Afghanistan

  Allegiances and orientations are frequently determined, at a local level, by Kabul’s willingness to favor one mode of agriculture over another. In the 1970s and 1980s, the conflict between Pushtu-speaking Kuchi nomadic herdsmen and Uzbek or Hazara sedentary pastoralists was based on competition between different agricultural practices; Pushtun-dominated governmental authority looked away as cattle were driven over standing crops. Dostum’s original Uzbek militia, formed in the 1980s, was intended to halt this practice. In the 1980s, some of Soviet-occupied Kabul’s strongest rural allies were not committed Communists but those who depended on the central government to allow them to hold on to irrigated land against the claims of their neighbors, especially in areas such as those around Khost and in Kandahar province’s Maiwand district. It is not surprising that in 2001 the Taliban’s strongest supporter in the south, Mullah Abdul Wahid in the Baghran district of Helmand province, was an “upstream” leader, who had been able to keep scarce water for local use due to his personal relations with the Taliban. Since then, he has skillfully kept on good relations with both Kabul and the insurgents, which has enabled him to remain politically important in Helmand through his ability to affect the water supply.340

  Some of the water and land—use conflicts cross international and ethnolinguistic borders. The years of drought pre-2001 led to the rise of opium cultivation, which requires little rainfall. For example, the Wazirs, with close links to Pakistan’s transport mafia and timber mafia (both Pushtun-dominated), have been clear-cutting vast areas of Paktika and Paktia provinces since the mid-1980s. This has put them into direct conflict with the local Kharoshti Pushtuns from different tribes. Elsewhere, like the Kunar valley, where the Kabul government’s ban on timber exports had finally stuck by 2009, unemployed low-level timber mafia members found an alternative source of income as foot soldiers for HiH and proved formidable enemies to US Army units.341

  Gender

  The nature of Afghan culture puts great significance on gender relationships. Control of paternity is vital to a patrilineal, patrimonial society in which lineage and blood ties remain key determinants of political orientation and alliances. Marriage in Afghanistan tends to be arranged, a political and economic alliance between two lineages. The companionate marriages of the West are viewed with hostility by some Afghans across the political and social spectrums as an implicit threat to Afghan and Islamic ways. Reflecting the widespread use of Islamic and traditional Afghan themes to mobilize and radicalize Afghans in the conflicts of 1978–2001 and the pre-2001 Taliban regime’s making the enforced absence of women from the public sphere a core value, control of female life in general and sexuality in particular is often emphasized to the point of obsession. A man who cannot control “his” women is often seen as not much of a man, or, worse still, a man without honor, as it is also a way of controlling his lineage and holding on to power, at least domestically. Control is often seen as requiring withholding women from outside employment, education, or contact with non-family members.

  Just as Afghanistan, though now defined by conflict, traditionally saw more cooperation than bloodshed, the worst elements of gender-related oppression also stem from the societal dislocation and polarization stemming from decades of warfare. The irony is that an insurgency that claims to be motivated by Islamic requirements to safeguard the honor of women (and the men that must protect them) from the threat inherent in an infidel foreign presence has helped create an Afghanistan where widows beg, farmers sell their daughters to opium traffickers to compensate for falling income, and forced marriage or rape is used to create power relationships for the benefit of warlords, terrorists, insurgents, and narcotics traffickers alike. None of this was part of the old Afghanistan. Such gender oppression is still limited in scope and application. But the results of this and other conflicts—the insurgency and those about religion and modernization—have the potential to make life much worse for the future of Afghan women. Conversely, the potential to make life better, though real, remains more limited and incremental.

  In 2003, Afghanistan signed the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against women without reservations, unlike most other countries that base their personal status laws on Sharia. Article 7 of the 2004 Afghan constitution specifically identified Afghanistan as being required to abide by the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as treaties and conventions. Afghanistan has a Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) and has ensured that governmental development plans, including the Afghan National Development Strategy (ANDS), have emphasized gender mainstreaming. What is significant is the disconnect between the policies implicit in these actions and the political realities of an Afghanistan defined by its conflicts.

  To many Afghans, the need for the patriarchal head-of-family to keep control over his family’s honor mandates a rigid separation of the private from the public. The position of women in Afghanistan life and society does not reflect any particular Afghan or Islamic pathology but is comparable to that of other poor and underdeveloped countries. Indeed, Afghanistan has traditionally proven resistant to some of the more severe gender-related practices that resulted in oppressive outcomes in the sub-continent or elsewhere in the Islamic world. Yet this area remains a source of conflict. Any action by outsiders that has the potential to affect, let alone benefit, Afghan women is transformed by rumors and the Taliban culture to be an assault on honor and an attempt to defeat Islam and the Afghan patrilineal society. Any veteran aid worker in Afghanistan or the refugee camps in Pakistan can tell of programs or activities intended to benefit Afghan women, even those teaching basic sanitation or handicrafts, that resulted in foreigners being accused of enabling immoral behavior and causing men to lose control of their family and lineage, shaming their kin.

  Gender emerged as a source of tension in Afghanistan starting with the changes in the 1960s and 1970s. This included acid-throwing attacks against Afghan women in Kabul dressed in Western clothing. Its importance has been fueled by failed attempts first by the Communists and then Afghan Taliban to use state power to transform gender relationships in order to bring their own version of the future. This meant “liberation” from the norms of Afghan and Islamic culture for the Communists and a withdrawal from the public sphere for the Taliban. These were the only Afghan governments to attempt to dictate the terms of gender relationships within the family. The Communists (especially the Khalqis of 1978–79) and the Taliban, despite their ideological differences, were both totalitarians, demanding state involvement in personal life; both parties “told us how we must treat our women,” in a common Afghan characterization. The Soviets tried to use the women of urban Afghanistan as a surrogate proletariat to strengthen their political consolidation in the 1980s, who would receive resources (jobs, money, access to education, cheap food) in return for political loyalty. This policy helped bring stability to urban centers, but could not turn around the widespread hatred of the Soviet presence. Most Kabul governments throughout history have treated the division between public and private as a firewall and do not aim to interfere with domestic life. Actions seen as interfering led to widespread resistance to Communist and Taliban rule.

  The harshest of the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban’s impacts on gender relationships were, in practice, reserved for areas they saw as a threat to their control, especially Kabul and the Hazara Jat. Educated Afghan women—indeed, most of the educated elites of any ethnicity—were effectively totally marginalized, losing jobs and being excluded from economic or social activity, helping the Taliban consolidate their hold. The Taliban was less repressive in their heartland of southern Afghanistan. Some women in Kandahar kept their jobs. In rural Pushtun areas, women’s labor, especially the drawing of water and the gathering of firewood, continued much as before without the all-enveloping burqa (the one-piece covering with a view slit) that was enforced on urban Afghan women. This was because the Taliban did not view them, or their kin, as a threat to their hegemony.


  Similar contradictions were also apparent in the Taliban’s harsh policies affecting male homosexuals (the Taliban apparently did not believe in female homosexuality). The Taliban made a point of nominally turning against the traditional Afghan attitudes of toleration and willful ignorance by imposing harsh, even fatal punishments on a few individuals who were known homosexuals. But, in reality, the Taliban widely used sexual degradation and relations with boys as a tool of establishing power. In Kabul, the Hazara Jat, and elsewhere, this included taking custody of boys from the local population and sexually abusing them. The use of boys, especially singers and dancers, as catamites by powerful men, bacha bazi (play by boys), was part of the Afghan traditions the Taliban rhetorically opposed. Throughout Afghanistan, girls were pressed into forced marriages, often as second or third wives, with Taliban supporters that would otherwise have not had the resources or status to marry. Where this and other examples of the pre-2001 Taliban’s failure to achieve the rectitude they claimed became known, even to their supporters it was a powerful blow to their legitimacy. That the Taliban used sex as a tool of political power and degradation of opponents has led to non-Taliban and anti-Taliban Afghans adopting these tactics in retribution, and it remains widespread.342

  It was apparent long before Dr. Freud ventured into political philosophy that frustrated manhood could find expression in political and social action, seldom for the better. Gender issues are used to rally the insurgency as shorthand for the insurgent’s claim to defend Afghanistan’s culture and religion from destruction by Western intervention. “Foreign influence makes our women immoral and destroys our honor” has been a widespread rallying cry, reinforced by such Western counter-insurgency tactics as house searches. Other Western imported practices are presented as being as much an attack on Afghan and Islamic ways as those brought by the Communists. This reflects the insurgents’ maximalist approach to Islamist practice, especially toward those they believe are lax in their Islamic devotion. If Islam requires modest dress in women, then it is better still to prescribe an all-encompassing dress like the burqa and insist on women’s exclusion from the public sphere, versus any other previously accepted social practice.

  Since 2001, there has been much that seems to threaten Afghanistan’s honor in the eyes of conservative Afghans, not just the insurgents. The “gender issue” is essentially the final straw, but still part of an amalgam of cultural conflicts. The arrival of television opened a new front in Afghanistan’s cultural conflicts that is still ongoing, while the arrival of large numbers of foreigners in Kabul—imagined by many Afghans to be drinking and fornicating behind their compound walls—made their living apart from, and their often imperious and disrespectful attitude toward, Afghans they claimed to be helping even less tolerable. Many foreigners involved in Afghanistan perceived their mission in terms of moral uplift and insisted that Afghanistan have the benefits of advances in gender equality and suffrage that had only come about in their own countries in the past generation, and this after a century of male and female literacy and democratic institution-building. The Afghans often respond with a lack of comprehension, failing to see what they mean in terms of Afghan life or Islam. In some ways, it is like imposing post-modern views of women on the Europe of previous centuries, yet in other ways the Afghans have been receptive to these outside influences when presented to them as being congruent with their core values.

  The Afghan and Pakistani insurgents share a devotion to maintaining and expanding gender-defined boundaries to relationship, power and behavior. These are believed, in most cases, to be ordained, inviolate, and compulsory upon all Muslims. As with much else in the Islamic practices embraced by the insurgents, these beliefs represent Pushtun folkways for which Islamic legitimacy is claimed and held. In 2008–10, insurgents in both Afghanistan and Pakistan were reported to be targeting clinics that provide contraceptives.343 Imposing dress restrictions, separate education, and ultimately exclusion of women from the public sector is increasingly being seen as a goal of radical parties through Pakistan, including areas remote from the insurgency.344 The more the West is seen as being the source of gender equality, the harder these groups will push for repression.

  The fact that serious Islamic theologians around the world would not support these actions does not make the insurgents’ approach to gender relationships any less powerful or compelling to their followers. Gender relations have been at the heart of the narrative Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other insurgent groups produce in order to mobilize their followers and legitimize their actions against the West and elected governments in Muslim countries. The 1990s saw Western press reports of demands by ulema associated with the Taliban in Kabul that pop-culture figures like Michael Jackson and Kate Winslet be turned over to them for harsh punishment for crooning songs or appearing in films that extolled romantic love rather than arranged marriage. These were only precursors to the widespread theme of today that the infidel outside world is seeking to destroy Islam, starting with Afghanistan and the Pushtuns, by attacking their culture through an intrusive foreign presence that specifically is focusing on women, and therefore kinship, lineage, and the core of their society. More than the West’s celebrity culture and the Vortex’s Taliban culture misunderstanding each other, the whole premise of romantic love, or even “choice” on the part of the participants, calls into question the validity of the potential marriages the Taliban’s clients might seek to arrange for their children or enjoy themselves, especially if they had gained status through their service to the cause and were cementing this with familial ties via an arranged marriage. Romantic love, as practiced in the West, has no place or meaning in the insurgents’ world, however much individual insurgents may love their wives and children.

  Harder to identify, but no less significant, a cause to the gender issue in Afghanistan are psychosexual fears and insecurity. Islamic ideology, expressed by Al Qaeda-generated propaganda and used post-2001 by groups such as both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, has been able to make use of the insecurity in the face of what is seen as a world dominated by infidel culture that does not respect or understand the importance of honor valued in patrilineal Pushtun societies. With satellite television, radio, cassettes, and the DVD providing increased familiarity with—but not increased understanding of—an outside culture that is at once attractive and existentially threatening: even those without sophisticated psychological insights can still use this disconnect and fear to extract support. If you do not take arms to fight the foreigners in Kabul, your women may become like those in the bootleg Bollywood movies the Taliban have taken such pleasure in burning. Or even worse, your women might become like those you imagine exist in the infidel world, which would render it impossible to live as a Muslim and as a man of honor and so bring shame to your kin. “The most common Pushtun feeling is that there is a war on our culture,” is the sentiment according to Massoud Kharokhail of the Kabul-based Tribal Liaison Office, which is a developmental NGO. Afghans of other ethnicities are more likely to agree with these Pushtuns than elites of their own groups. While no group is as conservative as rural Pushtuns, Afghan cultural conservatism cuts across ethnolinguistic divisions. They share an emphasis on Islam and kinship, even if they lack the Pushtun’s tribal divisions.

  Westerners have tended to view the complexities of Afghan gender relationships in a way that reflects the gender-consciousness of their own societies. This led to the 2009 Shia personal status law, signed by President Karzai on 27 July only after international protests over restrictive provisions, including those that limited married women’s rights to travel without a spouse’s consent and attempted to give the force of law to a husband’s sexual access.345 The Afghans considered that providing the Shia with their own personal status law rather than one based under Sunni Hanafi-based jurisprudence was a multicultural and good thing. While many of the more offensive provisions were removed, the incident showed Karzai as submitting to outsiders in the eyes conservative Afghans; and it alienat
ed foreign donors, who considered allowing Afghan politics to stand in the way of achieving international human-rights standards unacceptable. But this incident revealed more than the disconnect in the worldviews between the Afghans that sit in the parliament and the Westerners that advocate human rights in Afghanistan. Westerners have no problem with using the state’s rule of law to regulate gender relations, whereas to many Afghans this is not an inherently obvious solution. Murder is normally not a crime but a tort under Pakistan’s FCR or the customary law of Afghanistan’s Pushtuns (under Pushtunwali). This means that if someone is killed, many Afghans do not want the state to come in and try and punish the murderer: they want the murderer’s kin to make them whole for the loss of a family member by turning over as compensation valuables such as money, weapons, livestock, or, in some cases, unmarried women to become the wives of aggrieved family members. This is a traditional justice mechanism and, as such, is opposed by the Taliban, who insist that their brand of state justice, using Sharia law, must prevail. The Taliban banned the exchange of women between kinship groups to settle feuds and blood debts, claiming it has no status under Sharia law.

  Westerners see the injustice, frustration, sheer waste of human potential, and barriers to development inherent in much of Afghanistan’s gender relations. Yet to change these social constructs, there is a risk that even the most well-intentioned of efforts, however legitimate according to international norms (and Afghans do want to be recognized as a country like any other) and Islamic theology, can still lead to widespread opposition because of how it is implemented. Afghanistan is a conservative country, and the harder change is pushed, the more the Afghans will either cling to tradition or, more often, grasp at change but in a way that they believe makes them more Islamic. Gender can be an issue where, in order to maintain the proper relationships they see as required by religion, a particular code of honor or to avoid shaming their kin, Afghans will feel compelled to make common cause with the insurgents, largely because of the alternative approach to gender relations they represent.