Afghan Journal

Saving women’s rights in a post-war Afghanistan

                                                        By Andrew Hammond

There have been worrying signs in Kabul over the past week  that political and social gains made by women since the Taliban  were removed from power in 2001 are at best tenuous.

 ”Normalising” the country’s profile after the extremes of  five years of Taliban rule has been one main justifications for  continuing the Western military mission in Afghanistan, and of  Hamid Karzai’s government.

Karzai’s interim cabinet after 2001 included a female  vice-president and there were three female ministers after his election in 2004.  Next month’s parliamentary polls maintain a  quota to ensure at least 25 percent of Walesi Jirga seats are  filled by women.

The state has also done away with the austere version of  Islamic law applied by the Taliban and its fixed sharia punishments for crimes such as adultery. Women are not barred  from education or the workplace or no longer need cover up  completely in public.

Social freedoms, specifically those of women, have played a  central role in Western arguments justifying a military operation  dubbed by insurgents as an occupation by Crusaders

Resurgent Taliban target women and children

Civilian casualties in the worsening war in Afghanistan are up just over 30 percent in the current year,  the United Nations said in a mid-year report this week, holding the Taliban responsible for three-quarters of the deaths or injuries.

More worrying, women and children seem to be taking the brunt of the violence directed by a resurgent Taliban, which will only stoke more concern about the wisdom of seeking reconciliation with the hardline Islamist group.

Indeed the Taliban have been blamed for a series of horrific assaults on women in recent weeks,  which must be distasteful to even those pushing for a deal with them as a way to end the nine-year conflict.

A 48-year-old widow was given dozens of lashes in public and then executed for alleged adultery by the insurgents in the northwestern Badghis province on Sunday, according to a Reuters report, citing a provincial police officer.  This came hard on the heels of a Time magazine cover picture of an 18-year-old woman allegedly disfigured by the Taliban for trying to flee abuse by her husband.

The UN report, documenting attacks on women and children, makes for equally grim reading. It said that in the first six months of this year, 55 percent more children were killed or wounded by the Taliban and other anti-government groups than in the same period in 2009. The number of women killed or wounded by the Taliban and other insurgents increased by six percent. Here is a PDF of the report.

It’s not just accidental deaths that we are talking of here, or people getting caught in the middle of crossfire between soldiers and insurgents.  These were targeted killings, especially in the case of children, often suspected of  spying for the government. Here are three cases listed in the report :

No place for women in the Great Afghan endgame

A Time magazine cover showing the face of an 18-year-old Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban has set off a furious debate about how far to go in search of a political settlement with the resurgent Islamist group to end nine years of fighting.

On the one side are those who point to the latest atrocity as a reminder of the brutality of the Taliban, and that nothing really had changed. Women will pay the heaviest price if the hardline Islamist group returned to power, they warn. On the other hand are those who argue that America cannot indefinitely remain in Afghanistan to defend women’s rights which in any case remains an elusive goal. Indeed the latest abuse took place while troops are on the ground which goes to show the limits of military power.

How do you reconcile the two, that is, win peace for Afghanistan without giving away women’s rights?

But first the horrific Time story. Here’s an excerpt:

The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband’s house. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn’t run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Aisha’s brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose.

This didn’t happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden in a secret women’s shelter in Kabul, Aisha listens obsessively to the news. Talk that the Afghan government is considering some kind of political accommodation with the Taliban frightens her. “They are the people that did this to me,” she says, touching her damaged face. “How can we reconcile with them.”

She is not the only one asking that question. Across Afghanistan, not just the conservative southern part of the country which is also the spiritual home to the Taliban, girls’ schools are closing, working women have been threatened and advocates attacked, the New York Times reported. Families are increasingly confining their daughters to home as the Taliban and allied groups extend their sway into the north and centre of the country.

On Afghan planes, women are “not able-bodied”

I was recently on a flight back from the western Afghan city of Herat. I was with a female friend, an American consultant who was in Herat compiling field research on civilian casualties. There was a ‘free seats’ policy on the Pamir Airways flight so my friend and I went to the first available empty row, which happened to be the exit row in the middle of the plane.

As we went to sit down a clean-shaven flight attendant who looked like he was in his twenties told us we had to sit elsewhere. I asked why and he said “It’s for men only, no women, please sit here,” pointing to the next row behind. My friend and I looked at each other with disbelief. We both asked him again, why we couldn’t sit there and why being women prevented us from sitting there. Without any hesitation he said: “It’s for men and able bodied people only.” We were shocked.

Together we both have about five years experience living and working in Afghanistan as foreign women — not much compared to many outsiders in the country, but enough to know what the deal is with public transport in this very conservative Muslim country. We both always dress appropriately and wear the usual modesty uniform of a long coat or jacket and headscarf in order to blend in and not draw attention to ourselves. But neither of us had heard anything as offensive as what this flight attendant was telling us.

Again I said to the young man, who looked like a typical Westernised Kabulite, sporting the type of hair style British footballer David Beckham had in the late 1990s, “so you are saying we are disabled?” With a straight face he replied simply, “yes”. My friend and I tried to reason with him and insisted that we should be able to take the seats, pointing out that we were capable of opening the emergency exit if needed. But he insisted we sit elsewhere. Without wanting to delay our journey any further, we took two empty seats next to an Afghan lady.

As my companion lifted her rucksack to place it in the overhead locker, the same attendant tried to help her. She turned to him and firmly pointed out that she was able bodied and perfectly capable of lifting her bag without his assistance.

On another flight from Kabul, this time on Safi Airways, I asked the flight attendant their policy on seating women in the exit row and he had the same answer. He even used almost the exact same language: “No women, men and able-bodied only”.

I also checked with Emirates Airlines, a major international carrier, and their flight attendant said they had no such policy.

Kandahar’s street without women

Where women really stand in Afghan society didn’t hit home to me until I walked down a busy market street in Kandahar without seeing a single woman. The birthplace of the Taliban, Kandahar is conservative even by Afghan standards.  It is also the focus of NATO’s next big military offensive in Afghanistan,  and I spent a couple of days last week embedded with a U.S. military police unit there to report on plans for the offensive and the mood on the ground. 

Under a blistering afternoon sun, a group of U.S. and Canadian soldiers and military police led me down a road packed with shops on either side — a bustling market street where you could buy anything from glass plates to spare bicycle parts. At first, I was taken in by the colourful sights and smells, some of which reminded me of my childhood in India – giant bags of something resembling green and beige pasta shells, sweet shops stacked with glass containers of cookies and pastries, fruits and vegetables laid out on the ground, men sitting on a mat and drinking chai.  It was only after a while that I realized that the curious local faces staring at us were all male,  that each and every shopkeeper, assistant and hanger-on (and there were a lot of them) we had seen so far was a man.  Could it really be possible that we had walked about 200 metres along a busy market in the city center without seeing a single woman?

A Canadian soldier next to me chuckled when I mentioned it. “That’s what my wife asks me as well when I send her pictures.  Where are the women? You rarely see them here, and when you do they’re completely covered up,” he said.  The general lack of women also probably explained why the Kandaharis were staring at me like I had just showed up from outer space. At every shop we stopped at to ask questions, a small crowd of boys and young men would gather around to find out what the fuss was about and after a few minutes of giggling and staring, some would take out cellphones to take pictures.

It was only towards the end of our stroll, when we had turned back, that I finally caught glimpse of a woman as she entered a car. She was wearing an all-enveloping burqa, and then another car passed by with three burqa-clad women in the backseat.  So women existed here after all.  I’d heard that Kandaharis were known for their good looks, and a colleague who had done a feature on a girls’ school in Kandahar had mentioned their startlingly big eyes and perfect faces. In the end, I left Kandahar without seeing a single local woman’s face – at least on the streets; the exception being an old woman at the military base I was staying at, who may or may not have been from Kandahar.

Various people to whom I later mentioned the lack of women at the market put it down to perhaps the afternoon time when women stayed indoors and prepared dinner to an unusual coincidence that they found odd as well. 

The next day, I did see a few more burqa-clad women on the streets on another patrol with the U.S. military police team, but trying to stop any to lob a question at them seemed next to impossible as they fled at the sight of U.S. soldiers. The full-cover burqa with its netting across the eyes made eye contact impossible as well. The closest I got was a scrawny 9-year old girl with brown hair who happily followed us around one street.  Out of sheer curiosity more than anything else, I asked her through an interpreter if she too would wear a burqa when she grew up.  Giggling happily, she said: “Yes, when I get to your age.”

Women hold up half the sky even in Afghanistan ?

Back in 2002, onlookers would often gather outside the U.S. military headquarters in Bagram in Afghanistan, watching women soldiers in full battle gear sitting on top of vehicles on guard duty at the entrance to the base.

For a deeply conservative society such as Afghanistan, it was a novel sight to watch women in such a role, more so coming soon after the harsh regime of the Taliban. From time to time, the women would get annoyed and holler to the men hanging around and staring at them:  “Back off. Haven’t you seen a woman ever?”

Getting into the base off and on, I often wondered what was the idea of posting women soldiers right at the entrance, since it only underlined the vast cultural gulf between the two societies.

Anyway, fast forward to 2010,  women members of the U.S. Marine Corps are going to be at the front end of the renewed push to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans. They will be launched into Afghan homes to try and win over the rural women, according to a report in The New York Times. You can’t gain the trust of  the population if  you talk to only half of it, is the argument for this outreach to Afghan women.

Beginning next month small units of the female marines will accompany the men on their patrol in Helmand, one of Afghanistan’s most violent provinces. The teams will meet Afghan women in their homes, assess their need for help, and gather intelligence. Hopefully, winning the  women’s goodwill  could make Afghans, both men and women, less suspicious of American troops. For, women hold half the sky even in Afghanistan.

Once inside an Afghan compound, the Marines have been instructed to remove the ‘battle rattle” of body armour and helmets, and in a nod to local custom, swap the helmet for a scarf.

The other do’s and don’ts: Don’t start by firing off questions, break the ice by playing with the children and don’t let the interpreter hijack the conversation.

The agony of Pakistan

It must take a particularly determined lot to bomb a bus full of pilgrims, killing scores of them, and then following the wounded to a hospital to unleash a second attack to kill some more. Karachi’s twin explosions on Friday, targeting Shia Muslims on their way to a religious procession were on par with some of the worst atrocities committed in recent months.

It also came just two days after a bombing in Lower Dir, near Swat, in which a convoy of soldiers including U.S. servicemen were targeted while on their way to open a girls school. Quite apart from the fact that the U.S. soldiers were the obvious targets, the renewed violence along with fresh reports of flogging by the Taliban calls into question the broader issue of negotiating with hard-core Islamists as proposed by the Afghan government just over the border.

The blog, All Things Pakistan, captured the mood of a despairing nation. “Pakistan remains at war. Whether it school girls in Lower Dir or Shia mourners and those waiting outside Jinnah hospital in Karachi. All Pakistanis everywhere are targets for these murderous enemies of Pakistan.”

“It may be true that we do not have many friends abroad. But it is certainly clear that our cruellest enemies are all amongst us. Day in, day out, they kill and maim and terrorize Pakistanis all across Pakistan. No city is safe. No Pakistani is safe.”

No Pakistani is safe. The BBC ran a chilling story this week about life among the Taliban in which a 13-year-old girl talks about how her father and brother tried to turn her into a suicide bomber. They told Meena she would go to paradise long before they would if she carried out a suicide bombing, She said Taliban commanders used to come to their house, and that would-be bombers, most of them children her age or even younger, would be trained in an underground bunker adjacent to her house.  Children were used for this activity because they were too young to know any better, she said.

She watched her own sister being strapped with bombs and sent to die even while she kept crying for her mother. Later her brother told Meena her sister’s attack was in Afghanistan. And when Meena refused to follow suit she was threatened and beaten. She escaped her fate only after a helicopter gunship struck the family house just as she stepped out to run after a goat. Her house reduced to rubble, she never went back and walked until she reached a town. There is no independent confirmation of her account but police believe she is telling the truth, according to the BBC.

Reintegrating the Taliban: where does it leave Afghan women?

At Thursday’s London conference on Afghanistan, some 60 countries will to try flesh out the details for a plan to gradually hand security to Afghans, which involves strengthening and expanding Afghan security forces, improving the way donor aid to Afghanistan is spent and reintegrating Taliban fighters. But where do women fit into these plans, especially if the Taliban are to be involved?

The plan, which has been tried in the past without much success, would involve luring low-level Taliban from the insurgency using jobs and money to re-join Afghan society. There has also been much talk, particularly in the media, about the possibility of dialogue or negotiations with the Taliban.

But many Afghan women, who remember very clearly what life was like under the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, are outraged by the idea.

On Wednesday, groups representing Afghan women warned the international community against pursuing a peace deal with the Taliban. “I have great fears, and I am greatly confused … 2001 was a very clear signal that there is no more room for conservative elements to rule in Afghanistan,”  Homa Sabri of the United Nation’s agency for women, UNIFEM, told Reuters in London.

The women at the meeting, which took place on the sidelines of the conference, also called for greater female representation in any peace process and better access to jobs in the security services and the monitoring of aid which is destined for programmes promoting women’s rights.

The condition of women has improved in the past eight years, but they are still frustratingly far from being able to succeed in public life, even when they are much better qualified than men.

Earlier this month, the rejection by Afghanistan’s parliament of two women who President Hamid Karzai nominated to be ministers in his new cabinet, provided a stark and rather sobering reminder of just how difficult it still is for Afghan women to succeed independently and how, in some ways, little beyond rules about the burqa has changed.