Operation Rhetorical Agency

     As the German C130 I was seated in prepared to depart Kabul International Airport, I heard an Air Force Sgt. say with amusement to the just arrived female Airman sitting near him on the red canvas jump-seat,  “Welcome to Afghanistan! Set your watch back…five hundred years.”

I smiled sardonically to myself in appreciation of his accurate appraisal of many areas of the country.

     Though I knew nothing of the study of rhetoric then, I can look back now and consider that classical rhetoric is still alive and well there. The War on Terror in Afghanistan, known as OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM, could, in fact, also be named OPERATION RHETORICAL AGENCY. Those that have had the power of agency (The Taliban) and have kept hold of it with violent and cruel persuasion are struggling to prevent the acquisition of agency by those Afghans who do not support their radical Muslim views.

An Agent, says Cooper in “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted”, is one who, with free will, changes the world through knowing intention (421).

     In this photograph that I took of a Shura (meeting) near the town of Jer-i-syah in Badghis Province in Northern Afghanistan, a 209^th Corps Afghan National Army Soldier (with raised hand) discourses with the elder leaders and other men and boys from the village with the desire of persuading them to give up their belligerent ways and fully support the government. If the local people should decide to do this then we, the representatives of the government, will assist financially with much needed basic improvements for the village such as the reconstruction of the dilapidated school. A provision of this construction would be that the village’s girls, as well as boys, would be educated.

     Those girls and all the women of the village are without agency. “Agents do reflect on their actions on their own” (Cooper 421). “Agency instead is based in individuals’ lived knowledge that their actions are their own. (Cooper 421). Those village females have access to little or no knowledge of the outside world. The confines of that village and the mud walled compounds in which they move comprise their entire view of the world. Their actions are not their own.

In stark contrast to those unseen village females was I, a female Soldier working alongside my male counterparts from the US, Afghanistan, Norway, and Croatia. Since I was usually the only female present, it was always my fervent hope that I would somehow be seen by the village 

females from behind the mud walls that obscured them from my sight.  By virtue of my presence and gender I was an agent of change.  I was always aware that I had great responsibility as that lone female representative and had to conduct myself with modesty to maintain a respectful and good working relationship with my fellow soldiers and civilians. Cooper concludes, “…responsible rhetorical agency is a matter of acknowledging and honoring the responsive nature of agency and that this is a kind of agency that supports deliberative democracy.” (422)