After 9/11, the US government committed to a war in Afghanistan as a retaliation strike. But shortly thereafter other reasons for going to war there were found and aired - like the treatment of women under Taliban rule (wearing the full-body burqa for example). It is a typical example of instrumentalising an undeniably good cause (liberation from oppression and sexism) for an ambiguous cause (the war in Afghanistan).

The two US-Iraq wars had similar propagandistic preparations, like the daughter of Kuwait ambassador doing a fake witness account of an Iraqi massacre which never took place, or the reasons for the second war ranging from weapons of mass destruction (and preventing their proliferation) which were never found to liberating the Iraqi people. A goal adopted much later, which in itself seems valid and honorable, but served as an excuse for going to war *after* already having committed to the idea.

So, we have the issue of instrumentalisation in general. More specificly to the original post I tried to point out that there are branches of feminism which welcomed the Afghanistan war as a just campaign for freeing women - allowing themselves to be instrumentalised in a propaganda effort and ultimately losing awareness of a fact - war costs lives. Neither should it be welcomed, nor did it actually end the cultural biases present in Afghanistan. More freedom is possible now, but living in Afghanistan has not fundamentally changed. In my personal opinion the desire to overcome oppression of women in this world has in this instance has become warped into turning a blind eye on what really has been going on.

Oliver