The US-led war in Afghanistan followed on the heels of a war in the 1980s with the Soviet Union, and a 1990s civil war. Each war has turned thousands of Afghan women into refugees and widows – or both – and made it dangerous for women to seek schooling, healthcare, paid employment and legal rights. In each war, rival male combatants have claimed that they knew what was best for Afghan women, while marginalizing women in the actual planning of their future. And in each war, women and their children were often the victims of the violence itself.

In its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the US government chose as its chief domestic allies those warlords – the “Northern Alliance”-- opposed to Taliban rule. This was despite the fact that they firmly embraced negative or dismissive views of women, for instance, accepting domestic violence as a husband’s prerogative. Currently women hold a quarter of the seats in the Afghan legislature, but that percentage was gained over the objections of quota-phobic American officials. In addition, the millions of foreign dollars that have poured in for contractors and infrastructure have mainly benefited men and in many cases have created incentives for escalating conflict between male-led groups. Afghan women activists fear that the status of women – especially as it is affected by laws regarding marriage, inheritance, custody, divorce, and domestic violence – will become mere bargaining chips among the rival foreign and local male elites.

Since the 1920s, Iraqi women have pressed for access to legal rights, schooling and paid employment with notable success. The Iran-Iraq war and the US-backed 1990s international economic sanctions against the Iraqi regime caused many Iraqi women – including teachers, physicians, and engineers – to lose their jobs as the economy foundered. During the 2003 – 2011 war, the number of Iraqi women reduced to impoverished widowhood and refugee status skyrocketed. The ruling party of Prime Minister Maliki and his closest allies wrote a constitution undercutting the reformed family law that women’s groups had helped to craft in the 1970s. While Iraqi women’s organizations won a 25 percent quota for women in the new legislature, the newly emerged political parties are all led by men and there is only one woman among the 44 members of the current cabinet. Iraqi women activists today express alarm at the backward motion of the country’s gender policies, laws, and politics, saying that the US government’s focus on reconciling Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish men’s rivalries constantly marginalize important Iraqi women’s issues such as access to paid employment.