rights suffered a backlash after a brief period of improvement, the promises of the first ladies’ campaigns not having been delivered.