Shaukina's father a loan in return for a promise of 30 kilos of opium, never imagining that both their fields would be eradicated before harvest. That's how Enaghul's son married Shaukina. But with the opium ban, Enaghul says his family is barely surviving. They make less than $2 a day growing tomatoes and potatoes. Enaghul casts an appraising eye on his youngest daughter, Sharifa, 5, as she runs after a goat in the courtyard of their mud-and-brick home. "I think she would fetch between $500 and $600," he says. With luck, he says, he might be able to postpone the wedding five or six years. Some Western officials promise the hard times won't last much longer. Loren Stoddard, Afghanistan director for the U.S. Agency for International Development, says crop-substitution programs are already yielding results. As many as 40,000 farming families in Nangarhar are receiving some kind of compensation for the loss of opium revenues, he says, and USAID has financed the planting of 1.3 million fruit, nut and other trees in the province since 2006, with plans for an additional 300,000 this year. There's even a new mill producing 30 tons of chicken feed a day. "Good things are happening here," Stoddard says. "I think Nangarhar will take off in the next two years." Many farmers doubt they can hold out that long. Kachkol Khan looks around his single acre of wheat in Pa Khel village and asks how he will feed his family of seven. "What we earn from this wheat won't feed us for one month," he says. Six months ago he gave the hand of his 13-year-old daughter, Bibi Gula, to settle an opium debt of $700, with roughly $1,500 cash thrown in. That's what they're living on now. At least his creditor agreed to let Gula stay home until she turns 15. "I'm not happy with what I did," Khan says. "Every daughter has ambitions to marry with dignity. I fear she'll be treated as a second-class wife and as a maid." Even worse is his worry that the same future may await his two younger daughters, 11 and 10. Angiza Afridi, 28, has spent much of the past year interviewing more than 100 families about opium weddings in two of Nangarhar's 22 districts. The schoolteacher and local TV reporter already had firsthand knowledge of the tragedy. Five years ago one of her younger aunts, then 16, was forced to marry a 55-year-old man to pay off an older uncle's opium debt, and three years ago an 8-year-old cousin was also given in marriage to make good on a drug loan. "This practice of marrying daughters to cover debts is becoming a bad habit," says Afridi. Even so, the results of her survey shocked her. In the two districts she studied, approximately half the new brides had been given in marriage to repay opium debts. The new brides included children as young as 5 years old; until they're old enough to consummate their marriages, they mostly work as household servants for their in-laws. "These poor girls have no future," she says. The worst of it may be the suicides. Afridi learned of one 15-year-old opium bride who poisoned herself on her wedding day late last year and an 11-year-old who took a fatal dose of opium around the same time. Her new in-laws were refusing to let her visit her parents. Gul Ghoti is on her first visit home since her wedding six months ago. She says it's a relief to be back with her father and mother in their two-room mud-and-brick house, if only temporarily. "My heart is still with my parents, brothers and sisters," she says. "Only my body is with my husband's family." She says she personally knows of two opium brides who killed themselves. "One of the girls had been badly beaten by her husband's brother, the other by her husband," she says. Ghoti says she's considered suicide, too, but Islam stopped her. "I pray that God doesn't give me a daughter if she ends up like me."
The terminal impact to patriarchy is nuclear holocaust Spretnak 89 (Charlene, MA in English at Berkeley, “Exposing Nuclear Phallacies, p. 60)
Most men in our patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns that areradically inappropriate for the nuclear age.To prove dominance and control, to distance one’s character from that of women, to survive the toughest violent initiation, to shed the sacred blood of the hero, to collaborate with death in order to hold it at bay – all of these patriarchal pressures on men have traditionally reached resolution in a ritual fashion on the battlefield. But there is no longer any battlefield. Does anyone seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a crucial, large-scale conventional war it would refrain from using its multiple-warhead nuclear missiles because of some diplomatic agreement? The military theater of a nuclear exchange today would extend, instantly or eventually, to all living things, all the air, all the soil, all the water. If we believe that war is a “necessary evil,” that patriarchal assumptions are simply “human nature,” then we are locked into a lie, paralyzed. The ultimate result of unchecked terminal patriarchy will be nuclear holocaust.
1AC - Positive Peace Add-On
War on Drugs and War on Terror sanitize the way we look at life as peace and conflict resolution
Cuomo 92 (Chris. Ph.D., 1992, University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Philosophy University of Cincinnati Hypatia Fall 1996.Vol.11, Iss. 4) M
Given current American obsessions with nationalism, guns, and militias, and growinghunger for the deathpenalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot underestimate the need for philosophical and political attention to connections among phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded militaristic campaigns. I propose that the constancy of militarism and its effects on social reality be reintroduced as a crucial locus of contemporary feminist attentions, and that feminists emphasize how wars are eruptions and manifestations of omnipresent militarism that is a product and tool of multiply oppressive, corporate, technocratic states.(2) Feminists should be particularly interested in making this shift because it better allows consideration of the effects of war and militarism on women, subjugated peoples, and environments. While giving attention to the constancy of militarism in contemporary life we need not neglect the importance of addressing the specific qualities of direct, large-scale, declared military conflicts. But the dramatic nature of declared, large-scale conflicts should not obfuscate the ways in which military violence pervades most societies in increasingly technologically sophisticated ways and the significance of military institutions and everyday practices in shaping reality. Philosophical discussions that focus only on the ethics of declaring and fighting wars miss these connections, and also miss the ways in which even declared military conflicts are often experienced as omnipresent horrors. These approaches also leave unquestioned tendencies to suspend or distortmoral judgement in the face of what appears to be the inevitability of war and militarism. Representations of war as a bounded temporal event sanitize peace time militarism and produce a politics of crises that disable any possible resistance to structural violence
Cuomo 96 (Chris Cuomo - Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and Director of the Institute for Women's Studies at the Univerity of Georgia – 1996 )
Ethical approaches that donot attend totheways in whichwarfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of lifein twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politicsand analyses. For any feminism that aimsto resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because they distract attention fromthe need forsustained resistance to theenmeshed, omnipresentsystems of domination and oppressionthat so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglectingthe omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, thepolaropposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief thatmilitarism is an ethical, politicalconcern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms ofresistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control.Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism.Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state. Moving away from crisis-driven politicsand ontologiesconcerning war and military violencealsoenables consideration of relationships amongseemingly disparatephenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and practical forms ofresistance.Forexample, investigatingthe ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence andsymbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meaningsof gender; the ways in which threats of state-sponsored violence are a sometimesinvisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war."