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.

A Tolerant Taliban in Kunduz Province Collaborates with U.S.A.I.D.

Finally, after many months, I finished reading Ann Jones' Kabul in Winter (2006). The book is terrific, a first-person account of Jones' experience working for a women's rights NGO in Kabul in the first years after the U.S. toppled the Taliban; she uses her own encounters as a device to unwind the history of Afghanistan. 

The takeaway from Jones' book is the U.S.-led international development effort that followed the defeat of the Taliban was corrupt from the very beginning, never sincerely committed to rebuilding a country torn apart for decades by foreign-supported conflict and that by 2005 had lost the hearts and minds of Afghans.

What took me so long to finish Kabul in Winter is just the basic difficulty of reading books when you work a full-time job requiring a long daily commute. I could read many more books if I stopped reading the newspaper on the train and took a book with me to read instead. But since I choose to try to keep up with what is being reported in the "newspaper of record," this means that with the arrival of regular season football in September I only have Saturday to read in an unimpeded fashion.

As I see it the worker running the normal 9-to-5, Monday-thru-Friday rat race deals with a two-day week: one long long-day of 120 hours and one short long-day of 48 hours. The long long-day is all about routines and basic survival of the work week; free time is doled out in 15-minute increments. The short long-day of the weekend, for me at least, is about exercising and watching the NFL on Sunday, leaving several hours on Saturday when I can read what I wish.

Anyhow, there is another informative story this morning by the Gray Lady's Azam Ahmed, "Taliban Are Rising Again in Afghanistan’s North." The Taliban are now not only a dominant presence in the south and east of Afghanistan but the north as well where they are actually governing in several sections of Kunduz Province. What is noteworthy about this is that the Taliban are governing in a less totalitarian fashion; they are even allowing some girls' schools to stay open:

Leading the charge for the Taliban is Mullah Abdul Salam, a native of Kunduz Province who was the insurgents’ shadow governor before his arrest by the Pakistani authorities in 2010, officials said. He was set free in a negotiated prisoner release between the Afghan High Peace Council and the Pakistani government in 2013. 

Under his leadership this summer, it appears the insurgents have been trying new tactics, showing a flexibility in governing rather than relying on fear, according to interviews with more than two dozen locals and officials across the province. 

Residents and an aid official said that local commanders had been allowing schools to stay open and even distributing pens and notebooks — including at girls’ schools, which were often targets for violence under the Taliban’s rule in the 1990s. They said the insurgents had even given their blessing to international development projects in some areas, which would once have been unthinkable. 

“They have a parallel system to the government, one that approves the development projects,” said a stabilization adviser for a U.S.A.I.D. contractor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he works in Taliban areas. “We can’t do anything without the Taliban approval.” 

Some residents said that Taliban justice had already proved more attractive than that offered by the government. 

“Their justice is quick, and they do what they say,” said Mohammad Nazar, a local elder who works for the government community development council in Chahar Dara.

If U.S.A.I.D. is collaborating with a newly tolerant Taliban, this strikes me as another enormous barrier to the success of the Ghani administration in Kabul.