Before the troop withdrawal, the US government had justified its two-decade-long presence in
Afghanistan as protection for women’s rights. Now US President Joe Biden has thrown Afghan women and girls to the Taliban wolves without compunction.
As CH-46 military helicopters clattered over the Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul, the vengeful phantoms of history were resurrected by the dust and thunder of rotors. The sound of yet another empire in retreat drowned the cries of a young Afghan woman pleading with the American soldiers guarding the wire-fenced gate, “You’re our family. Please help!” The United States, which fought terrorism for two decades in Afghanistan, where an entire generation of girls and young women enjoyed personal freedoms under its watch, showed her no empathy. Mahbouba Seraj, a prominent Afghan women’s rights activist, has a message for the international community: “I’m going to say—really—shame on you,” she said, “I’m going to say to the whole world, shame on you.”
BETRAYAL OF A FUTURE
Joe Biden feels no such shame. In his 2019 stump speeches, he was fond of advertising the fact that he would be the first president since Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s to have had a son serving on an active battlefield. Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, recalls in his memoirs Biden lashing out that he was “not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of (Afghan) women’s rights... That’s not what they’re there for.” America’s hasty and chaotic withdrawal has imperilled the most vulnerable section of Afghan society—its women. To be fair, Biden who had initially supported sending troops to the terror-ravaged nation had opposed US boots on the ground.
But it was during Afghan civilian rule supported by the US that the fruits of freedom from the Taliban, and American economic might combined to change the lives of a generation of women like Zarifa Ghafari. She became the youngest mayor of Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak Province, when she was just 26 years old. These girls and young women grew up to be lawmakers, provincial governors, doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers and public administrators. They became the hope of Afghanistan, whom Biden-engineered anarchy has put in mortal danger. In spite of the Taliban’s assurance that women will be protected, the terror regime is making lists of females aged between 12 and 45 years to be forcibly taken as wives for their fighters—a custom that was widely prevalent during the first occupation. The barbaric avatar of Sharia law is back in force, with women prohibited from leaving the house without a male relative, or working, studying or dressing according to their preferences.
Swati Jena, founder of WriteFor, TEDx speaker, co-author of SAGE’s Diversity Beyond Tokenism, says, “Asking ‘what needs to be done to help women in Afghanistan’ is naïve at some level. We all know what needs to be done. The million-dollar question is, ‘who will do it?’ Why didn’t we ask these questions the last 10 years? Women have historically been the victims and scapegoats of war. This sort of today-we-are-angry-tomorrow-we-forget attitude makes us all guilty of tokenism. For any meaningful solution, we have to keep holding the right people accountable, for a very long time.” When Biden became president, he forgot that accountability by ignoring a US raison d’etre for staying on. America was not fighting for Afghan women, it was defending an ideal. Its troops were not combating terrorism, they were erasing a vicious ideology. Biden failed on both counts.
Says Dr Ranjana Kumari, Director, Centre for Social Research, “Their (Taliban’s) global statement about change should not be trusted by international communities, because since the moment they have come to power they have put a stop to women’s freedom to go out.” Reports of fighters torturing and raping women and conducting public executions in far-flung provinces are trickling in. A woman in Northern Afghanistan was burned alive for cooking an “unsatisfactory meal” for Taliban fighters. Many professionals are in hiding, fearing reprisal—women’s rights activists, political activists, journalists and academics. Ghafari, a graduate from Panjab University, Chandigarh, believes that “the Taliban will come for people like me and kill me.” The Italian Foreign Ministry reported that rights activist Zahra Ahmadi and all the female researchers from the Veronesi Foundation were evacuated. It says the Taliban are paying “special attention to those who worked for Italy… such as women and young people.” The foundation has been in Afghanistan since 2003, funding medical initiatives and projects like cancer research for children. Italian-Afghan doctor Arif Oryakhail broke down at the Milan airport, “We need to save those people in Kabul. We left them in Kabul with nothing.
They cooperated with us, we trained them as obstetricians, nurses, doctors. They were working and now they are abandoned, our hospitals are abandoned.” The gun-toting Salima Mazari, one of the only three female district governors in Afghanistan, has been captured by the Taliban, her fate unknown, presumably killed. On August 17, a Taliban spokesman said, “Our women are Muslim and will be happy to be living under Sharia law.” The same day, terrorists in Takhar shot dead a woman for not wearing a burqa. “The Taliban are running a sophisticated media and communications campaign (in five languages—Pashto, Dari, Urdu, Arabic and English) in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the international community. Only time will tell if it is the same draconian Taliban just dressed up in a new PR machine. As of now Afghan women do not believe them,” says Dr Anwesha Ghosh, Research Fellow (Afghanistan), Indian Council of World Affairs, Delhi.
QUITTING A DEAL
After routing the Taliban in 2001, one of the moral justifications America cited to stay on was as a protector of women’s rights. Former President George W Bush, who had put US boots on the ground in Afghanistan first, calls the US withdrawal “a mistake,” and that “I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had insisted that the insurgents must commit to uphold the Afghan Constitution and protect women’s rights as a precondition for any talks. The 2004 Afghan Constitution, midwifed by the US, specifically guarantees women’s rights and ensures female quotas in the political system. In Taliban-free Afghanistan, 3.5 million Afghan girls were enrolled in school and 100,000 were studying in universities by 2017.
Women’s life expectancy grew from 56 years in 2001 to 66 in 2017. Mortality during childbirth declined from 1,100 per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 396 per 100,000 in 2015. By 2020, 21 percent of all Afghan civil servants were women—16 percent of them in senior management—while there had been none in the Taliban regime. And 27 percent of Afghan MPs were women. Afghan women were soldiers and cops, surgeons, teachers, scientists, judges and prosecutors. They became journalists, translators and television presenters. After Donald Trump signed off on the US withdrawal, a patchwork combine of the US-led NATO alliance, the Ghani government, Afghan power brokers, warlords and the Taliban negotiated the future contours of Afghanistan, which included women’s rights. Ashutosh Shekha Paarcha, Advocate, Supreme Court, has a legal take on the Taliban’s assurances, “As far as laws or EVAM (Elimination of Violence against Women) are concerned, I don’t think any law is applicable, since this wasn’t a democratic power change. Afghanistan was taken over by siege and attack. Hence, the existing Constitution means nothing and so does none of the laws.
The new laws will be drafted by the Taliban and that will be the Constitution and law of the land for Afghanistan, no matter how insanely ridiculous they might be.” Recently, a female Afghan journalist told The Guardian, “I’m not safe because I’m a 22-year-old woman and I know that the Taliban is forcing families to give their daughters as wives. I’m also not safe because I’m a news journalist and I know the Taliban will come looking for me and all my colleagues.” After the abrupt collapse of the Afghan Army, the Taliban captured the US-made HIDE (Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment), which was used as a biometric tool to identify locals working for NATO forces. HIDE devices are linked to a massive central database, which has their iris scans, fingerprints and biographical information. In Taliban hands, this means certain death for these Afghans of whom a huge segment are women. Door-to-door searches are ongoing: Germany had created special ‘safe houses’ for Afghans who worked with its agencies. These are being closed because they are now “death traps.”
NO WOMEN, NOT SORRY
When final negotiations with the Taliban started in September 2020, the Afghan government’s 21-member negotiating team included only five women. They were the type of women the barbarians hated and feared; urban and educated, consistently outspoken opponents of terrorist abuses against women. They opposed any political deal that compromised women’s rights in the country. In President Ghani’s High Council for National Reconciliation, which oversaw and directed the negotiations, there were only nine women among 46 members. The Taliban’s team had no women at all. Ignoring the suggestions of Western observers and civil society representatives, the Taliban refuse to include women in their power structure or negotiating team, thereby indicating the status of women under Taliban 2.0 but nobody raised an eyebrow. The only work the Taliban had allowed women was poppy cultivation and opium harvesting—money knows no religion. The UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime reports that the overall income generated by domestic consumption, production and exports of opiates in Afghanistan is worth billions.
TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS
The women of Afghanistan inhabit different worlds, as inconsistent as its mountainous geography that has both the merciless Dasht-e Margo desert and the green fields of Wardak. The West’s “nation rebuilding” effort has hardly impacted the lives of Afghan rural women, who are 76 percent of the female population. The majority of them desperately desired peace after generations of their boys and men had died in conflict, and were buried in shallow graves in stony ground, or their bodies, half eaten by wolves, lay in the anonymous solitude of jihad along forested mountain slopes.
The green fields and orchards of Afghanistan ran with blood as the NATO coalition forces, the Afghan Army, the Taliban, and local militias battled for control. The spanking new clinics, the English-speaking doctors and modern co-ed schools and universities of new Afghanistan are alien concepts in upcountry Afghanistan. Most village women—the majority being Muslim, and the cycles of their days and lives controlled by the village maulvi and the men in their family—are fully covered in burqas even without the Taliban’s urging. Particularly in Pashtun areas, women still need approval from the men to visit a clinic, go to school, or work. The majority of Afghan men are deeply conservative.
A recent UN study showed that only 15 percent of Afghan men think married women should be allowed to work outside of their home, and two-thirds of men complained that Afghan women enjoy far too many rights. The study also revealed that 80 percent of Afghan women face domestic violence. Horrifyingly, around 50 percent of women prisoners and 95 percent of girls in prison have been jailed for “moral crimes” like having sex outside of marriage. Some are in captivity for killing their brutally abusive husbands in self-defence. Conservative Afghan men, like the Taliban, are deeply opposed to education for women. In many families, girls usually study up to primary or secondary level and are married off. If she is lucky, the girl is permitted to continue her education up to university level, but there is little hope of her being allowed to work. “It is safe to predict that rights, opportunities and participation of women in public life will shrink substantially in the days to come,” says Dr Ghosh.
THE ISLAMIST CAGE
In Afghanistan’s frontier provinces, where Islam is the reigning religion, men control society. The bodies of women are a battlefield of bigotry, with personal choice in conflict with medieval Islamic constructs. The role of frontier men is to be patriarchal and paternalistic, and is driven by the kind of machismo that glorifies honour and justice at the expense of women. Female roles are subservient and passive. The two bonding units of Afghan rural life are family and tribe in which women are respected as vessels of genetic continuity, and in whom the family’s honour resides. The men see their women’s bodies as proprietorial objects of purity.
Virginity is guarded zealously and violently so that the family line continues unsullied. Data from various agencies estimate that around 90 percent of rural women never even leave the house. In public, they emerge in chaste and segregated solitude, with the burqa as a sheath for their private space—their faces and bodies hidden to temptation and the voyeurism of strangers. They are shapeless figures of taboo, their forms invisible and magically secure, like a djinn’s illusion. The cohesiveness and identity of their tribes and family depend on the inviolateness of their physical, emotional and moral space. In Islamic societies, girls or women who are victims of rape are murdered to save the family’s “honour”.
Afghan women’s rights campaigners who are caught between the Western concept of female emancipation and Islamic gender values are keen to persuade the world from stereotyping oppressed Afghan women; they cite Nazoo Anaa, “the mother of Afghan nationalism”, and the female “warlord” Bibi Ayesha, who led male soldiers in the war against the Soviets and the Taliban as examples of emancipated women of the frontier. But Nazoo Anaa was a 17th century queen while the village-bred, uneducated mass of Taliban youth and their mentally padlocked mullahs bow to an ideology that is even more ancient. Said a commander in Hemland, “We (the Taliban) obey those orders that are based on Islam and Sharia, and if it is against Islam and Sharia, we do not obey the orders. If our leaders allow girls’ education, we disagree, and we would not accept their orders.” Muslim feminists across the world argue that the Quran is being misused by terrorist preachers and their proxies while the Prophet supported gender equality. However, the Taliban is the Devil that quotes the Scriptures and the women of Afghanistan are facing the eternal hellfire of the Islamist mind. In Kunduz, the Taliban is opening madarassas for girls. But in the northern districts of Helmand, girls cannot go to school. A former Taliban fighter from Musa Qala told an interviewer, “Girls cannot go to the mosque, forget about (girls) studying in a madrassa and school. The Taliban have said this.” A teacher from Kajaki told Human Rights Watch (HRW), “I have two daughters and one son. My son goes to madrassa, and I teach the Quran to (my daughters) in the morning and evening.”
BRUTAL INCONSISTENCY
Afghan women in the countryside and many towns and provinces were never free of Taliban. Driven out from Kabul after 9/11, the Taliban dug in and were lording over large swathes of the countryside as of mid-2020. They continued to oversee the work of international NGOs, which provide social services, including education and healthcare. The opinion of the elders in the community and local councils carries weight in deciding matters like regulating NGOs. This arrangement complicates matters for the Taliban since all provinces and cities treat women differently. There are even instances of older males approaching the Taliban for restricting women’s rights. According to a terror commander interviewed by HRW, “We have to take into account local norms.
In Kunduz, Samangan and Logar, people are more open-minded about girls’ education. In Uruzgan, Helmand—the people are not open to this. We cannot impose from the top. We are working to change peoples’ minds. The Kunduz conflict is different from Helmand—we cannot establish the same rules and guidelines for all of Afghanistan. It has to be done in a case-by-case manner until the whole country is under our control.” Now that it is indeed happening, the commander of Herat has banned music and watching TV. In some provinces, the Taliban have revived their brutal mores, whipping women for sex outside of marriage, stoning them to death, and punishing them for not wearing a burqa. Many Taliban commanders act on their own, imposing rules based on their individual interpretation of Islam.
Says Dr Ranjana Kumari, “We can see that the Taliban are not just one single group of people. Every commander has his own area where he is ruling with his own jurisdiction and he has individual ways of interpreting Sharia. So there is no common understanding among their members which highly increases the exploitation and violence on women and girl children. Young girls are at risk of being exploited sexually and forced to get married at a very young age, withdrawn from schools, and susceptible to trafficking as a huge number of people are trying to flee the country.”
Women’s individual freedoms, health and education have been war zones in Afghanistan since the reforms of the 1930s clashed with the country’s conservative and tribal Islamic male establishment. Education and health empower reform and justice for women which the Taliban, their power brokers and the war lords deeply abhor. Joe Biden does not realise that America’s war is not just with a bunch of zealots with a death wish, but with an entire belief system fighting to bring primitive frontier justice to the world. Or, he doesn’t care. A foreign affairs expert on US-West Asia relations is skeptical about the anti-Taliban rebels in Panjshir Valley repelling the Taliban encirclement.
“The West won’t help. It depends on how long Ahmad Massoud can hold out,” she says. “If he can, the West may help him with weapons.” According to her, CIA Director William Burns had met Taliban chief Abdul Ghani Baradar last week to cut a deal—the Taliban cannot keep their word of ensuring US safety if they are not allowed to control the entire country. And that includes Panjshir Valley. Going by unfolding events, the fate of Afghan women is already sealed.
During his election campaign in March 2020, Biden quoted his favourite Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime,
The longed-for tidal wave,
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.”
The tidal wave that has risen up to drown Afghanistan in an ocean of unspeakable horror is not justice, but the Taliban’s law where hope is the dirge of women losing their right to be. The drums of history will not play the tune that rhymes with justice for Afghanistan’s abandoned women.
With inputs from Sangram Parhi, Medha Dutta Yadav, Ayesha Singh
THE RISE AND FALL AND FALL OF AFGHAN WOMEN
King Amanullah Khan Head of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, 1919-29
The liberation of Afghan women from Islamic tribal patriarchy began under King Amanullah Khan, who saw himself as an Afghan inspired by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey. He brought in a modern Afghan constitution that guaranteed women’s rights. Wearing the veil was no longer mandatory. His wife, Queen Soraya, became the face of Afghan women’s rights and opened the first girl’s school in Kabul. Under her influence, the king banned child marriage. He curtailed the power of religious leaders.
Mohammed Zahir Shah the Last king of Afghanistan, 1933-73
Shah gave women the right to vote and stand for elections. Afghan women went to work, became businesswomen, lawmakers and politicians. But the religious and conservative male establishment continued to oppose them.
Soviet Invasion and Mujahideen Resistance 1979-89
The US in its zeal to defeat Communism allowed the hardcore mujahideen to murder government officials and burn down schools. They also attacked NGOs in Pakistan refugee camps promoting girls’ education and women’s literacy and employment.
Taliban 1.0 1996-2001
After the Soviet-Afghan war was over, the mujahideen split and the Taliban, headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar, conquered Afghanistan. Education for girls and women were banned in areas controlled by them. When the Taliban took Herat in September 1995, all girls’ schools were closed. In 1996, when Kabul fell and the Islamic Emirate was established, Mullah Omar “temporarily suspended” education for girls and the 4,000 women students of Kabul University. Women were not allowed to teach. They could not work or talk in public and had to cover themselves in the burqa. They could not use cellphones. Women who did not obey Taliban rules endured public lashings or were stoned to death. They were denied access to health care because they could be admitted only to women-only hospitals even as female doctors were a rarity because of the ban on working women.
New Constitution 2004
A new post-Taliban Constitution was formulated, which specifically guarantees women’s rights and ensures female quotas in the political system. They became soldiers and cops, surgeons, judges and prosecutors. They became journalists, translators and television presenters. However, the Taliban does not recognise it.
A SEXUAL NIGHTMARE
The Taliban maintain a women’s prison in Kajaki district in Helmand. However, when the courts convict women they often return them to the custody of their families rather than sentence them to prison. Taliban courts have imposed harsh punishments for “moral crimes” like zina— sex between an unmarried man and woman. This is usually misused by a husband or father of a woman or girl who has fled home to escape punishment or a brutal marriage.
In such cases, the Taliban punishment is lashing and, in some cases, execution. In a UN documented case, the Taliban executed a woman fleeing an abusive marriage and arrested the man she asked for help to appeal to the Taliban district authorities. According to one villager, her father and brother, who were Taliban members, carried out the sentence, shooting her dead. The man whom she had asked for help got 40 lashes.
Courtesy: Human Rights Watch (Extracted from a 2020 report)