Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  The Journal would never have endorsed a political figure who proposed denying civil liberties to Jews, Christians, or any other religious group, and even Rago seemed uneasy with her opinions, writing that he could understand why some people found Ayaan “disturbing or even objectionable.” Still, he rallied to her defense, concluding that “Society, after all, sometimes needs to be roused from its slumbers by agitators who go too far so that others will go far enough.”

  “In person, she is modest, enthralling,” Rago wrote. “Intellectually, she is fierce, even predatory.” She was known as a champion of free speech, but she urged him and other Westerners to punish Muslims even for peacefully expressing their antipathy to the West. She wrote in Newsweek that veiled Muslim women who were harassed got what they deserved. “To every woman who decides to walk out the door looking like Batman and then complains of being ridiculed, I say, you are inviting it. Bear it or shed it.” In the New York Times she urged the West to defend its “honor” against Muslim students who had burned effigies of Salman Rushdie and Queen Elizabeth II after the queen knighted Rushdie. “The West,” she said, “should join together to vigorously defend its symbols and civilization that, with all its flaws, still offers the best life to the most people.”

  Just what the essence of that civilization was remained unclear, except that it did not and could not include Islam. Democracy itself and even the rule of law were secondary, in her view. She argued in the Los Angeles Times that the European Union should stop demanding that Turkey place its army under the control of its elected government as a condition of admission to the European Union. Since Turkish voters had made the mistake of electing a moderately Islamic government, she seemed to be saying, they had lost the right to control their army.

  She maintained that Iraq was better off since the U.S. invasion, though it was becoming clear that more than 100,000 Iraqis had been killed and that Islamists were gaining rather than losing power there. Nor did she respond to studies like the one published in 2009 by the British researchers Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, What Kind of Liberation?, showing that women’s rights in Iraq had been set back for decades. Instead, she pushed tirelessly for the Bush administration to attack Iran. “Talking to Iran is a sheer waste of time,” she told Reason magazine in a long interview with Rogier van Bakel published in October 2007. The West should be fighting Iran, and the United States and Europe would have to keep fighting until “Islam, period,” was defeated.

  “We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot?” van Bakel asked, seemingly caught off guard. “In concrete terms, what does that mean, ‘defeat Islam’?”

  “I think that we are at war with Islam,” Ayaan replied, “and there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, ‘This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.’ There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.”

  “Militarily?” van Bakel asked.

  “In all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed,” Ayaan answered.

  Her prescription was the opposite of what the leaders of Iran’s burgeoning human rights movement—including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and the journalist and former political prisoner Akbar Ganji—were urging. Earlier in the year, the diminutive Ebadi had told the Italian Web site Reset DOC what secular Muslims in Holland had been saying for a long time: that Ayaan and others who called Islam incompatible with human rights simply gave license to the Islamists.

  “Intellectuals like Ayaan Hirsi Ali play into the mullahs’ hands,” Ebadi said. “They end up presenting Muslims with an ultimatum: either accept Islam, and with it all the injustices which you are suffering, or abandon the religion of your fathers in favor of democracy. It is not fair to force such a decision. I propose another way—that Islam be interpreted in a way which allows for democracy.”

  Ebadi had been warning since 2004 that a U.S. attack on Iran would be a disaster for women’s rights. “When a society is in danger of attack, its government feels itself authorized to limit civil liberties in order to strengthen national security,” she told Reset DOC. “This has always been true, and the case of Iran is no exception.”

  In the end, the Bush administration did not attack Iran. Its credit with the Pentagon was running low, and in a National Intelligence Estimate released at the end of 2007, the CIA and its associated agencies reported that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The estimate undermined a key argument that the administration had made for embarking on a third war against a Muslim country. Under the military command of General David Petraeus and with the political guidance of Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. “surge” in Iraq was beginning to have an effect. But just as Iraq seemed headed toward relative stability, the Taliban made a comeback in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The military warned Bush that the United States couldn’t handle another war.

  The military attitude taking root was in many ways the opposite of the administration’s initial approach—and not just toward Iraq but also toward the war on terror. One key to the new strategy was to avoid, at all costs, defining the conflict as a war against Islam. Instead, the United States needed to emphasize the differences among Muslims rather than to blur them and to protect Muslims willing to abide by democratic rules against other Muslims intent on ruling by violence.

  It has yet to be seen whether the United States is capable of stabilizing governments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. But the new strategy in Iraq, which was put together partly by people at AEI, did allow the neocons to avoid or postpone the meltdown that they had helped start. The new strategy also meant that, even as Ayaan was becoming widely known as a commentator on the Muslim world, those in Washington actually charged with policy making toward Muslims had already stopped listening to her type of advice.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Umme Hassan, the headmistress of the female seminary connected to the Lal Mosque, which the former spy Khalid Khawaja had recommended I visit, embarked with her students on a campaign against “vice” in Islamabad. Dressed in black cloaks and face veils, this “burka brigade” prowled the capital terrorizing the owners of CD shops, burning “un-Islamic” videos, ordering female drivers to wear Islamic dress, and condemning the “sexually immoral” policies of the Pakistani government.

  The students had already occupied a children’s library. And in June 2007, they kidnapped seven Chinese women working at a massage parlor that the madrassa girls claimed was really a brothel.

  Musharraf’s government ignored the vigilantes for months, while officials such as Ijaz ul-Haq enlisted Khawaja to negotiate. But the Lal Mosque leaders refused to back down, and with support from jihadi groups and even al-Qaeda they seemed determined to undermine the government. Finally, on July 10, government troops attacked the mosque. The government reported afterward that 102 people had been killed. The militants claimed that more than a thousand men, women, and children had burned to death. The whole capital city could hear the explosions.

  Like everyone else in Pakistan, Aafia’s former husband, Amjad, followed the dramatic news. He could only wonder what Aafia must be thinking. Umme Hassan, after all, had become the sort of national symbol of jihad that his ex-wife had aspired to be. Amjad had felt a few months earlier, after Chief Justice Chaudhry had ordered the government to report on her case, that he might learn where she and the children were. But before the law could take its course, Musharraf had suspended the judge, ending Chaudhry’s inquiries.

  Indirect evidence later surfaced that Aafia may somehow have been involved in the disastrous insurrection. At any rate, she told the FBI that she and M
ufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani had had a terrible falling out over what had happened at the Lal Mosque. She claimed that the mufti had blamed her for the disaster—though I wonder if he said such a thing or if he simply meant that angry female rebels like her were to blame. Aafia denied it, claiming darkly that she had been “caught in the game of the American-Israeli-Russian alliance” and that an “Indian agent” had incited the fervor at the madrassa. Among the papers later found on Aafia was a flier urging Pakistanis to recognize the injustice of Musharraf’s decision to attack. “When those in charge repeatedly failed to fulfill their duties, then is providing shelter to raped women, helping the downtrodden, providing speedy justice, closing down a couple of brothels without causing harm—are these ‘crimes’ per se? And if so, are they so great, that their punishment is death?”

  The storming of the Lal Mosque became a turning point for Pakistan. The long-standing alliance between the Deobandi jihadis and the military seemed to break down. Many of the militant Pakistanis in Waziristan and on the border with Kashmir had had young relatives in the shattered mosque, and they began attacking the army in revenge. In the five years after Jaish-e-Muhammad had organized Pakistan’s first suicide bombing in 2002, the country had suffered twenty-two such attacks. But after the Lal Mosque disaster, suicide bombers carried out fifty-six attacks, killing 2,729 Pakistanis in just five months. Most of them were orchestrated by two groups associated with KSM and al-Qaeda, namely Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

  In theory, Musharraf might have looked to Pakistan’s secular middle class for support. But the country’s professionals were up in arms over his suspension of the chief justice. The United States tried to prop him up by working out a compromise in which Benazir Bhutto would return from exile and govern with him. After months of negotiations, Bhutto returned on October 19. A joyous parade in Karachi welcomed her home. Then suicide bombers set off two huge truck bombs, killing 139 people and barely missing the former prime minister. Bhutto would write in her posthumously published memoir that she thought a longtime jihadi named Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a man with close ties to the Deobandi establishment, had organized that bombing.

  President Musharraf declared martial law and placed the chief justice under house arrest. Then on December 27, Bhutto, the first woman elected to lead a Muslim country, was murdered in a second attack, at a rally in Rawalpindi. Within hours, Musharraf said that telephone intercepts showed that Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of a new group in Waziristan calling itself the Pakistani Taliban, was to blame. Al-Qaeda also tried to take credit: “We have terminated America’s most precious asset, who had vowed to defeat the mujahideen.” But a yearlong UN investigation later determined that Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment also probably played a role in Bhutto’s murder.

  The glamorous Harvard graduate, who had inspired Aafia’s mother to send her abroad to study, was dead. And now thousands of Pakistani women were competing to become that other kind of leader, the one that Aafia dreamed of resurrecting: the strong mujahida who dared to stand up for Islam as had the Prophet’s wives, “mothers of the believers.”

  But the Deobandi clerics and officers who had formerly applauded such radicals had grown angry. The women of the Lal Mosque had gone too far. It was said that women created dissension, and that was what those women had done: they had divided the military from its longtime allies, the jihadis.

  Perhaps Aafia fell out with her secret government protectors over her support for the jihadi women. In any case, toward the end of 2007, she appears to have decided to leave Pakistan.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Dutch government had agreed to fund Ayaan’s protection when she left for Washington. But the Ministry of Justice soon warned her that if she planned to stay in America she would have to start paying for her own bodyguards.

  The Hague had spent $3 million a year to hire a private U.S. firm to guard her while she lived in the United States and traveled the world to promote her book, and the Dutch didn’t want to keep paying now that she was neither a public official nor a resident of Holland. Dutch officials also doubted that she required so much protection in the United States. Unlike Salman Rushdie, they argued, Ayaan had never been threatened by a head of a state or even by a particular religious or political group, only by an amorphous collection of individuals, several of whom had been tried and imprisoned. Nor did she stand out in the United States as she had in Holland, where she was the most famous black woman in a country with very few of them.

  Soon the ministry refused to pay for her travel by armored car, and it asked her to pay to maintain the alarm and video systems it had installed in her apartment. Ayaan complained—and was furious when she heard the ministry had made its decision without asking the FBI to evaluate the threat against her.

  In December 2006, the Dutch justice minister, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, informed Ayaan by letter that payment for her two armed bodyguards would end in July. “While you are living in the U.S. the Dutch government has no responsibility for your protection,” Ballin wrote. Not long after that, Ayaan received what Dutch security officials considered credible death threats. The minister extended her protection. But he warned that payments would stop on October 1, 2007.

  Ayaan refused to accept it. She said she still felt unsafe and that the Liberal Party and other officials had never told her she would forfeit her guards if she moved to Washington. In a tense meeting in the Netherlands, she told the ministry that even her American guards underestimated the danger to her life. She said they had once let her ride in a taxi alone, even though many taxi drivers in Washington were Eritreans or Somalis who might recognize her.

  The officials retorted that she needed a psychiatrist more than she needed guards, and they volunteered to get her an appointment with one at the University of Amsterdam. Ayaan coldly declined, telling them, according to the minutes of the meeting, that “if she were in an emotional mood, she would talk with a good friend.”

  The U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, whom Ayaan had first met at the Time gala in 2005, put her on the fast track to get a coveted green card that let her stay and work in the United States. But not even Rice could change the law barring the U.S. government from providing private citizens with protection beyond ordinary police services.

  Ayaan made no plans for Holland’s impeding cutoff. When October 1 arrived, she seemed stunned to discover that her guards were gone. She flew to the Netherlands to fight the decision from a safe house, complaining to reporters that she had been forced to cancel several speaking engagements.

  Her friends accused the Dutch, in extreme terms, of abandoning her to Muslim fanatics. Leon de Winter was quoted in the October 3 New York Times as saying, “Canceling Ayaan’s bodyguards is a death sentence.” Christopher Hitchens in Slate compared the government’s refusal to pay for guards to the abandonment of Srebrenica’s Muslims by Dutch peacekeepers and the subsequent massacre of eight thousand Bosnian boys and men and the ethnic cleansing of more than twenty-five thousand refugees in 1995. Anne Applebaum, also in Slate, called the Dutch decision “a truly fundamental turning point, maybe even a test, for that part of the world which is known as the West.” And in a piece for the Los Angeles Times, Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie argued that Ayaan might be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. “There is not a person alive,” Rushdie and Harris wrote, “more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted here in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.”

  None of those overwrought arguments changed the Dutch government’s mind. In the Netherlands, Ayaan’s once-potent symbolism had evidently lost its charge.

  Applebaum claimed that The Hague had withdrawn its protection because “many in Holland find her too loud and too public in her condemnation of radical Islam.” This was not the case. Some Dutch citizens did think that Ayaan went too far in condemning Islam in general. Ayaan herself, of course, had rejected the distinction betwe
en Islam and radical Islam. But her beliefs had nothing to do with the government’s decision.

  Ayaan’s old friend and former Liberal Party colleague Geert Wilders, for example, condemned Islam even more loudly than Ayaan did. Wilders had left the Liberals to form his own political party, centered solely on opposition to Islam. He was also making a movie saying that the Quran ought to be banned. The Dutch prime minister and the entire government opposed Wilders’s film project, which they feared would lead to attacks on Dutch citizens and businesses abroad. Yet the government continued to provide Wilders with guards twenty-four hours a day. It also provided guards for five other Dutch critics of Islam, including several private citizens. But Ayaan’s case was different: the government didn’t want to set the precedent of guarding private citizens who lived outside Holland.

  The media attacks by Ayaan’s friends only alienated her further from the Dutch. In an article called “Friends of Ayaan Heckle the Netherlands,” the newspaper Eindhoven Dagblad noted with sour amusement that the same neoconservatives who mocked the Dutch welfare state were now demanding that Holland spend millions of euros to provide Ayaan with a level of security overseas that the U.S. government refused to provide its own citizens even inside the United States. Other articles asked why—if Ayaan was planning to live permanently in the United States and was “filled with great pride and gratitude” to be an immigrant there, as she had told the magazine of the U.S. immigration service, she didn’t ask the United States to protect her.

  The Dutch government said that it would continue to guard her in Holland. But public distaste was clearly rising, and Prime Minister Balkenende advised her to return to the United States and take responsibility for her own safety. The advice prompted Ayaan to comment bitterly that Balkenende would be personally responsible “if anything goes wrong.”