Walking the Precipice

by Barbara Bick

  Both my parents had grown up in orthodox Jewish families—my mother in old Russia, my father in Brooklyn. They met in Manhattan in the socialist, secular milieu of the 1920s and after they married, moved to Washington, D.C. I was born there in 1925, in a city that was then a southern, segregated small town. I remember going with my father to see World War I Bonus Marchers—an army of unemployed veterans encamped on the nearby Anacostia hills.

  Coming of age in times different from my parents’, I went further afield politically than either of them, joining a Marxist student group at Antioch College, enduring hard times during the McCarthy era, and then turning to the New Left and the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s. As second-wave feminism gained ground, I became involved, and my worldview now encompasses gender as well as class and race. But I remain my mother’s daughter; I have been demonstrating or organizing ever since those days beside her in front of the White House gates. I think she would not have been surprised by the paths I took and the places to which I journeyed. Nor would she be surprised by my growing commitment to Afghanistan.

  By 1992, the mujahidin are close to overcoming the Kabul government, and I watch the news with trepidation. When Miagol, the Afghan Chargé d’Affaires in Washington, first told me about the mujahidin, I had conceived of them as one group. In fact, there are seven major organizations, led by rival conservative Muslims of varying degrees of religiosity, all of whom are politically ambitious men who head political parties that are generally ethnically based. They include Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the man so feared by Zahera for his fanatic approach to Islam and his use of brutal violence to support his cause. In 1973, he was jailed for ordering the murder of a Maoist student. Although his party, Hezb-e-Islami (Islamic Party), continues to receive most of the millions that the CIA is funneling to the mujahidin through Pakistan’s secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), he is rabidly anti-American. His most hated rival is the more moderate Ahmad Shah Massoud, defense minister of Burhanuddin Rabbani’s party, Jamiat-e-Islami (Islamic Society), which is largely made up of ethnic Tajiks. The bitterly contentious relationship between Hekmatyar and Massoud began when both studied under Rabbani, then a Kabul University theology professor who had formed Afghanistan’s first Islamist party.

  Hekmatyar, an engineering student, and Massoud, a student of architecture, both joined Rabbani’s demonstrations against the dissolution of the monarchy and the formation of the secular republic in 1973. When their nascent movement was quickly crushed, both young men, along with some five thousand other young Islamists, followed Rabbani into exile in Pakistan, where they were welcomed by President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and given military training. In 1975, the Afghans were enlisted to join Pakistani incursions into their homeland. Massoud’s lifelong mistrust of Pakistan began at that time, and in 1978, he returned to Afghanistan to develop an indigenous movement among the Tajiks in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. While Massoud remained loyal to Rabbani, Hekmatyar broke with his former professor to form a more radical Islamist party. Now, in 1992, the two rivals, each with his own troops, are at the outskirts of Kabul and are vying to be the first to enter the city.

  In the United States there is very little information about any of this; Afghanistan is no longer newsworthy. Belatedly, I realize that I do not even know Shakira and Zahera’s last names, or if they even have last names, or any way in which I can communicate with them. I search the media endlessly for information.

  Unlike the US government, the United Nations and its Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, consider the fate of post-Soviet Afghanistan a matter of great concern. With some six million refugees (the highest number of any country in the world), more than two million dead, another two million disabled, an estimated ten million mines in the countryside, and the chaos that will inevitably result from the fall of Najibullah, Afghanistan could become a major disaster zone. In the spring of 1992, the UN sends a mission to Kabul with the aim of ensuring a peaceful and stable transfer of power to an interim authority that will prepare for elections.

  Negotiations toward that goal take place in Peshawar, Pakistan, with national and international representatives, and envoys from the seven mujahidin groups. The final agreement, the Peshawar Accords, is for a fifty-one-person transitional government to take power for two months until a “Loya Jirga”—the traditional assembly of Afghan leaders that elects leaders, enact laws, or confronts a crisis—can be convened to prepare for elections. Najibullah has been persuaded to resign with the promise that he and his brother will be evacuated to India, where their families await them. He asks that one thousand international peacekeeping troops be stationed in Kabul, to ensure the orderly transfer of power, but Pakistan vehemently opposes the request—and since the United States supports Pakistan, the proposal is doomed. The entire negotiation process is muddied by rival mujahidin ambitions and the power of Pakistan to make demands. M. Hassan Kakar, an Afghan historian, has said of the accords, “It was not just Najib who was being held hostage. It was Afghanistan as well, although this time the kidnapper was neither Russia nor Great Britain, as in the Great Game. It was Pakistan.”

  With the accords signed, Najibullah and his party are being escorted to the airport when their convoy is stopped by PDPA General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose Uzbek party is based in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sherif. Najibullah is returned to Kabul, where he and his brother are given refuge in a UN compound. It is said that Najibullah spends his days translating a history of British-era Afghanistan and the Great Game.

  In his last days in government, Najibullah had told reporters from the International Herald Tribune, “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.”

  Kabul falls to the mujahidin on April 25, 1992. Many government troops go over to Massoud, who is the first leader to enter the city, riding on a tank strewn with flowers. According to news accounts, hundreds of Massoud’s mujahidin fire their assault rifles into the air in celebration, but by the next day they have lowered their rifles and are aiming them at other troops as fighting breaks out with other mujahidin groups who have followed him into the city. It is said, “The first Afghan war is over. The second has begun.”

  As I sit in Washington reading the brief news reports, I can hardly bear to imagine Zahera’s fear, or how the council women will survive. April 25 is my birthday, and as I move through the day, so freely, so privileged, I am overwhelmed once again by the fact that we Americans are so removed from the calamitous results of our country’s foreign intrusions.

  According to the Peshawar Accords, each of the seven mujahidin commanders is to serve, on a rotating basis, as president of the interim government until elections can be held. I am appalled to read that when the two women ministers whom we had interviewed, Saleha Farugie Aetemadi and Massouma Asmity Wardak, join their male colleagues from the outgoing government to pay respects to the new mujahidin president, Sibghatullan Mujaddedi (Sibghatullah) Mujaddedi, his aides turn them back because their long black dresses fail to conceal their ankles.

  Rabbani’s turn is next and when it is over, he refuses to relinquish the position. Hekmatyar has already rejected the whole process and retreated to his base in the surrounding hills to begin relentlessly pounding the city with hundreds of rockets. Kabul, which survived a ten-year war against a foreign occupation, is being destroyed by its own people. I begin to get information from an Afghan Listserv on the Internet and learn that militia groups make alliances one day and become enemies the next. Rape and civilian executions are becoming the norm. Electric grids are failing throughout towns, food supplies are shrinking, and disease is spreading. In 1994, some ten thousand civilians die violently. Anarchy and chaos spread from Kabul throughout Afghanistan. The people are desperate.

  Then, awful news—the Taliban has entered Afghanistan from Pakistan. Talib militias trained for
jihad in Pakistani madrassas—Islamic religious schools—are joined by Arab troops, with military aid from Pakistan, and are being welcomed by the Pashtun populace of the southern city of Kandahar. The Taliban promises the desperate people that they will operate under sharia law to restore civil order from the chaos created by the mujahidin civil war.

  As I watch all this take place from afar, I also begin to educate myself about the vast sums and advanced weapons that our government has invested over the years in the mujahidin. I am stunned to learn just how provocative my country’s role has been in this tragic war. Early in the summer of 1979, several months before the Soviet invasion, President Jimmy Carter had issued a directive to the CIA to provide covert aid to the Afghan rebels who were fighting the Communist government. It was a move that national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski hoped would “trap” the Russians, in his words, and “give the USSR its Vietnam.”

  During the 1980s, students were recruited and trained for jihad in Afghanistan through a string of new madrassas established by Saudi Arabia in Pakistan to proselytize Wahhabism, the Saudi fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam. Many of these madrassas were also boarding schools for refugee Afghan boys and indigent Pakistanis. It was not long before there were more than eight hundred official schools along the Afghan-Pakistani border. According to Ahmed Rashid, author of the bestselling book Taliban, “Tens of thousands [of] foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the new madrassas [and] between 1982 and 1992, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries [including] Filipino Moros, Uzbeks from Soviet Central Asia, Arabs from Algeria, Uighurs from Xinjiang in China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait . . . would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan mujahidin.” The recruitment and funding was not limited to Saudi Arabia, but included the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamist group that was founded in Egypt and has repeatedly been banned there, and the CIA, under William Casey, all organized by the ISI, and aided by Hekmatyar’s Heizb-e-Islami. The wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden, also helped fund the mujahidin during the Soviet war, and in 1989 set up Al Qaeda to develop broad-based alliances with Arab militants.

  By 1994, Pashtun mujahidin, grouped around an uneducated village mullah, Muhammed Omar, have joined forces with fundamentalist students and have taken control of Kandahar. And from there they orchestrate a fundamentalist movement to cleanse Afghanistan of Western influence and make it the purest Islamic state in the world in accordance with their own views of Islam and sharia law.

  The Taliban’s first decrees in Kandahar are aimed at the status of women: they may not work outside the home; they must wear the burqa—a heavy garment covering the head and body with only a small gauze inset to see through—in public; schools for girls and women must shut down, along with nearly all public places where women gather, such as female bathhouses; women may not be seen by non-relative males or be treated by male doctors. The edicts of repression multiply. Women who display a single finger outside the burqa can have it chopped off. A woman meeting with a man who is not a relative can be stoned to death.

  Prayer becomes obligatory for men, who are no longer allowed to shave their beards. All forms of entertainment, including the national pastime of kite-flying, are prohibited; musical instruments, singing, television, chess, all celebrations (such as wedding receptions), are forbidden. Smoking and alcohol, forbidden. Normal government structure, eliminated. All authority stems from Taliban commissions and Islamic tribunals. Punishment is severe, archaic, and immediate.

  I follow what little news there is of the Taliban militias, reinforced by thousands of Arab and Pakistan contingents, as they battle their way across the country. In 1996, they finally enter Kabul, while the warring rival mujahidin fade into the populace, join the Taliban, or go into exile in neighboring countries. Only Massoud and his Tajik forces are determined to resist the Taliban; he withdraws from Kabul and moves north to his home base in the Panjshir Valley.

  The Taliban’s first act on capturing Kabul is to drag Najibullah and his brother from the UN compound where they have stayed for the past four years. Up to this time, the warring factions have respected the diplomatic immunity of the UN, so this is a deliberate act of defiance against the world organization. Najibullah and his brother are beaten senseless, then taken to the presidential palace, where both men are tortured and Najibullah is castrated and dragged behind a jeep. My stomach turns when I see photos in the media of their bloated bodies hanging from a traffic control post in the city.

  I am beginning to understand another aspect of my obsession with Afghanistan. Since my visit there, I have felt uneasily apart from my own culture. People in the United States just do not seem to understand the significance of the drama playing out in that distant part of the world, which I see as a terminal struggle between religiously based patriarchal authority and secular support for gender and ethnic equality. Almost vertiginously, I feel the political landscape I have known all my life fading and a new, still shadowy, terrain rising up around us. It seems to me that, in innocent ignorance, we are moving blindly through a global interregnum.

  During most of my lifetime, two powerful countries, representing two opposing systems, have shared the world stage—the Communist USSR, and the capitalist United States. Their fierce eighty-two-year competition has been the overweening political discourse. That confrontation ended with the collapse of the Soviet system, and the apparent triumph of the United States. But, unseen and ignored by most of the world, a new force is coalescing in the back alleys of history, and I believe its genesis is in Afghanistan. I have come to see events there as an omen; Afghanistan as our modern Cassandra.

  I am desperate to do something to help prevent the Taliban from taking over the entire country. As the Talibs have battled their way across Afghanistan, the US media has begun to report on their brutality against women and their degradation of Afghan society, yet no one seems to care that under Taliban decrees, every woman is literally denied the right to lift her bare face to the sky. Her condition is lower than that of a beast of burden, which can at least breathe fresh air. Even though many people I speak to are touched by the fact that girls are forbidden to study and women to work, the response is typically a what-can-I-do-about-it shrug.

  I have found only one American activist organization whose work against the Taliban I agree with: the Feminist Majority Foundation. There is also an Afghan women’s group, RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), based in Pakistan, that has captured the imagination of many Americans with its dramatic exposure of the plight of Afghan women, but I am most impressed by Ellie Smeal, the Feminist Majority’s president, and her analysis of the global significance of the Taliban’s extremist religious misogyny: “We have been saying for years that a country where so many people have no rights will create international instability,” she says. “People just thought, ‘Oh, there they go about the women again.’ People need to realize that women are important, not just in their own right, but that we’re the canaries in the coal mine. How women are treated is a good indication of which way society is going.” Ellie’s position is that the international community’s passive acceptance of the Taliban’s brutalities is a threat to all free civil societies.

  The Feminist Majority has launched a “Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid,” with the goal of putting the condition of women in Afghanistan on a par with the oppression of blacks in South Africa, an injustice that inspired international opposition. Its first priority is to stop the United States from recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

  While only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have recognized the Taliban government, the United States is not unfriendly. The Clinton administration effectively supports the Taliban through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In addition, Unocal, an American energy corporation, is negotiating intensely for a pipeline from Turkmenistan, newly independent of the Soviet Union, through Afghanistan to Pakistan and the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean.
The pipeline would bring the Taliban royalties of some one hundred million dollars a year. The Clinton administration supports the project, and apparently believes that a stable government, no matter what its politics, offers the best prospects for the pipeline being built and operating without threat. The Feminist Majority, aided by its board member Mavis Leno, wife of late-night TV host Jay Leno, is fighting back with ads, public meetings, and petitions. Bombarded by the political and wealthy feminist women in Hollywood, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of State Madeline Albright are also beginning to take a public stand against the Taliban.

  In the summer of 1999, I hold a fundraiser for the Feminist Majority on Martha’s Vineyard. Hawa Ghaus, a young Afghan staffer at the foundation, in a brilliant presentation, compares the Taliban to the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Both groups, she points out, were and are fanatically committed to their visions of a former golden age in their respective countries, and remorseless in their destruction of whatever has stood in their way. While the Khmer Rouge’s vision of a rural communal utopia required the destruction of Cambodia’s educated population and its urban infrastructure, the Taliban’s vision of an international Islamic caliphate requires the total subjection of women, because emancipated women typify modernity, equality, and, frequently, secularism.

  I admire the Feminist Majority for their campaigns, but I want to work directly with women from Afghanistan. I seek out the large Afghan community in northern Virginia, where most of the refugees are from the first exodus, those who fled the Russians, and many of them, both women and men, are working successfully in business and the professions. A number of the women are engaged in aid projects, but they are studiously non-political. The exception is Nasrine Gross, whom I meet in the fall of 2000 at her annual fund-raiser for women and children in Afghanistan.