The CIA wanted to use the agenda of feminism to gain Western support for the US-led War on Terror in Afghanistan, claimed a WikiLeaks report published a decade back.
WikiLeaks published details from a confidential 2010 CIA report that explored PR strategies to garner German and French support for US military occupation in Afghanistan. According to the report, the strategies would exploit the two countries’ soft spots. For French it would be public sympathy for Afghan women and refugees, whereas for Germany it would be the threat of an influx of refugees, drugs, and terrorism.
According to the WikiLeaks summary for the report, “The memo is a recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO-ally countries.” The US feared that the two countries, would withdraw their troops from war-torn Afghanistan like the Dutch did.
The Netherlands, despite being asked by NATO not to, had withdrawn Dutch troops from Afghanistan in 2010 after four years of sending them to the battleground. The Dutch suffered monetary losses up to some 1.4 billion euros and lost 24 soldiers to the US mission. Their withdrawal was detrimental to NATO’s cause at a crucial time when other countries like Canada and Britain had planned to reduce their forces in Afghanistan as well.
