The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  “Soap?” General outrage greeted this news.

  What was wrong with soap for widows? “Was it some sort of inferior Communist soap?”

  They looked at me pityingly, just another ignorant foreigner—albeit one from a country that provided their weaponry and finances, so they couldn’t be too hostile.

  “Orgies,” one of them said. “They’re giving them soap to start orgies. Soap, then group showers, then orgies.” The inevitability of that progression seemed to make sense to them.

  Sherzai came back to the subject of divorce. “Are women in your country really allowed to divorce without their husbands’ permission?”

  “Yes, if they have a good reason, and we’re not Communists. Some places have no-fault divorce, where they don’t even need a reason to divorce their husbands. Also, many women have jobs. All girls have to go to school, usually with boys.”

  He had trouble processing all that. “Americans sound like Communists.”

  “No, Communism is about politics and economics, not about women’s rights.”

  “The first thing our Communists did was take our women away. They want me to get rid of two of my wives.”

  “Polygamy is illegal in America, too, and in most countries, but that doesn’t make them all Communists.”

  This discussion was unfortunately not endearing me to my hosts, who began to regard me with suspicion and concern. Either I was crazy or America was, they weren’t sure which. This was not helping Sergey’s cause any either. But Sherzai still wanted my Swiss Army knife. Despairing of winning him over, I decided to make a straight-up deal.

  “I’ll give you my knife if you don’t kill the boy,” I said.

  “Okay, I won’t kill the boy,” he said, and I handed the knife over. He kept marveling at the retractable toothpick.

  In those Cold War years, the mujahideen were admired throughout the free world for facing up to the might of the Soviet Union and fighting them and their Afghan proxies to a standstill and, eventually, to defeat. Their jihad was seen as an anti-Communist crusade, and indeed it was, but only nominally. A jihad against women and against rights for women is what it really was. Sherzai Amin was no outlier, and his views on women and the jihad were commonplace.

  What distressed the muj about Communism was not redistribution of wealth, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, or state control of the means of production—many of those principles were already somewhat present in Afghanistan or were just beside the point in a country with a preindustrial economy. The major industries and mines, such as they were, had always been nationalized. Since the days of King Mohammad Zahir Shah, who ruled from 1933 to 1973, when he was deposed, the Afghan state had been strongly centralized,1 however weak. The Afghan extended family practices a form of communal sharing of wealth and resources, property and responsibilities, that would rival that of any kibbutz. It wasn’t even Communism’s godlessness that infuriated the mujahideen, because the Afghan version of a Communist Party never challenged Islam nor advocated atheism.

  What really infuriated the mujahideen about Communism and sent them on the warpath was its doctrinal and practical espousal of equal rights for women. Under Afghanistan’s Communist rulers from 1978 to 1992, modern attitudes toward women were introduced to the country for the first time since the abortive attempt to do so during the reign of Amanullah Khan in the 1920s.2 Since they were Communists and their Soviet patrons wanted to make a point, gender reform was done on a massive scale, nationwide. Schools for women were opened throughout the country; jobs were set aside for women, and they were encouraged to work. Huge numbers of women were drafted into the military and police, far more than Western encouragement and financing has managed in this past decade. The national airline, Ariana, had female flight attendants under the Communists.3 Social laws were modified to give women rights to inherit property, to keep their children, to divorce their husbands—all things unknown in traditional Afghan culture and still not the practice today. At its heart the jihad was not a response to Communism, it was holy war against feminism. In the narrow worldview of Afghanistan’s jihadis, Communism and feminism were synonyms. But they quickly learned that fighting feminism was not going to attract massive Western aid, even from womanizers like Congressman Charlie Wilson,4 while fighting Communism qua Communism would.

  The Communists brought in social and legal protections for women that were as far-reaching as those later instituted with American backing by the landmark 2009 law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. As the EVAW law later did, the Communists outlawed abusive customary practices such as child marriage and the compulsory marriage of widows to their brothers-in-law, and they criminalized behavior like wife-beating and rape. In other words, EVAW law for the first time restored to Afghan women many of the protections that already had been granted to them by the Communists by the early 1980s and which provoked the jihad that ultimately, with massive Western aid, destroyed the Communists—and stalled any real progress on women’s rights in Afghanistan for two or three decades to come.

  This is a piece of history commonly overlooked in the dialogue about women’s rights in Afghanistan. There tends to be an assumption now that the first time Afghan women had any rights at all was in the post-Taliban era, but in fact women were in many ways much better off during the Communist time than they are now.

  Many older Afghans still speak about that period as the country’s golden age. While the Communists’ writ did not extend much beyond urban areas—especially once the jihad got under way—women in the cities and even in many towns were soon freer than they have ever been in Afghanistan, before or since. Dr. Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the irrepressible head of one of Afghanistan’s most admired institutions, the Afghan National Institute of Music,5 was a college student in those days, and he remembers young men and women in Kabul University greeting each other by kissing on the cheeks—something so forbidden now that even foreigners do not do it in public or around their Afghan co-workers; few Afghan women, even among professionals and officials, will shake men’s hands today. By some estimates6 over half of the urban workforce during the Communist era was female; it is a fraction of that today—even in government agencies where there are contractual set-asides and compulsory quotas from foreign donors. During Dr. Sarmast’s college days, young people of both sexes visited one another’s homes for lunches and dinners—equally unheard of today. Kandahar, a city so conservative now that few women are ever seen in public, and then only in burqas, was liberal and cosmopolitan even compared to Kabul. “When the Communists took over, their first activity, their first decree was to declare the freedom of women, equal opportunity for women, the compulsory education of girls until grade nine, the end of the sale of young girls for big bride prices, the end of buying and selling girls like cattle,” Dr. Sarmast said. The tragedy was, as at so many other times in history, Afghanistan became a victim of the political currents and ambitions of other nations. “They were very progressive, taking society toward equality and justice especially in women’s rights, but the mujahideen and all the opponents identified those progressive measures as un-Islamic. It was a war between the Soviet Union and the West, and the people of Afghanistan paid the price. And today the West is paying a much bigger price for promoting the same values and the same progressive policies toward women’s rights and equality,” Dr. Sarmast said.7

  That old jihadi commander who got my Swiss Army knife, Sherzai Amin, would agree with this analysis. If Sherzai hasn’t joined the Taliban by now, as most of his mujahideen brethren up in Kunar Province have, he would nonetheless abhor what the West has tried to do for Afghan women since 2001. The morning after our quasi-philosophic exchange on Communism and feminism, having raped Sergey one last time, Sherzai sent the boy out on point, a couple hundred yards ahead of the mujahideen column as it moved toward the suspected minefield. When I realized what was happening, I protested that Sherzai had given me his word; I would soon learn how little that was worth in Afghanistan.


  “I said I wouldn’t kill him.” He laughed. “If he trips a Russian mine, it’ll be the Communists who killed him. Anyway, he’s probably lying and knows where they put the mines.”

  Shortly later there was a deafening explosion.

  “Oh, well,” Sherzai Amin said. “I guess that boy was telling the truth.” He and the other muj shared a hearty laugh.8

  Afghan men can be as hard and brutal as the rocky and treeless landscape they inhabit. “Beat your wife every day,” goes a joke that is popular among them. “If you don’t know what she did, she will.” It is a joke that rings true. Over half of Afghan women report that they have been beaten by their husbands at some point, while 39 percent of those surveyed have been beaten at least once in the previous twelve months. Include sexual and psychological abuse and nearly nine out of ten of the country’s women describe themselves as victims of their men.9 Many Afghan men will argue that wife-beating is justified if a man’s woman misbehaves. Many Afghan men do not see rapists as criminals but are much more inclined to blame and punish their victims; unsurprisingly, 11 percent of Afghan adult women say they have been victims of rape,10 which is fifty times the rate in the West.11 Many Afghan men approve of honor killing, or at least excuse it, hence the low level of judicial punishment in such cases.

  The EVAW law was meant to change all that. Before the law’s enactment in 2009, most gender-based crimes were not even considered to be crimes in Afghanistan. Since the law’s enactment, there have been some notable improvements but also many dramatic failures. Still, fewer than 10 percent12 of those accused of committing crimes against women are ever punished, and much larger numbers commit crimes that go unreported.13

  Nothing illustrates the imperfection of the EVAW law’s implementation more dramatically than the EVAW unit of the attorney general’s office in Kabul and the women who work within it. When I visited in September 2014, the unit had been relocated to a recently converted storage room in an office building off Darulaman Road. Its thirteen lawyers shared the single room, big enough for perhaps four desks, even six if they were packed close together. The EVAW unit had been moved there two months earlier and still had no furniture other than one desk for the head of the unit, a small table to the side, and some armchairs and sofas along the walls for everyone else. “You could call this office itself an example of violence against women,” said one of the prosecutors, Shazia Abbasi, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Afghan criminal-justice system. Small children ran around while their mothers, the clients, squatted on their haunches along one wall, some completely shrouded in burqas. A man wept openly in front of his burqa-ed wife, complaining of her gang rape by politically well-connected Afghan Local Police—militiamen who are trained by the American Special Forces—in Badakhshan. A teenage girl, a prosecutor’s daughter whose school got out early that day, was doing her homework on the available corner of the small table. The other lawyers had piles of legal papers in their laps.

  Sitting on one of the tattered sofas like the other five prosecutors in the office on this particular day, Ms. Abbasi was deeply demoralized about the prospects for the EVAW law to really work in Afghanistan, even after a new president, Ashraf Ghani, had been installed and had sent positive signals about his commitment to women’s issues.14 As the lawyers remember, President Hamid Karzai had done the same in his first years; after all, he enacted the law that brought their unit into being. “This EVAW law has had some accomplishments, but they were negative, not positive, even when we succeeded,” Ms. Abbasi said. “How can a law like this work in a society that is so strongly patriarchal?

  “Out of ten cases,” she continued, “we’re lucky if two have a positive outcome, one that changes the husband or improves the situation for the woman. In the eight others, the complainants disappear, or they get killed, or they give up. It just doesn’t work. How can an Afghan man accept that his wife stands next to a lawyer and speaks about him? That is in the cities. We don’t even reach people in poor rural places.

  “Half the time we go into court and the judge just says, ‘I don’t agree with the EVAW law,’ and he refuses to apply it,” Ms. Abbasi said.

  Ms. Abbasi and her five colleagues had varying views on how effective EVAW law had been, but they were all in agreement about one thing: Given the chance, she and the others readily said, every one of them would leave Afghanistan and not come back. Ziba Sadat, in her forties and an EVAW prosecutor the last five of her twenty-three years as a lawyer, was the most adamant of them all. Her own husband, an Afghan TV journalist, expected her to stop working when he told her to do so. When she didn’t, he beat her until she brought charges against him under the EVAW law. As a result his entire family disowned her and their children and launched what she described as a campaign of terror against them. The husband was convicted and served two months in jail. Ms. Sadat has four children, a daughter and three sons, all teenagers. She showed me a recent text message on her phone, one of many from a caller who did not even bother to disguise his number: BITCH, WE WILL FIRST KILL YOU AND THEN WE WILL RAPE YOUR DAUGHTER, YOU DIRTY PROSECUTOR.

  “Look here, I am a prosecutor subject to death threats, but when I complain to anyone about it, they don’t help me,” Ms. Sadat said.

  Her misery had company. The head of the EVAW prosecutor’s unit, Qudsia Niazi, is regularly beaten by her husband, as she has confided to one prominent women’s activist. “She called me, and she was crying on the phone,” said the activist, a prominent member of parliament who did not want to be further identified. “She told me, ‘I help other women, but I cannot help myself.’”

  During an interview in October 2014, I asked Ms. Niazi if any members of her staff were themselves victims of spousal abuse. She laughed ruefully. “I could say even myself,” she replied. She did not want to discuss her specific case, she said, but added, “In Afghanistan the majority of those women who work have suffered violence and cannot afford to report it because of their positions. Afghanistan is a male-dominated society, and it’s very difficult to change anything to do with that.”

  According to many women’s activists in Kabul, even one of the country’s first women’s-affairs ministers, Massouda Jalal, a physician who served in that position from 2004 to 2006, was beaten by her husband while she was still in office. A candidate for president of Afghanistan in the country’s first democratic election (she placed seventh out of a numerous field), she was the women’s minister who claims to have been responsible for first drafting the EVAW law, in 2005, although it was not enacted during her tenure. “It sat in a drawer for four years,” she said, “until the Americans pressured President Karzai to enact it.” She said the law was drafted in her home with a committee including her husband, a law professor named Faizullah Jalal; Ms. Jalal at first dismissed as unfounded rumors the reports that Mr. Jalal beat her while she was the minister. “He has always been so much supportive and was one of the committee members for writing the law. It’s just not true. He really cares about women’s rights. Plus, he wasn’t even in the country most of the time I was minister,” she said.

  A few days later, my colleague Jawad Sukhanyar went alone to see Ms. Jalal, and she confided to him that there had been something to the rumors after all. “You know that question your colleague asked?” she said. “Well, it’s true, I have been a victim of violence at home. And not just me. I could tell you another woman cabinet minister who was the victim of abuse from her husband.15 You cannot work in this society as a woman without suffering abuse.” He asked her if her remarks were on the record, and she defiantly said they were. There is, she said, nothing at all unusual about her case, or that of the prosecutor Ziba Sadat, or any number of female members of parliament (MPs) and women’s activists who are abused women. Yet her husband was still a good man, who supported women’s rights, she said, and they are still married.

  One of the saddest cases of the abuse of prominent women16 concerned Noor Zia Atmar, one of the country’s first elected female MPs. The Afghan constitu
tion, at the insistence of the Western powers, reserved 25 percent of the seats in parliament for women, giving that body a higher percentage of female representation than the British parliament or the U.S. Congress, although many of the Afghan MPs are standins for husbands, fathers, or brothers. Routinely beaten by her husband and forced to wear a burqa, Ms. Atmar divorced him and was thrown out of their home. Disowned by both his family and hers, Ms. Atmar was forced to take refuge in a women’s shelter in 2013.

  “The violence against women is getting worse and worse,” said Ms. Jalal, the former women’s minister. “Women in Afghanistan are subject to the public mentality that they should be enslaved. Even if they are working outside [the home], they have to give their income back to the male. Even after the opportunities created by these past thirteen years, they are working for the males.”

  Ms. Jalal blamed this state of affairs on the continued dominance of Afghan society by old warlords and jihadi commanders, and she was forced out of office by the Afghan parliament in 2006 for expressing that view. “We met in secret in my private home to draft the EVAW law because we were afraid of sabotage from extremists and warlords,” she said. After the draft law was submitted to the Ministry of Justice, “I was recognized as someone who wanted to release Afghan women from fear and poverty, and by my doing this the extremists saw that I was really serious about freeing women and giving them a new life, so they removed MoWA [the Ministry of Women’s Affairs] from the cabinet.” The attempted downgrading of MoWA from the cabinet level aroused indignant opposition from the international community, and the hard-liners were forced to back off and allow the ministry to be restored to the cabinet; so instead the hard-liners successfully demanded that Ms. Jalal be ousted as the women’s minister.17

  Despite the EVAW law’s shortcomings, its enactment and enforcement have been the international community’s greatest achievement on behalf of the women of Afghanistan, with the possible (and qualified) exception of girls’ schools. Yet the EVAW law only barely became law in Afghanistan and remains very much at risk today.18 It was passed by decree by President Hamid Karzai in 2009,19 after it became clear that it had no hope of being enacted by Afghanistan’s parliament, and the Americans put heavy pressure on Mr. Karzai to use his powers to circumvent the parliament.