She is not alone. With the battle against the Taliban entering its final rounds, Afghanistan’s women are moving from shadows to substance. After nearly a quarter century of relentless war, they outnumber Afghan men by a ratio of roughly three to two. But even that figure doesn’t do justice to their importance to the country’s next phase. Throughout the long war, it has been the women who have been responsible for food, shelter and other basic human needs. A generation of men has grown up with few skills but fighting, and they have no idea how to function in a peacetime society. “Women are the key to rebuilding the social fabric,” says Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). “Men–especially Afghan men–are disconnected from the everyday realities of securing shelter, food, water and education. Without women’s input, the cycle of war and broken communities will continue.” If the massive project of transforming Afghanistan into a functioning, viable state is to succeed, its women will inevitably have to take the lead.
That might not be obvious from the makeup of the country’s new interim government, appointed last week in Bonn. The 30-member “executive council,” scheduled to take power in Kabul on Dec. 22, does include two women. But it remains dominated by members of the Northern Alliance, whose brief, bloody rule caused many Kabul residents to welcome the arrival of the Taliban in 1996. In the Loya Jirga, the national “great council” that will meet six months from now to lay the foundations of a permanent government, some 100 out of 700 seats are reserved for women. Yet even then, most of the leadership positions are expected to remain in the hands of the warlords and tribal chieftains who control the most powerful of Afghanistan’s many factions.
Instead women will likely exert their greatest influence at the grass-roots level, where the true reconstruction has to take place. Experience in other massive development projects has shown that empowering women is critical to improving key indicators like education and primary health. That’s a tough proposition in a country where women have not been allowed to leave the house by themselves, let alone run rural electricification projects. But those years of unspeakable oppression and brutality have given Afghanistan’s women an enormous stake in creating and maintaining a peaceful society. “If chaos erupts again, women united cannot be so easily pushed back into the house,” says Sippi Azerbaijani-Moghadam, an Afghanistan specialist with the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. The trick for the West may be to help Afghan women reassert their rights–and then stand back.
For starters: poverty, war and the Taliban have practically eradicated women’s health care in many rural areas. As a result, Afghanistan’s maternal mortality rate is second only to Sierra Leone’s. For every 1,000 live births, 17 women die of pregnancy-related medical complications. One quarter of all children die before their fifth birthday. Yet, says Dr. Olivier Brasseur, a representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), “it is very difficult to get women to come to health clinics. It is not customary for them even to leave their homes.”
But patience and persistence can overcome such cultural taboos. At Jalozai, one of the most desperately poor Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, Brasseur and his team gradually won women’s trust by recruiting some of their campmates to carry out tent-to-tent surveys of health conditions. On the next visit to a given tent the recruits would bring needed medicines and relay health advice from Brasseur’s medical team. Within six months, Brasseur says, women had begun gathering for tea and conversation at a small tent set up by the UNFPA in the camp. Eventually he wants to set up a bigger tent where women can learn crafts and skills to help them become self-supporting.
Aid groups describe this kind of thing as “capacity-building.” It’s a matter of teaching women the vocational and administrative skills they need to take control of their own lives. For many Afghan women, that includes learning how to function in public after years of enforced seclusion. “We want to help women practice their public speaking, build their confidence and use language to secure their needs,” explains Ruchira Gupta, communications director of UNIFEM. “Then when banks reopen, for instance, women will know how to participate in the economy.” Down the road, the idea is to prepare a new generation of Afghan women to run for and hold political office.
Such work has a snowballing effect, particularly on the next generation. Before they were banned from the classroom, women provided some 70 percent of the teachers in Afghanistan, and they tend to care more than their husbands about their kids’ education. Under the Taliban only 3 percent of Afghan primary-school-age girls attended class, compared with 39 percent of boys. (Among adults, only 13 percent of women and 33 percent of men can read.) Improving that number will take the rebuilding of many destroyed schoolhouses, to be sure, but also the rehiring of teachers and a commitment to make sure kids and teens attend class. It may also demand some revisions in the curriculum. “Boys are taught that two Kalashnikovs plus three Kalashnikovs equals five Kalashnikovs,” says Roya, who taught at a clandestine school for girls in Taloqan. “With girls, it’s apples.” Someone may need to start telling the boys about fruit instead of assault rifles if the cycle of violence is ever going to end.
At the village level, too, women have already been involved in the kind of small-scale projects that have an immediate impact. Azerbaijani-Moghadam tells of an irrigation canal dug by CARE International last summer in Vardak province, west of Kabul. No one used it. Local women finally told CARE representatives that the canal was useless. They would have washed clothes there, but its concrete sides were too weak to take the pounding of their wet laundry. CARE replaced the concrete with a hard slab of rock, and the project became a success.
This kind of progress is hard to quantify–and easily lost in the grand reconstruction schemes being bandied about already. International organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) have laid out a massive, phased rebuilding plan that could cost up to $10 billion. (By some estimates, simply removing the thousands of land mines scattered around the country could cost $500 million, more than the entire budget for rebuilding East Timor.) The first task would be to rush food aid to the estimated 3 million Afghans who face starvation this winter. Once the immediate humanitarian crisis is met, the building blocks of an economy will need to be laid. Jobs can be created by food distribution and infrastructure projects. Seeds and tools can be distributed to the 85 percent of Afghans who subsist on farming. An estimated 5 million refugees will need to be resettled, which in many cases will mean rebuilding destroyed homes and clearing mined land. In Kabul the rudiments of a state will need to be created, everything from a Ministry of Finance to a justice system.
An even greater challenge will be to pull Afghans together as one society, not as Pashtuns or Tajiks or Uzbeks. “The rate at which things move is the rate in here,” says UNDP chief Mark Malloch Brown, pointing at his brain, “not the rate at which you spend money or create infrastructure.” And here, say activists, women are crucial. Traditionally they are the community-builders. Already Afghan women–who suffered from the threat of rape during the mujahedin days, and then the medieval abuses of the Taliban–are among those calling most loudly for perpetrators of war crimes, past and present, to be held accountable. “Right now,” says Azerbaijani-Moghadam, “everyone is whitewashing past abuses by the Northern Alliance. But the atrocities will only continue unless these people are held accountable for what they did.”
Of course, Afghans don’t want foreigners telling them how to live. That will test the tolerance of aid workers trying to improve the status of women, particularly in the countryside, where many of the misogynous practices normally blamed on the Taliban have held sway for generations. Development groups can only try to be patient while they work as quietly as possible to change such attitudes. “You can do all sorts of fancy things in the area of nation-building,” says Malloch Brown. “But the fact is, you can’t do more and you can’t do it faster than Afghans will allow.” That’s not as dire a prospect as it may seem at first glance. It’s important to remember that Afghanistan’s women won the right to vote in 1919–a year ahead of the Americans.
Even under the Taliban, women struggled against their fate in myriad ways. They risked beatings and worse by secretly defying the Taliban’s dress code. Those little rebellions helped them maintain a sense of identity through the worst times. “We would wear makeup to work, even though our director docked our pay if he caught us,” recalls Nezifa Tabibzada, a female surgeon in Kabul. Habiba, a clandestine teacher in Taloqan, says she wore high heels under her burqa as she walked around town. She was careful to change into flats whenever she approached a Taliban checkpoint. “I felt like I was living underground,” she says.
Now she and others are adjusting to a newly visible role. Dr. Aziza Aziz, 29, the chief woman obstetrician at Taloqan Hospital, seems quite relaxed in the lounge of the women’s ward. She’s wearing a black leather jacket, earrings and silver nail polish. A thin scarf scarcely covers her long black hair. A male staff member quietly knocks on the door and asks her advice on a prescription for a patient. She quickly spells out his options. He nods vigorously and heads back to work. “Now that the Taliban have left, we have freedom, inside the hospital at least,” she says. “If they were still here, male doctors couldn’t come and talk to us, even for professional things.” Then she bursts out laughing. Now she’ll be the one telling men what to do.
