Women's Place in Afghan Society After 14 Years of Western Occupation

Yesterday was International Women's Day. I celebrated it by going back and reading two long articles by Alissa Rubin that appeared early last week.

In the first story, "Afghan Policewomen Struggle Against Culture," which I found the more informative of the two, Rubin describes what can only be called a failed effort by occupying Western powers to establish a toehold for women in the tribal, misogynist Afghan criminal justice system. Remember, besides the hunt for the planners of 9/11, it was restoring the lost rights of Afghan women under the Taliban that was the main justification used by the Bush administration for its lengthy occupation of the country.

In one telling passage Rubin describes how Western-dictated quotas for police women have been turned into a system of prostitution:

. . . Nooria Sediqi, a second lieutenant who is about 50, displayed considerable knowledge of prostitution arrangements within the police. “The salaries are low,” she said of police pay. For a session of sex, a woman could earn $100 or even $200, she said. That is half a month’s salary for a junior policewoman, and a great deal even for a more senior one. 

Occasionally older policewomen have acted as madams, procuring younger ones either for men within the police force or outside it, according to two of the policewomen interviewed for this article as well as Western officials who work with the police. 

Interviews suggest that many policewomen, aware they have few useful skills and untrained in how to behave professionally, are vulnerable to sexual pressure. They are easy targets for more senior males who can withhold their pay or assign them to jobs far from home, and so policewomen are fearful of complaining.

One has to get to nearly the end of the story before Rubin provides a glimpse of success in the form of Zarif Shaan Naibi: "The first female warden of Kabul’s women’s prison, she stands out among the overwhelmingly male command structure of the Interior Ministry."

It is at this point, near the end, that Rubin finally allows for a little historical context to enter her piece:

Her success appears to be rooted partly in her training in the late 1970s and the 1980s, when Afghanistan’s government was imbued with Communist ideology. The period offered exceptional opportunity for women, especially in urban areas.

As ethnic Hazaras, a group that was persecuted by the Taliban and has now embraced education and the modern world, Ms. Naibi’s mother and brothers allowed her to join the police, and when she married, her husband allowed her to continue. He is now in the Defense Ministry.

Ms. Naibi recalls that in her day all her teachers at the police training center were women. Now they are almost all men.

Under the Communists, women’s education was valued and candidates for the police were vetted, she said. “If she wasn’t educated, they wouldn’t take her. If she had graduated from high school, they would send her to the police academy.”

But these Communist ideals encountered resistance from much of Afghan society. Then under the Taliban, most policewomen were banished, and Ms. Naibi’s family, as Hazaras, had to flee. When the police were reconstituted after the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, the Afghan leadership was desperate for women to serve, calling former policewomen back to work as well as recruiting new ones.

What Rubin leaves unmentioned is the U.S. role in bringing to end the period of Communist rule that "offered exceptional opportunity for women"; that role led to the blowback attacks of 9/11 and is currently responsible for reign of terror in the Middle East. (For a brilliant recapitulation of how the U.S. is presently both fighting and assisting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria read Tim Anderson's "The Relationship between Washington and ISIS: The Evidence.")

In other words, what the U.S. was responsible for destroying it is now halfheartedly and superficially trying to reconstruct, and so far with little success to show for its effort.

In the second of her two articles, "A Thin Line of Defense Against ‘Honor Killings’," Rubin describes Women for Afghan Women, "a fragile network of safe houses and the women who staff them" in 13 Afghan provinces. It is here that Rubin goes into the brutal nuts and bolts of Afghan patriarchy. This is ground that has been covered elsewhere earlier, such as in Ann Jones superb Kabul in Winter (2007), but it is good to see the Gray Lady devoting not insignificant column inches to it.

One wonders how long this network of women's shelters will last when the U.S. pulls out by the end of next year. There is currently a bipartisan movement underway ("No Cause to Delay the Afghan Pullout") to maintain U.S. military presence beyond 2016. Based on recent reports, it is clear that in the Afghan National Army we have another Iraq Army -- a paper army, a ghost army. The U.S. military is required to have a presence in country to obscure this.