An Open Letter to the London Review of Books

I did write this as a more “normal” letter to the editor, but evidently they were more interested in using their page space to let Emily Wilson nuke her own credibility for no good reason, so I'm putting it here instead. It's about Afghanistan.

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To whom it may concern,

Tom Stevenson's review of Paul D. Miller's Choosing Defeat (LRB, 21 May) makes a compelling case against Miller's treatment of the American war in Afghanistan. This treatment, according to Stevenson, completely ignores key aspects of the conflict such as the US torture program and the Patriot Act. Stevenson's review, however, has a similarly glaring omission of its own, namely the peculiarly horrendous treatment of women in Afghanistan during periods of Taliban rule. Indeed, Stevenson's only even indirect allusion to this is a scornful mention of women who won elected office in US-run Afghanistan "so they could work alongside the CIA assets in the cabinet". As with the feminist aspects of earlier so-called "civilizing missions" such as the British Raj, a moral verdict on the war that gave adequate attention to this topic could still be very negative; for one thing, even from a purely consequentialist standpoint, the Taliban rule over more of Afghanistan's women now than they did before 2001. However, Stevenson's decision against giving any such attention means that his analysis is as necessarily, and offensively, incomplete as is Miller's.

N.M. Turowsky

Greenfield, Massachusetts

United States of America