The Plight of Women in Afghanistan
Body and Soul has a nice piece on this, where the writer asks this simple question:

--Well, I was just wondering: How come conservatives have now dropped the issue of the lives of women in Afghanistan, and the only people who are still trying to gain some attention for the issue are feminists?

Check out the article and links. This was my comment:

It's a good question, but unfortunately the answer is simple. Because conservatives don't give a flying f*ck about women and only used the "feminist" angle against the Taliban when they needed some quick and easy propoganda to win support for a war in Afghanistan. Now they've gone back to ignoring the plight of women there just as they did in the years of Taliban rape and pillaging BEFORE September 11th.

The height of conservative hypocrisy was in the post 9-11 media frenzy, when several women who'd previously been denounced as "feminazis" (like Mavis Leno, for one) were welcomed with open arms onto the air at the FOX "News" Network to tell Americans why the Taliban was evil. The fauning and sucking up by the hosts ended abruptly, however, when one of the "feminazis" had the audacity to suggest the US should have never supported the proto-Taliban Mujahadin in the 80s and early 90s. (For more on this, see my rant about the US Propoganda machine from early 2002.)

Other than providing a haven for Osama Bin Laden and the small fact that they worship Alah rather than Jesus, the fact is that the Taliban is much closer to the kind of government the hard-core "christian" conservatives have wet dreams about installing in the US. Just look at Ashcroft: he's spent his entire political career trying to get laws and constitutional amendments passed that would FORCE women to give birth to their rapists' babies or, literally, to DIE TRYING. (For more on this, see my rant about the partial-truth abortion campaign.)