An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

At the time I knew nothing about this history, nor did most Afghans. Thus I learned that most Eastern peoples do not necessarily treasure or resurrect their past. People constantly revise history. They build their houses of worship right over their predecessor’s, or enemy’s, houses of worship and then wipe out all traces of what came before. I learned to value the search for origins: one’s own and those of the entire world.

  I learned the importance of research. When I blindly, stubbornly followed Abdul-Kareem back to Afghanistan, I had not carefully researched the country. I did not seek out other American wives of Afghan men. I was not suspicious. I was ambitious; I wanted to have an adventure. I did not take marriage seriously. I took books seriously. I thought I would triumph, no matter what adversity I might face.

  I learned that being a woman placed me at a great disadvantage. I had never thought of it this way. After Kabul this way of thinking continued to make sense to me.

  I learned that, like women everywhere, Afghan women have also internalized the sexism that legitimizes their own mistreatment. Oppressed daughters and oppressed wives in turn oppress their daughters and daughters-in-law and their female servants. This helped me to see variations on this theme in the West and globally. In 2002, after twenty years of research, I published a book about this long-denied, and at the time still-controversial, subject. The title? Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.

  I learned that people take what they want without understanding the consequences of their actions, without caring whom they hurt along the way. Both Abdul-Kareem and I did this. I broke my family’s heart. Abdul-Kareem offended and perhaps endangered his family and himself by a love marriage to a Jewish American. We hurt each other deeply.

  As a Jew and a woman, I was drawn to Abdul-Kareem’s marginality in the West. I identified with it and thought it made us kindred spirits. I was wrong.

  After Kabul—long after Kabul—I read Betty Mahmoody’s riveting book, Not Without My Daughter, in which she describes how her Westernized Iranian physician-husband unexpectedly trapped her in Iran under hostile conditions and held her there against her will. Betty finally escaped with her daughter, Mahtob—and a wild and dramatic tale it is. But the story did not end there.

  In 1991 Betty’s husband, Sayyed Bozorg Mahmoody (“Moody”), released his own film, Without My Daughter, in which he rebutted each of Betty’s points. On camera he says, “My only sin is [in] loving my daughter, my only child. Betty knows she has done me wrong. She has wronged all Iranians.” He then goes on to blame his loss on the CIA, Zionism, and Betty’s desire to get rich by telling sensational lies.

  I suppose Abdul-Kareem can now write his own book about his difficult and faithless American wife who caused him great suffering. Perhaps I did, perhaps that is true.

  I thought Abdul-Kareem was worldly and understood everything. I was wrong. He minimized the dangerous reality of Afghan history and customs, especially gender apartheid and Sharia law. He failed to understand that a hard and radical Islamism might rise again.

  In 2008, I interviewed a prominent Egyptian businessman who was the first Arab chair of a global oil company and the founder and chair of a Middle Eastern oil company. He is also a prolific writer and human rights activist. The following year this man called me, weeping. His childhood city of Port Said was no more.

  “The women are wearing black sheets down to the ground, and loudspeakers are blaring hate from every mosque. Believe me, this was such a cosmopolitan city, there were people of all religions and from so many countries here. I am afraid of what is coming.”

  Indeed by 2012 the Muslim Brotherhood had come to power legally. Even as I write, the Brotherhood has taken over the military, the media, and the judiciary; an Islamist constitution has been passed. For some time now women have been wearing black hijab and, increasingly, face masks (niqab) in most Egyptian cities, including Cairo.

  And now, Egyptian military nationalists have taken over and imprisoned many Muslim Brotherhood leaders. Protests continue.

  I wonder how my business friend is now. I wonder how all Egypt is as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists battle to retake the country and to abolish women’s rights, human rights, and freedom of expression.

  In 2005, I delivered a keynote speech at a feminist conference. The moment I stopped speaking, the first woman on her feet was someone with whom I once worked; she was a friendly colleague. She insisted that both Iraq and Afghanistan would have been better off as communist and secular countries, that women’s lives would have been better.

  “Oh,” I say, “Women seemed to have more freedom. But what about the Iraqi women who were raped to death by Saddam Hussein’s goons or the Afghan men and women who were jailed and tortured by the Soviets? What about the Kurds Saddam Hussein killed with poison gas?”

  “Look,” she argued. “Whatever is wrong with those countries was caused by us. First the West went and colonized the world, and then it made crooked deals with tyrants or just invaded it again for oil. Admit it. The West has ruined the developing world.”

  I will not admit this because it is not exactly true. The gender and religious apartheid I encountered in Kabul is indigenous to the region; it was not caused by Western imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, or military occupation. And Islamist dictators may be far more dangerous than nonideological dictators.

  But she may also have a point.

  In 2012, I am talking to a man from Libya. Like so many exiles from the Islamic world—and like the Russian aristocrats in Paris before them—he is driving me in his limousine. He is a trim, relatively young, and good-looking man. I open the conversation.

  “What a disaster in the Middle East! The world stands by, the tyrants attack their own people, the Islamists pile on, and the people die.”

  He takes off his sunglasses, turns around, and looks at me.

  “Madam,” he says, “I blame the media and the Internet. They are driving the tragedy. Let me ask you something. Do you believe that the Tunisian man who set himself on fire is the real cause of the Arab Spring? No, he was not normal, maybe he was on drugs. Everywhere people suffer but they do not set themselves on fire. The media coverage: Al Jazeera, CNN, have encouraged radicals, al-Qaeda. Now they are everywhere.”

  He pronounces al-Qaeda in Arabic. I say, “I thought the Tunisian man’s ultimate humiliation—being insulted and slapped by a woman police officer—was the final straw.”

  “He is not important. Qaddafi was a hard man, maybe a crazy man, but he kept al-Qaeda out of Libya. Now Libyan women are not safe. They cannot go out. No one is safe. They are kidnapped and their families are forced to pay money for their lives. After Mubarak, Egypt went radical too, just like Syria will once Assad is gone. Al-Qaeda and other groups like them are all over the place.”

  “Are you saying that Arabs need a ruthless dictator in order to stop more extreme criminal forces—Muslim radicals—from taking over? You mentioned women. What if you were one of the women or men whom Qaddafi’s men plucked off the streets to rape and murder?”

  “You are right,” he says. “But that does not compare to the much greater suffering the people are undergoing now without their strong leaders.”

  His English is good, his nails are carefully manicured, it is clear that he has traveled throughout the Arab world. Perhaps he once held an important position under Qaddafi.

  I fear he may have a point. If so, America’s past support for such dictators was not absolutely wrong. And America’s current hands-off policy as radical extremists take down or profit from a people’s genuine desire for freedom may not be absolutely right. Refusing to recognize the Green democrats in Iran was wrong, as is America’s current policy of recognizing Islamist coalitions. I add, “The UN is useless, and America does not have the financial means or the political will to take on the policeman’s role in the entire Arab and Muslim world. Either the people themselves
will have to do it—and they have really tried and failed to do this in Iran—or they will suffer a terrible fate under the Islamists. Unless there is a miracle, I fear this tragedy will last for a long while. I am so sorry.”

  I say this expressly to offer my condolences to him on the loss of his country and the suffering of both his family and his religious compatriots.

  In turn in classic Arab fashion he must also comfort me. He says, “Madam, there is always hope. One must always have hope.”

  But the information is in. Islamists want to turn the global clock back to the seventh century. The Afghan Taliban would rather their children die of polio than be inoculated against it. The Pakistani Taliban are shooting young girls in the head for attending school. As I have written many times, and as Leon Wieseltier has recently said, “The struggle for gender equality is the campaign against totalitarianism.” One cannot reason with evil; one must defeat it.

  Between 2009 and 2010 eighty-five humanitarian workers were murdered in Afghanistan. In July 2004 Doctors Without Borders recalled all their physicians after the Taliban killed five of the organization’s doctors. As I write this, Afghan soldiers being trained by American soldiers to replace them are murdering their American teachers and then either blowing themselves up or hiding among the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

  The American army has proposed giving soldiers a handbook that includes a list of taboo conversation topics. Americans in combat must avoid “making derogatory comments about the Taliban,” “advocating women’s rights,” “any criticism of paedophilia,” “mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct,” or saying “anything related to Islam.”

  How can Afghan men who never fail to impress foreign visitors as sweet and funny and humble—men who giggle so girlishly—nevertheless treat women and young children so cruelly? So many Afghan men I have met were modest people, not monsters; they were simple, kindhearted, and eager to please. They loved a good joke. They accepted their fate as part of God’s plan for them.

  These men believe in God—yet they think that women, who are also created by God, are subhuman, nonhuman: property that must be jealously guarded, fields that must be continuously plowed. Can they be educated to think otherwise? In 2007, after Abdul-Kareem visited Kabul for the last time, he said this:

  It was a terrible, terrible experience. The country has fallen apart, it was worse than I expected. There is no electricity, no roads, and no water. One can’t breathe the air or eat the food. It took me a quarter of a million dollars in bribes to get my deal finalized. It is corrupt, from the very top to the bottom. There are lots of massage parlors and prostitutes. I saw only turmoil, with no future. Everyone is paying lip service in terms of women’s rights, but no one is helping. By the way—why has no one ever seen Karzai’s wife? Why does he hide her? Even on International Women’s Day she was nowhere to be found.

  I am cheered by Abdul-Kareem’s sudden concern for the ladies.

  But he is right about the country’s corruption. According to the New York Times, in 2013, the Kabul bank turned out to be a nine hundred billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Revenge drove Sherkhan Farnood, one of the bank’s founders, to turn on his co-conspirators before they could turn on him. Those who had purchased villas in Dubai received minimal sentences; those who did not know what was going on received long prison terms.

  Ah, and what about the women in Afghanistan? As a feminist can I just abandon them to their fate without a backward glance?

  The British Afghan author Saira Shah belongs to a distinguished family of writers; her father is Idries Shah, her brother is Tahir Shah. They are all the descendants of Afghan warriors and diplomats and the Scottish writer Elizabeth Luiza MacKenzie, aka Morag Murray Abdullah. Saira Shah traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s. In The Storyteller’s Daughter she recounts what she saw in the 1990s: “People were starving. One woman crept out in a lull in the fighting. She was caught by a gang of former mujahidin and raped by twenty-two men for three days. Finally, she staggered home to discover that her children had died of hypothermia. . . . Bodies and body parts turned up everywhere in Kabul—stuffed down wells, in brick kilns, in abandoned buildings. At the Institute for Social Sciences, a group of armed men raped and killed sixty women.”

  Western feminists and journalists, both men and women, continue to cry out against the savage mistreatment of Afghan women—outraged by the chopped-off noses and ears, the acid-disfigured faces, the torture and murders in the name of honor. Paradoxically this signals that, despite years of being taught that everything is culturally relative, Westerners still understand that women’s rights should be universal. People everywhere are offended, perhaps even threatened, by how women are being treated in Afghanistan.

  Afghan (like Pakistani) girls are given in marriage to violent older men who already have a wife or two. In protest and in despair young girls are setting themselves on fire. Unlike the self-immolation of the Tunisian vendor, which presumably set off the wintry Arab Spring, the drastic and terrible actions of these young girls have had no ripple effect.

  In Afghanistan in-laws confined a daughter-in-law to the basement, where they tortured her for months in order to force her into prostitution. Recently an Afghan mother-in-law beheaded her daughter-in-law for refusing to become a prostitute.

  In 2010 Time magazine put beautiful but noseless eighteen-year-old Bibi Aisha on its cover—a poster girl for atrocities against Afghan women. With the help of the Taliban her husband, father-in-law, and other family members had chopped off her nose and ears. Women for Afghan Women sprang into action. They offered this young woman asylum, surgical repairs, and psychiatric treatment. The do-gooders soon ran into posttraumatic stress symptoms that are somewhat off our Western charts.

  But she is only one of millions of Afghan, and other central and east Asian, Indian, and Arab women in similar distress. Can we relocate them all? Or fund a Marshall Plan to educate Islamists about human rights—really?

  While I praise the courage that has led so many Westerners to try to help Afghans survive day by day, I am also frustrated beyond measure that so many of these humanitarians continue to blame America and the West, and refuse to understand the realities of indigenous gender and religious apartheid and the totalitarian evil we are facing.

  In my opinion America should not have stayed on in Afghanistan. I also thought that America should have cut into the enormous Saudi funding of worldwide propaganda and terrorism by either refusing to buy Saudi oil, taking over their oilfields, or investing in other sources of energy. I have been saying this for nearly a decade. The West has funded the war against itself by buying Arab oil. It is as simple and as tragic as that.

  Still, I am also shaken by the inability of many people to understand that evil and injustice truly exist and that one cannot win every single battle against them. I am even more shaken by the refusal of educated and progressive Americans to understand that the concept of a global caliphate is fueling thousands of Islamist terrorists, all of whom have explosives and some of whom have nuclear weapons.

  We are infidels, and as such our help is feared and despised. The author Rajiv Chandrasekaran tells the story of a farmer who observed American do-gooders at work back in the 1950s, when Afghans and Americans were optimistically engaged in the Helmand River Project. The farmer had a “strange expression on his face.” When Dr. Abdul Kayeum, the head of the project, questioned him, here is what he said: “‘As I looked at the Americans the thought came to [me] that the land upon which they were standing was cursed because the infidel had touched the land’ . . . the farmer predicted that within twenty years, the entire Helmand Valley would be a wasteland because of the tinkering of the infidels.”

  In the context of this anti-infidel history, can Americans save the women and girls of Afghanistan?

  No, I fear we cannot. This pains me but passion must yield to reason. Yes, we can and should rescue girls
and women one by one and relocate them either within Afghanistan or externally; some groups are doing this. But we cannot rescue every woman in Afghanistan—or stem the tide of Islamist violence against civilians everywhere, not only in Afghanistan, without first defeating the Islamists ideologically, politically, economically, and militarily.

  Are we our sisters’ keepers? Yes, we are—theoretically, morally. But we cannot keep trying to do something that cannot be done. As outsiders we cannot save anyone so far away; indeed we cannot seem to save girls from honor-related violence right here in the West.

  There are many things we must and are beginning to do—in the West. Honor killings are being prosecuted here and long or life sentences are being handed down. However, America lags behind Canada and Europe in terms of arresting collaborators or accomplices, who are often women as well as men. We have not yet committed the resources necessary to rescue women who are at risk of being slain in an honor killing in America or who seek asylum here for this reason.

  Honor-related violence and gender apartheid are human rights violations and cannot be justified in the name of cultural relativism, tolerance, antiracism, diversity, religious custom, or political correctness.

  The battle for women’s rights is central to the battle for a Judeo-Christian, post-Enlightenment civilization. It is a necessary part of Western democracy, along with gay and lesbian rights, and freedom of speech, religion, and dissent. Here, then, is exactly where the greatest battle of the twenty-first century is joined.

  In 2002 Rory Stewart, an author and member of the British Parliament, walked on foot from Herat to Kabul; he wrote a wonderful book about his travels, The Places in Between. Stewart has said, many times, “Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons—doing ‘whatever it takes’ and ‘whatever it costs’—we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don’t have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.” In 2012 Stewart wrote, “Foreigners have not forged a political solution, and now can’t.”