by Rod Nordland
Like the other female generals, and most other female senior officers, Brigadier General Bayaz joined the police in the Communist era—a detail the American-led international coalition and the Afghan government leave out of their glowing pronouncements about the success of female advancement in the security services. The official announcements also leave out the other three female senior officers who have fled the country in the past few years, including the previous one in charge of female empowerment and gender equality at the Ministry of Interior, Brigadier General Shafiqa Quraishi, who fled Afghanistan in 2012, two years after Secretary of State Clinton awarded her the International Women of Courage Award.80 Brigadier General Bayaz is careful not to mention that she herself applied to the Canadian government for asylum in 2014, according to Western diplomats in Kabul.81
Brigadier General Bayaz would join not only Fatima Kazimi, the Bamiyan women’s ministry head who protected Zakia and later fled to Rwanda and America, but other leading Afghan women who have given up and left. Hassina Sarwari, the head of the women’s shelter in Kunduz, who saved the life of Breshna, the ten-year-old raped by her mullah,82 now wants to flee to the United States and has been talking to lawyers there about doing so. She begged me to intercede for her with the American embassy, but as we’ve seen, I have little influence there, and they have little interest any longer in helping at-risk women to leave. She is also applying for asylum in Germany, and officials in the embassy of that country in Kabul were actively talking to her late in 2014. Afghanistan’s most famous missing person among women’s-rights activists is of course Malalai Joya, the woman who electrified audiences with her fierce opposition to her country’s patriarchs in 2002. She lives in Canada and visits Afghanistan in secrecy from time to time, but rarely appears in public there any longer. She is afraid to be interviewed in person or on the telephone and will take and answer questions only by e-mail for “security reasons,” according to an anonymous person, reached through her website, who said he or she was the activist’s secretary.83 Ms. Joya has been quoted as saying that she is married but cannot name her husband, for his safety.84 She is no longer a player inside her own country, where she is a forgotten figure. The battered member of parliament, Noor Zia Atmar, has fled to India, where she has so far unsuccessfully applied for asylum to a third country. There now may well be more Afghan women’s activists outside the country than inside it, a trend that would be growing dramatically were it not that most Western embassies have stopped giving visas to Afghan women leaders—the visa-application rejection rate is now over 90 percent at North American and European embassies.85 Brigadier General Bayaz said she was turned down in August 2014, for instance, for a visa to attend a Canadian government-sponsored international symposium on increasing the participation of women in the police forces of developing countries; so much for her role as poster girl for that effort in Afghanistan, but of course the Canadians were probably aware that she was planning to claim asylum and never go back. The head of communications at the American embassy in 2013, the novelist and journalist Masha Hamilton, set the tone when she argued that if we keep helping women leave Afghanistan,86 there would be no one left behind to change things; that is an attitude that is embedded in American visa policy now, but it is not one accompanied any longer by the sort of advocacy and activism on behalf of Afghan women that the United States and its allies once practiced.
By almost any measure, the accomplishments of the international community on behalf of Afghan women have been disappointing, particularly considering the scale of the financial investment and the sweeping promises made back in 2002.
Official numbers, which are greatly exaggerated, say that some 2.5 million girls are in school who were not at the end of the Taliban era.87 Even if it were 2.5 million, that would represent just 37 percent of students, so boys’ enrollment is nearly double that of girls. Half of those girls enrolled will drop out when they reach puberty, usually about seventh grade, mostly because they are forced to do so by their families. As the result, each year after seventh grade, the numbers of girls being educated dwindles further, until by twelfth grade only 10 percent of the enrolled students are female, according to figures from USAID. I vividly remember touring a show school in Kabul, Sardar Kabuli Girls’ High School, built by USAID at a cost of $27 million (in a country where an adequate, weatherproof school building for a thousand students can be built for half a million dollars), and visiting a class full of thirty or forty twelfth-grade girls. We asked the students how many of them wanted to go on to college, and nearly every hand shot up; that was unsurprising, considering what this 10 percent of Afghan girls must have endured to get as far as they had. Then we asked how many of the girls would be allowed by their families to go on to college, and all but three put their hands back down.
“All major social indicators continue to show a consistent pattern of women’s disempowerment in nearly all dimensions of their lives and Afghanistan remains one of the worst countries in the world to be born female,” the UN Women organization (formerly known as UNIFEM), said in 2014.88 Women remain disproportionately illiterate; 87.4 percent of women are illiterate, compared to 56.9 percent of men. Even among women aged fifteen to twenty-four, who would have come of school age after the Taliban era, when schools were in theory available for them, illiteracy remains at 80 percent.89 For all the official ballyhoo about girls’ schools, the average number of years of education for Afghan females is seven. (This number is based on 2011 figures, the latest available; it may be better today, but not by much.) In many areas the quality of education is so poor that even seven years can leave students functionally illiterate, barely able to sign their own names.
Other indicators are still worse. On the United Nations Development Program’s Gender Inequality Index, Afghanistan in 2013 ranked as the 169th-worst country in the world to be a woman, out of 187 countries studied.90 The year before, it was 149th-worst, so by 2014 it had declined a further twenty ranks. “It is still not the worst country in the world to be a woman,” said one Western ambassador in Kabul, the European Union’s Franz-Michael Mellbin. “Yemen is.” Even that is arguable, but it is still not much of an achievement considering how comparatively little international aid Yemen has received. Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest birthrates among underage girls (86.8 percent) and a maternal-mortality rate of 460 per 100,000 live births,91 a rate that has not been seen in developed parts of the world for two centuries.92 The lives of Afghan women are not only nasty and brutish but short; life expectancy for an Afghan woman is forty-four years, compared to forty-eight years for men (according to UN Women),93 which is a significant differential considering that there have been wars going on pretty continuously for the last thirty-five years and nearly all the combatants are male, yet still women live shorter lives on average. (Civilian casualties, including women, have been high, but never as high as casualties among combatants.) This is the state of things after fourteen years of massive international intervention, $104 billion in development aid from the United States alone by 2014, much of it earmarked to women’s programs and gender equality. Counting the military investment, which also had generous gender set-asides, America94 had spent well over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014.95
When General David H. Petraeus was running the Afghan War, he was fond of saying that the American military’s achievements in Afghanistan were “significant, but fragile and reversible.”96 When it comes to the achievements of Afghan women, the same could be said, although perhaps significant but disappointing, extremely fragile, and easily reversible would be a more precise description.
Many Afghan women’s activists have started to come to the conclusion that they went about it all wrong by relying on the international community to save them from their own society. In their personal lives, female activists like Ms. Frogh remain prisoners of their families and the men who run them. “This was the mistake we made,” she said. “There hasn’t been a women’s movement that has
challenged what happens inside the home. We couldn’t challenge the relationships and power differences inside our families, so we live in a kind of double role. Outside the home we are women’s activists. Inside our homes we go to a very different place.” Often a place where they are beaten and abused no matter who they are.
“Women’s activists have all had a terrible time,” said Ms. Koofi.97 “Either they don’t have a husband, like me”—she is a widow—“or they have a mess of a life, with lots of problems on their shoulders. We raise the awareness of women but not the standard of their lives.”
For most Afghan women, leaving is not an option, improved freedom is relative, better conditions are fictional, and the elimination of violence against them is more of an aspiration than a legal reality. Zakia has so far been more fortunate than most Afghan women. Most of them have had no practical legal protection under the EVAW law,98 and most of them lead lives unchanged by the trillion-dollar international juggernaut visited upon their country.
More typical are women like twenty-six-year-old Fatima.99 In 2014, Kabul lawyer Sher Saeedi took on her case, referred to him by friends of friends. Fatima had borne six daughters, eleven years old and younger, and no sons. With each new daughter, her husband would beat her for failing to have a son—there are widespread Afghan folk beliefs that women can control the gender of their babies, and that men who cannot have sons are somehow defective.100 “People say, if you don’t have a boy, you’re not man enough to make one,” Mr. Saeedi said. Finally Fatima left her abusive husband. Mr. Saeedi got involved when the husband demanded his right to take and marry off the oldest girl, the eleven-year-old, so he could collect the girl’s bride price. Mr. Saeedi told Fatima that she would lose the case if she went to court, even in Kabul city—“they always rule for the man in domestic custody disputes”—and advised her to go into hiding with her kids instead.
“There are many women in this country who the only thing they ever see is the inside of their father’s house, until they are married, when the only thing they ever see is the inside of their husband’s house, until they die, when the only thing they ever see is the inside of their casket,” Mr. Saeedi said. “All they will ever know is the house where they are born and the house where they die and the grave in which they lie.”
OTHER BATTLES IN THE AFGHAN WAR OF THE SEXES
THE RAPE OF BRESHNA
Even by the standards of Afghan misogyny, the rape of ten-year-old Breshna by her mullah stands out, and not just for the brutality of the crime.1 Afterward her family plotted to carry out an honor killing against the girl; the mullah pleaded innocent on the grounds that sex with the child was consensual, and then he jockeyed to marry her so he could get out of jail; she was rescued and put in a shelter but then ordered returned to her family despite the murder threat; other mullahs revised the victim’s age upward to try to lessen the crime; and when this all became public, the women’s advocate who protected Breshna was threatened by the office of the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and told to stop embarrassing the country over the rape of Breshna.
Breshna was rescued by Women for Afghan Women (WAW), which runs a women’s shelter in the northern city of Kunduz. For most of the war, Kunduz Province had been solidly government territory, with some Taliban presence in remote districts; by mid-2014, 90 percent of the province was dominated by the insurgents, and even the city of Kunduz, its capital, became dangerous after dark, and at one point fell to the Taliban during 2015.2 When I visited there in 2014, Dr. Hassina Sarwari, a pediatrician who ran the WAW shelter, and her colleague, Nadera Geyah, the head of the women’s ministry for Kunduz Province, detailed what had happened to Breshna.3 She was then in the shelter in Kunduz but would soon be transferred to Kabul for more advanced medical treatment.
The girl was from the village of Alti Gumbad, in an Uzbek area that by the summer of 2015 had fallen under Taliban control; the former strongmen there were Afghan Local Police (ALP), pro-government militiamen, many of whom had previously been Taliban themselves. Dr. Sarwari’s take was that in Alti Gumbad they were arbakai by day and Taliban by night. As with so many other such units throughout Afghanistan, the arbakai, often branded as ALP, were trained and mentored by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) special-operations or special-forces troops (in this area sometimes fielded by the Germans but in most parts of the country by the Americans) as an expedient solution to increasing anti-Taliban manpower.4
Like many of the children her age, Breshna attended Koran classes at the local mosque in the village; they were coed classes, since the children were so young (classroom segregation by sex does not begin until after puberty). After class on May 1, 2014, the mullah, Mohammad Amin, asked her to stay behind as the other children left to sweep the floor of the mosque, and when she refused and ran, he chased her, caught her, and dragged her back. Mullah Amin took her to the holiest part of the mosque, the mihrab, the Mecca-facing niche where normally the imam would stand to lead the congregation in prayers, then unrolled his white turban, a religious garment that signifies his clerical office, and tied her up with it.
“The girl said she screamed at him, ‘Aren’t you afraid of God? God is watching you, and if you’re not afraid of God aren’t you afraid of those Korans?’” Dr. Sarwari said, relating what Breshna had told her. (A copy of the police interview with Breshna, obtained later, corroborated this account.) Breshna was referring to the holy books piled in the mosque for congregants. “And he said, ‘At this moment I am not afraid of anything.’” The rape was so brutal that it caused a rectovaginal fistula—a rupture in the wall between the rectum and the vagina—and the girl began bleeding heavily, by both her account and the mullah’s later confession. He made her get dressed and finish sweeping the floor of the mosque, then sent her home. She was terrified to admit what had happened to her—the mullah had threatened to kill her family if she did. When Breshna began bleeding profusely at home, her mother thought she had begun menstruating unusually early and rushed her to the hospital in Kunduz. It did not take the doctors there long to figure out she had been raped; a fistula such as the one that Breshna had can be a life-threatening injury, and the girl lost so much blood that she needed a transfusion. From her hospital bed, Breshna confided to her mother and the doctors what had happened to her.
The mullah was arrested and soon confessed—sort of. His defense was the classic one, that the sex had been consensual. That the girl had asked for it and had wanted it and had even enjoyed it. That he thought she was twelve years old—an age that other mullahs would later bump up a few years in an effort to excuse what a fellow cleric had done. What follows is an excerpt from the attorney general’s statement summarizing the mullah’s confession:
Mohammad Amin, deeply aware of what he was doing, has made a joke of people’s trust and belief in mullahs and teachers and trampled on people’s beliefs, trust and religion by committing the act of rape in a place of worship. In addition to his rape and ignominy, Mohammad Amin confessed that he kissed and hugged her so often, which cannot be forgiven, and also as he said in his statement, “that when I was penetrating her she was saying, ‘Ah, ah,’” shows that this evil monster is not guilty about what he did, but he enjoyed it.
It was a story of depraved criminal conduct that could happen anywhere, in any culture. But there were plenty of “only in Afghanistan” elements that gave the case much greater significance. Dr. Sarwari went to the hospital the day after the rape and came into the girl’s room to find her mother kneeling at her bedside and both of them crying. “My daughter, may dust and soil protect you now. We will make you a bed of dust and soil, we will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe.” The mother told Dr. Sarwari that they had no choice, that her husband was under too much pressure from the other villagers to erase their communal shame by killing the girl.
On the same day, Nadera Geyah from the women’s ministry came to the hospital and saw the crowd of angry men waiting outside, including the girl’s father,
two brothers, and two uncles. Inside the hospital she came across the girl’s aunt. Ms. Geyah is a tough, no-nonsense woman, and she soon got the aunt to confess to what Ms. Geyah already suspected: the aunt had just been sent in by the men to bring the girl out, despite her state. “Everyone is focusing on revenge. They want to kill the girl and the mullah. They don’t have the means to kill the mullah, and a lot of powerful people are behind the mullah, so they know they cannot do anything to him,” Ms. Geyah said. Their plan was to kill the girl as soon as they got her away from the hospital and dump her body in the river, she said.
“The poor mother must have been under so much pressure,” Dr. Sarwari said. “She cannot do anything. She is an Afghan woman. She doesn’t have any say over anything.”
“The girl is easy—they can get to her, she’s their daughter,” Ms. Geyah said. “They think they can wash their shame with her blood by killing her. It all comes down to honor. They believe she has brought shame to their family, and only by killing her can they rid that shame. She’s just a child. She is sick and vulnerable, and nobody cares. Everything comes down to honor. Her own mother said, ‘Let’s strangle her in the hospital and say she died there.’”