Small Wars Journal linked to a story (
In Afghan War, Letting Women Reach Women, via NYT) about Female Engagement Teams that the Marine Corps is fielding in Afghanistan.
... 40 young women are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in one of the more forward-leaning experiments of the American military... 'female engagement teams,' the military’s name for four- and five-member units that will accompany men on patrols in Helmand Province to try to win over the rural Afghan women who are culturally off limits to outside men. The teams, which are to meet with the Afghan women in their homes, assess their need for aid and gather intelligence... [ISAF] officers say that you cannot gain the trust of the Afghan population if you only talk to half of it.
I remember receiving a check-the-block "cultural awareness" briefing prior to OIF I that was administered not at the unit level, but at the installation level. Thus, the audience was a mix of all specialties, ranks, and included male and female. Units simply had to make sure their Soldiers attended it at some point as part of the checklist of items in our "readiness processing" packets. It was not a horrible briefing, but certainly inadequate by today's standards.
One part of that briefing stuck out as I read the above article. The Major (Assistant Division G-5, if I recall correctly) giving the briefing asked, "how many independent ladies we got in the audience?" Several female Soldiers raised their hands. "Okay, here's the deal," he began, "when you're in Kuwait or Iraq, don't be independent. And for the men in the audience, don't talk to the local women."
If that was the perception of Iraq, then it was certainly the opinion of Afghanistan at the time - perhaps even more so. However, it appears that the women in Afghanistan are a little more "independent" than some first thought. The article went on to state that...
Marines who have worked with the ad hoc teams in Afghanistan said that rural Afghan women, rarely seen by outsiders, had more influence in their villages than male commanders might think, and that the Afghan women’s good will could make Afghans, both men and women, less suspicious of American troops.
I have long suspected this. As I said in
my comment at the SWJ blog, some things are universal. A man - in any country - will always claim that "in my house, what I say goes." In reality, once he goes home, his wife is telling him to take out the trash and fix that leaky faucet. If the man - in any country - knows what is good for him, he shuts up and does as he is told. I saw in Iraq and always suspected it to be the case in Afghanistan. This reaffirms my hunch.