Walking the Precipice

by Barbara Bick

  These contacts are little enough, but they help, to some extent, to ease my overwhelming need to do something for the people of Afghanistan. In some quixotic way, because my life has been so safe and comfortable, I feel beholden to all the women I have met from 1990 to the present, as well as to all the unknown Afghan women and children who have had to endure so much.

  When I returned from Afghanistan, I found myself a local news item: there was a front-page photo of me with Assim in the Vineyard Gazette; standing-room-only audience at our local bookstore, the Bunch of Grapes, interviews in the Cape Cod Times, Boston Herald, Newark Star Ledger, and Women’s ENews. Other interviews followed on television, and NPR’s All Things Considered, along with a story in Washington Jewish Week, which was reprinted in Jewish newspapers around the country.

  Now, I watch the fate of Afghanistan with both hope and fear. The US government is still divided over how to proceed with the local forces on the ground. Gary Schroen, a CIA field officer who set up a post-9/11 base in Afghanistan, would write in his 2005 book, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan, “General Mahammed Qasim Fahim and the senior Northern Alliance leadership [recognized] that there were grave reservations within the senior ranks of the US government over allowing the Northern Alliance to capture and occupy Kabul. Years of political dealings with the US government had made it painfully clear to the Northern Alliance that there was a strong anti-Tajik lobby within the ranks of senior US policy-makers.” The US State Department is apparently worried about Pakistan’s angry response if Massoud’s Tajiks are allowed to capture and occupy Kabul. But there are also those, including some in the CIA, who have been in and out of Afghanistan for years, who understand the battlefield realities and had long admired Massoud. Above all, the Northern Alliance—officially the United Front—is determined to take Kabul. The capital is surrounded by territory they furiously fought over and which they now occupy. More important, they are driven by the memory of the lives of their brethren sacrificed during the long, lean years when they stood against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and their Pakistani supporters.

  Following the initial bombing raid, the US-led coalition has maintained massive bombing of strategic sites in Afghanistan. By early November 2001, after fierce ground battles, all the major cities in the north are occupied by the mujahidin forces of the United Front. When the last stronghold, Kundiz, is captured on November 25, Pakistani aircraft rescue several thousand Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers and their military advisers. Two to three thousand more Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters escape into the South Waziristan province of Pakistan, including, according to reports, both Mullah Omar and bin Laden. But the Taliban is routed! On November 14, the Northern Alliance enters Kabul. I have no doubt that at that moment, the image of their commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, is in the heart and mind of every one of his Tajik troops.

  The international community of donor nations, which did so little to help Afghanistan before 9/11, has now leapt into action, pledging billions for reconstruction. In December, the United Nations initiates a conference in Bonn to plan for post-war Afghanistan. It is expected that the four major post-Taliban political factions will be sending, typically, an all-male cast. Instead, a surprising new script is played out: three women are included in the twenty-eight-member delegation—two in the former king’s group, one with the Northern Alliance—along with at least two more women attending as advisers. The Bonn meeting sets up an interim government, agreeing on the US-backed Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, as interim president. Three major ministries go to Northern Alliance Tajiks from Panjshir.

  As I closely read the US media, I realize that although Massoud is celebrated as a national hero, there is spreading concern over the concentration of power by the Tajiks. This feeling is especially strong among returning refugees who suffered through the mujahidin civil war, which many blame primarily on Rabbani and Massoud, rather than any of the other mujahidin parties such as Hekmatyar’s. Women express bitterness against the Northern Alliance for Rabbani’s edicts while president requiring women to return to conservative Islamic traditions, including dress. They also bring up his denial of requests for an Afghan delegation to the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. I know Nasrine has never believed that Rabbani supported women’s rights, but Mary MacMakin, speaking to me about it in Faizibad, said women were free in their dress and able to work everywhere in Kabul until the Taliban. She blamed Hekmatyar for fomenting Kabul’s destruction and the civil war. She did acknowledge that all of the mujahidin parties participated in the final frenzy until, as she told it, Massoud withdrew to save the population. I realize there are two stories, at least, in every historic account and both contain some truth.

  What I find truly amazing and hopeful, now, is the rapid emergence of Afghan women from their five years of bondage and centuries of oppression. Just days after the liberation of Kabul, women throng the streets, almost all still covered by the burqa, cautious of the new situation, but thrilled at the sight of items for sale such as books, condoms, and hair dryers, all forbidden by the Taliban. Women and girls are clamoring for schools to open and for new schools to replace those destroyed in the past ten years. Hundreds of young women are registering for classes at Kabul University and thousands are seeking jobs at international relief organizations.

  Urban, educated, and professional women, many of whom taught, worked, and organized clandestinely during the Taliban terror, are attending several international conferences, including the UN Development Program/World Bank meeting in Islamabad and the roundtable in Brussels on building women’s leadership, sponsored by the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the Belgian government. The Afghan Women’s Summit for Democracy, also held in Brussels in December, 2001, is called by a broad array of international institutions and groups to implement the UN Security Council’s resolution on women, peace, and security, which calls for women’s representation in conflict resolution and in rebuilding war-torn societies. The summit is attended by a large, diverse group of Afghan women from within and outside Afghanistan, along with many international women leaders and speakers. All these meetings are set up to ensure women’s participation in shaping the future of Afghanistan.

  I am astonished to read that women have taken to the streets in Kabul, Herat, and other cities to demonstrate for jobs and security. Even more strange is to read admiring stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Vogue about one of the women organizing them, Suraya Parlika, whom I had interviewed during my first visit to Kabul in 1990, when she was head of the Afghan Red Crescent. She and her family held high positions during the Parcham regime of the Communist PDPA. Parlika, who was unmarried, remained in Afghanistan during the years of the mujahidin and the Taliban, during which she organized the covert All-Afghan Women’s Council, which held classes and provided work under supremely dangerous conditions. Now Parlika, at age fifty-seven, is back in the open, still organizing and demanding education and power for women.

  On March 20, 2003, the United States begins its “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq despite months of worldwide anti-war demonstrations that bring unprecedented millions of people into the streets. Following the bombing, American ground forces enter Iraq to begin the long battle to vanquish and occupy the country. For Afghanistan, the consequences of this invasion are especially dire.

  Through the spring and summer of 2003, as the United States’s political attention and armed forces remain concentrated on Iraq, I follow the news from Afghanistan with an increasing sense of dread. The Taliban is already moving back from its sanctuary in Pakistan into the southern provinces, sowing havoc, murdering foreign aid workers, burning girls’ schools, and threatening Afghans who work for the government headed by President Karzai. Hekmatyar, the man my Afghan friends consider one of the most sadistic of the mujahidin, has left Iran to join with the Taliban and is reported to be in command of its terrorist forces around Kabul. Their aim is to disrupt the process of returnin
g Afghanistan to a constitutional government.

  By the end of September 2003, a new constitution has been drafted—it took eighteen months—and is being circulated throughout Afghanistan. It is crucial that women participate in the discussion of the constitution and participate in the Loya Jirga, the traditional assembly of Afghan leaders that convenes to elect leaders, enact laws, or confront a crisis. That this ancient instrument will be used to ratify the governing document for a new, more inclusive nation enchants me. It reminds me of the Hegelian idea of change—the dialectic in which a thesis is opposed by its antithesis, and in their synthesis, something entirely new is born. I will witness this process in real life as tradition is opposed by modernity, and something new is formed out of both. I do not know what the synthesis will be, but it should be remarkable.

  For NEGAR, events have outpaced their five-year petition strategy. This is their moment, their raison d’être, and Nasrine, Shoukria, and the NEGAR volunteers are working with a powerful sense of urgency to ensure that women are part of the Loya Jirga that will ratify a constitution guaranteeing their right to political participation. NEGAR has moved its base from France to Kabul and a group of Afghan women activists have rallied around it. Under the leadership of Shoukria, Nasrine, and the French NEGAR leader Chantal Veron, and with Connie Borde’s Paris-based links to institutional support, local women in provincial towns are learning through a series of three-day conferences how to participate in the constitutional debate. NEGAR will hold its final, large conference in early December, prior to the meeting of the Loya Jirga, bringing these women together in Kabul.

  Until our visit in 2001, Nasrine had not been to Afghanistan for thirty-seven years, and now she has hardly left, returning to the States to visit her family for only a few weeks at a time. During her two years in Kabul, in addition to her indefatigable work with NEGAR, Nasrine has become an associate professor at Kabul University, where her father was once president; has established the Roqia Center for Women’s Rights, Studies and Development, named after her mother; and has begun a pathbreaking adult literacy program designed for couples.

  I want to be in Kabul with my friends and colleagues to join with them at their conference, to celebrate the realization of a goal we could only dream about in earlier years. I admit to myself that I am afraid to go back to Afghanistan now. I am afraid of the Taliban, which has threatened Loya Jirga delegates with death. Still, the importance of this moment, when women from all over Afghanistan will come together in public to discuss government policy, takes precedence over my fears, and on the last day of November 2003, I leave Washington to begin my third trip to Afghanistan. Judy Lerner, an old friend from Women Strike for Peace, is going with me. At eighty-two, Judy is extraordinary—ebullient, beautiful, intelligent. She sparkles with fun and laughter. During a lifetime of teaching in New York City public schools, she was a leader in the teacher’s union and engaged in a host of other activities. Judy is retired, a great-grandmother, and a UN NGO peace advocate. I am very pleased she is going with me.

  From the start, the trip is full of small crises. We meet at Kennedy Airport at 5:00 p.m., far too early for a 9:45 departure, so we sit down for a leisurely chat and a cup of coffee, then amble to the departure gate, where we discover the gate was changed. We dash, as fast as two elderly women can, for a cart to drive us to Terminal 8. We are the last to board the plane.

  More drama awaits after we arrive at Connie Borde’s apartment in Paris. Connie finds out that Judy is traveling with an expired visa to Afghanistan and has been advised to renew it when we get there. Connie will have none of it. After frantic calls to the Afghan embassy in Paris, and trips back and forth in taxis, that problem is finally solved and Judy and I get back to Connie’s just before we have to leave for the airport. Let this not be an omen, I think.

  At the airport we meet two American expats, Jacqui Duclos and Jane Donaldson, friends of Connie with no previous connection to NEGAR, who are going to Kabul for the Loya Jirga. Our stopover is Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates. As we wander around the empty airport after midnight, waiting for our flight to Kabul, Judy and I bond with Jacqui. Her height and gorgeous mane of blond hair are dramatic; she has a great sense of fun, is very smart, and even more compelling to me, she is a seeker and doer. She was active in Students for a Democratic Society during college in the 1960s, and after graduation went to France, where she has lived and worked for over thirty years. She tells us about the months she lived and studied in a Nepalese monastery with a Buddhist master, where she became a practicing Buddhist, though she still retains a strong Jewish identity.

  We board the plane for Kabul, and my sense of trepidation takes over once again. I think back to my first arrival at Kabul’s airport more than thirteen years ago, when the plane was forced to make a spiraling descent to elude mujahidin missiles aimed at the city. I remember the silence of the shabby airport when Gabi, Cynthia, and I landed. I also flash back to our frenzied departure, when Shakira and Zahera literally pushed us onto the plane through the crowds desperate to leave the doomed city.

  When we land, the small airport is just as I remember it. There is a mob of people, pushing and shoving, just as when we left in 1990. But these Afghans are shouting happily, eager to greet waiting family and friends. I see Zubair and then Nasrine, who runs up to us. Everyone seems entangled, arms embracing, backs and shoulders butting. Nasrine is everywhere, collecting conference guests, exhorting and demanding efficiency from the airport officials, instructing NEGAR volunteers and drivers to gather us and our baggage onto transportation to the city.

  I am totally bewildered as we drive through Kabul to our hotel. I had envisioned terrible destruction from the mujahidin civil war, the Taliban rule, and American bombs. Instead, I find a city that has seemingly gotten over all that and gone wild with construction. Scaffolding and new buildings are rising everywhere. There was hardly any traffic in Kabul in 1990; now, hordes of yellow Toyota taxis jam the streets, along with private vehicles of every description and function.

  The NEGAR women have arranged for us to stay in one of the many small hotels that are springing up overnight, this one the Insaf Hotel on busy Charahi Ansari Street. As soon as I walk through the lobby and up the flight of stairs to the second-floor rooms, the acrid odor of drying concrete and the vapor of fresh paint and shellac take me back twenty years, to a room in Nairobi, in one of the units expeditiously constructed for delegates to the UN World Conference on Women. The smell may be the same, but the room in Nairobi was far better than the one here. Nairobi in 1985 was a modern city far more advanced economically and technologically than Kabul today.

  But we are fortunate to have a new, clean room with two narrow cots and a tiny bathroom. One florescent light gives uncertain illumination, and central heat being virtually unknown in Kabul, a gas heater is brought into our room along with a bulky gas tank. The heater rapidly warms the small room but the fumes are powerful; with inoperable windows and no ventilation, we keep the gas on only intermittently.

  I am especially delighted to see Zubair again. Earlier this year, as a token gesture of thanks for his great help in getting me out of Khoja Bahauddin, I had invited him, his wife, Manija, and baby daughter, Zainab, to stay with me in Washington for three months to study English. It had been a challenging period for all of us, but I believe it was a great learning period for them. I certainly learned a great deal from them, including his account of growing up in Kabul during the Communist period and how he had evaded the Taliban to join Massoud.

  Now, in Kabul, it is nearly eight months since they left Washington. He and Manija have a new baby girl, so their visit was also productive in another way. Zubair had been working for the Foreign Ministry when they came to visit, but now he has taken a leave, hoping to find work that will pay better. He plans to be with me every day while I’m here and has arranged for a car and driver. But for this, our first day in Kabul, Judy and I prefer to walk. So Zubair leads us out into the city. It is difficult
to do much talking as we walk, since the broken sidewalks and construction debris require us to watch our step and often to walk single file.

  “What is that new building going to be?” I shout back to Zubair, pointing to a tall building with immense panes of blue glass going up a few blocks from the hotel. He shrugs. “I have no idea, maybe offices, maybe stores. Some rich returning Afghan is building it. He hasn’t announced what it’s for.”

  “What will be constructed here?” I ask, pointing to a deep excavation ready to become the foundation for another large building. Zubair shrugs again. “I don’t know. Maybe a government building, maybe stores. No one knows.”

  The interim government’s first imperative is to rebuild essential institutions and infrastructure. It has neither time nor funds to undertake planning and even lacks the bureaucratic ability to oversee new construction. Entrepreneurial Afghans are simply moving ahead on their own. We walk past shops started up in old bullet-scarred, crumbling buildings, some so decrepit they seem ready to collapse.

  Soon it is time to turn back. Dinner and a meeting with Nasrine and Shoukria has been called for 6:00 p.m. at Popo Lano, a popular Italian restaurant next door to our hotel. The décor is simply amazing: on the lower walls, there are alternating panels of dark wood, white plaster embossed with vines, and mirrors painted with flowers. Above these panels, gold-framed oil paintings hang between white fluted columns. The ceiling is awash in pink, green, and yellow painted flowers. On the center wall, backed by a huge gold-framed mirror, is a gilded altarpiece. Several of us debate whether this fantastic decor is based on old Afghan motifs such as the white marble mausoleum of Queen Gawharshad (1377-1457), with its intricate carvings and stucco dome of lapis blue, brick red, gold, and white, or on the riotously painted trucks of the Kuchi, the Afghan gypsies. In any case, I love its exuberance and color, a flagrant reaction to the puritanical Taliban ethos.