Afghanistan’s Struggle: How peace with the Taliban threatens to reverse the hard-won rights of women

---

Cover Photo: Women are celebrating the 8 of March in 2017 in the city of Kunduz, just a few kilometers away from Taliban’s frontline. [Photo By Qais Azimy]

---

After much anticipation, the United States and the Taliban signed a preliminary peace agreement on 29 February 2020 in Doha, Qatar. The deal has four main points: 1) A 14-month timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign troops from Afghanistan; 2) A Taliban guarantee that Afghan soil will not be used against the U.S. by any foreign or Afghan armed groups that would threaten the security of the U.S. and its allies; 3) A commitment from the U.S. to lift sanctions against the Taliban and work with the United Nations to lift its sanctions against the Taliban; 4) A commitment from the Taliban to have intra-Afghan negotiations after a prisoner swap of 5,000 Taliban prisoners in return for 1,000 Afghan security forces’ prisoners. 

Some believe this could take Afghanistan to lasting peace after 19 years of bloodshed, and it will end the war. But there is no doubt that a hard, long road lies ahead. 

Pashtana Durrani, 22, doesn’t remember a day of peace. Durrani sees herself a survivor of the war, and now a warrior in the battle for equality. When she reads the peace agreement, she thinks American negotiators have traded women’s rights for a political settlement. She is upset that women’s rights are largely ignored in the agreement and worries about her future in her country. Durrani believes women in Afghanistan have changed and she is confident the newly-educated generation will earn their rights: “Women wouldn’t be silent this time, women will fight back, so I believe in the women’s power, not the government or the Taliban.”

Durrani was born a refugee in Pakistan in 1998.  She was three years old when the Taliban regime collapsed in Afghanistan and her family returned home when she was 19. All she remembers is that her father used to tell her that their family had left Afghanistan because it was not safe to live under the Taliban. Durrani started five digital schools in 2019 which now teach around 900 students in Afghanistan. She is one of the country’s best-known female human-rights activists. 

Durrani knows better than many the need for the peace and the dark side of the endless war. “Our community lost around 1,700 people to the Taliban, about two weeks ago I lost a cousin, but I’m honest, I cannot meet more widows, I cannot talk to more orphans, I just want them to go to school and have peace,” she says.

Durrani’s parents are from Kandahar, a southern Afghan province where the Canadian army were based from 2006 to 2011. Canada lost 158 soldiers in Afghanistan, and more than 1,800 Canadians were wounded. The war cost Canada at least C$18 billion. This was all done in the name of democracy and women’s rights. Canada still has many aid projects in Afghanistan.  Kandahar is also known as the birthplace of the Taliban movement in 1994 and its power base to this day. Historically, it was one of the most culturally significant cities of the Pashtuns, the biggest ethnic group in Afghanistan. 

Durrani is tired of war but she doubts the Taliban could bring her the peace that she wants; for her, “peace is freedom” and there is no way to go back to the life of women before 2001. When the Taliban were in power – from 1996 to 2001 – women were prevented from attending school entirely. Women were banned from leaving the house without being accompanied by a close male relative such as a father, brother, or husband. They were denied health care delivered by men; with women forbidden from study, health care was virtually inaccessible. Women were not allowed to enter politics or speak publicly. Listening to music or watching T.V. was prohibited, not only for women but for men, too. 

Restrictions on women went even further. They were banned from exposing their skin in public, even their faces. Anyone who would dare to break this rule would be publicly whipped. It became criminal for women to venture on to their private balconies. Some residents of Kabul were forced to paint their windows so that women inside the home would not be seen. Restrictions on freedom of expression also applied to men. Males were ordered to wear Islamic clothes and a cap. Men were not allowed to shave or trim their beards, and they also had to attend prayers in mosques. It was an oppressive time for women especially, but this affected society as a whole. 

Over the last hundred years, Afghan rulers have tried to reform the constitution and laws to give women more rights and freedoms. This has been met with resistance between the urban and rural classes; reforms have often been viewed as a minority urban practice imposed on a majority rural population where it has always been predominantly male-controlled.

At various moments in Afghanistan’s history, the misuse of religion has been a major impediment to women’s freedom of expression. This reversal has been felt especially strongly in Afghanistan because of its unique interpretation in the land; many even argue that the rights that Islam has given to females are held back from Afghan women. Any moves to strengthen the feminist movement wither because of contradictions between religion and custom. 

It has long been this way. In 1919, King Amanullah Khan tried to enhance the notion of freedom by introducing the ideology of Islamic modernism to Afghan society which contained aspects of the Western lifestyle. Khan’s liberal movements angered religious circles and the country witnessed a series of violent uprisings by many tribes and religious clerics who deemed modernization to be “un-Islamic.”

King Amanullah Khan’s wife, Queen Soraya Tarzi, was born in Syria into a well-known Afghan family. She was educated by her father, Sardar Mahmud Beg Tarzi, who was an Afghan leader and intellectual. Queen Soraya for the first time encouraged Afghan women to get an education and opened the first school for girls in Kabul. Along with her mother, she founded the country’s first women’s magazine in 1927, called Ershad-I-Niswan, (Guidance for Women).In 2020, Timemagazine called Queen Soraya Tarzi one of the 100 most influential women of the past century in the world. The Queen was known throughout the world for her progressive ideas, including in Afghanistan.

Soraya was also the first Afghan woman to speak publicly about women’s rights, and was the first woman to take the bold step of appearing in public without the veil or the hijab. This was all part of King Amanullah Khan’s modernism, but religious clerics protested the king’s reforms and started an uprising against him that led to violence. Unfortunately for them, King Amanullah and his queen were forced to leave the country; his rule came to an end in 1929 and the short gains of Afghan women were abruptly erased. Today, once again, there is fear of history being repeated and Afghanistan being abandoned again, especially for Afghan women.

Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesman, said in a telephone interview that Afghan women should not be concerned “because we are not bringing anything new or a man-made law – we will give them the rights that Islam has given them.” He insisted that women under the Taliban government would be allowed to get education on the subjects that Islam permits them, but under the condition that “women should study and work in separate buildings from the men. Women should have their exclusive transportation arrangements.”  

The Taliban are hoping to re-establish an Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan (an Islamic state based on Sharia law) after the U.S leaves. For Mujahid, having a government based on Sharia law is what they have been fighting for over the past two decades and they will not compromise on that. “Every citizen, men and women, will be given the rights based on Sharia law. Our people are Muslim and they would be pleased with the rights that Islam has given them,” said Mujahid. 

That is exactly what worries Shahrazad Akbar, head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, who says that Taliban believe “their interpretation of Islam is the only right interpretation, and everyone should obey that.” Akbar was one the first women who met with the Taliban for the peace talks in July 2019 in Doha, Qatar. Akbar was working in the Afghan Government, but she had to participate in a “personal capacity” in order to circumvent the Taliban’s rejection, because the Taliban had refused to talk to the Afghan government, calling it a “puppet regime” of the U.S.

In the opening statement of that meeting, the Taliban offered some assurances on women’s rights. But that did not satisfy Akbar, who called them “very vague. As a human rights activist, that is very concerning to me.” According to Akbar, the Taliban were talking about human rights and women’s rights within the Islamic framework, without specific detail of their current position on those important aspects that many Afghans are concerned about. They did not even give an example of how they will treat women if they run the government again. “Different Islamic countries have different ways of dealing with women’s Islamic rights. So where do they [Taliban] exactly stand? Is that the Saudi Arabian model? Is that the Iranian model? Is it the Indonesian model? What is it closest to? They weren’t very specific,” said Akbar.

For Akbar, women could be the most vulnerable group and the first victims of these peace talks, because she does not believe that the Taliban have changed from the past: “The fact is that they [Taliban] genuinely in their worldview think that woman are secondary citizens, women are secondary people, women are less human than men. Not only they think that way, they are proud they think that way, and they think that’s the only right way to think because they think that’s what the religion says, that women have less dignity than men,” said Akbar.

Afghan women officially gained equal status under the 1964 constitution, which declared that women, “without discrimination or preference, have equal rights and obligations before the law.” Among other things, this constitution guaranteed women “dignity, compulsory education and freedom to work.” The constitution also gave women the right to vote and allowed them to enter politics.

Under King Zahir Shah, during the “Decade of Democracy” between 1963 and 1973, many progressive reforms were introduced, which had a great impact on the life and role of women in Afghan society. In this way, Afghan women were now granted entry into modern society. Men were also making way for them to take their rightful place in multifaceted activities. Anyone in society who protested was jailed and challenged to substantiate their objections by providing positive Quranic proof – that is, direct Quranic verses as opposed to personal interpretations of the religious document.

King Zahir Shah was removed from power in a bloodless coup by Daoud Khan, the ex-Prime Minister of Afghanistan (1953-1963), who was also born into the royal family. He overthrew the kingdom of his first cousin, Mohammed Zahir Shah, and declared himself the first president of Afghanistan in 1973 with Soviet backing.

Over the years, an increasing number of educated women entered the government and the private sector. New jobs were created for women as administrators, judges, doctors, even parliamentarians. Women were also employed in factories, including ceramics, pharmaceuticals and housing construction. The direction was positive and steady, even though the numbers were small relative to the total female population. Still, the society as a whole made space for women. Another pioneering effort was seen in the preamble of the new Constitution of the Republic of Afghanistan of 1977. Article 27 stated that “all the people of Afghanistan, both women and men, without discrimination and privilege, have equal rights and obligations before the law.” 

Progress continued without further setbacks. As women became increasingly aware of the importance of their roles, they began to examine their opportunities as individuals rather than stereotypes or national symbols only in big cities. They fought to be released from the structures of family consensus and restrictions imposed by the family. This continues to be the dominant institution in Afghan society to this day.

Fawzia Koofi, a former Afghan Member of Parliament, was one of only two women at the Moscow peace talks with Taliban in May 2019 at President Hotel. The first thing that crossed her mind when she met the Taliban “was their brutality and their oppression of women in Afghanistan.” She observed that the Taliban faces reminded her of the regime when the Taliban were “beating up women, whipping women for not wearing the burqa in the streets of Kabul.” She said she had seen those scenes herself as a young girl living under the Taliban regime. 

Koofi agrees that there was a lack of clarity in Taliban statements in the meetings. According to Koofi, the opening statement from the Taliban was 14 minutes long; it was mainly to give the Taliban’s perspective on women’s rights, but at the end Koofi did not know “what is actually their definition of Islamic education or Islamic social and political participation of woman?” The Taliban claim that they support women’s rights under the Islamic Sharia, but Koofi says women have experienced the Taliban’s type of women’s rights during Taliban rule of the country. Simply put, the Taliban are not offering anything new.

Akbar and Koofi, the two women who met the Taliban for peace talks, were trying to say that Afghanistan has changed. “The current Afghanistan with all the transformation in terms of media, social media, the younger educated generation – all of these indicate that the future government should be a political settlement based on the will of the people,” said Koofi. She added that for the new Afghanistan, another Taliban government (Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan) is out of the question. 

---

Cover Photo: Thousands of people, mainly women and children, were forced to leave their homes due to unforgiving fighting between the Taliban and the U.S. backed Afghan government forces in May 2017 in Northern Kunduz province. [Photo by Qais Azimy] 

---

To negotiate an end to America’s longest war, President Donald Trump appointed Zalmay Khalilzad special envoy. He asked him to negotiate a deal with the Taliban and pave the way for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Khalilzad, 70, is an Afghan-born veteran American diplomat. He came to the United States as an immigrant. He became the diplomatic face of two of America’s wars in recent history, serving as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq after the invasions. His last job was as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. That made him the highest-ranking Muslim in the U.S. government by the time he left the government.

Khalilzad spent months trying to negotiate a preliminary peace deal with the Taliban from the comfort of five-star hotels in Doha, Qatar – far from the Afghan villages where men, women, and children were dying in record numbers. According to Brown University, from 2001 to October 2019, an estimated 157,000 people were killed in Afghanistan, 43,074 of them civilians.

A fancy ceremony was held at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha – another five-star resort – overlooking the Gulf where the Taliban and the U.S. peace agreement was signed. It appeared that the U.S. priorities have changed and that the West in general is not that concerned about the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women; there was no reference to women’s issues in the agreement at all. After the Taliban regime fell in 2001, the world echoed glowing stories of the change for Afghan women. In post-Taliban Afghanistan, women could work freely outside their homes; girls could go to a school and they enjoyed other basic rights they were denied by the Taliban during their rule. One of the main narratives that fostered public support in U.S. and the West for the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was women’s rights. This time, the future of Afghan women was not on the American agenda for its peace talks with the Taliban.

Graeme Smith is an award-winning author-journalist who spent a long time covering the war in Afghanistan. He has followed the talks closely and has inside knowledge of the meeting between the Taliban and the U.S.  His understanding is that these talks were more focused on issues that have effects outside Afghanistan: “The Taliban and the United States consider the status of women to be a domestic issue internal to Afghanistan, and not an international issue,” says Smith. However, Smith believes that the international community will have some financial leverage over the future government in Afghanistan. “Most of the money that supports the Afghan government today is donors’ money and most of the donors will have legal, regulatory, and political restrictions to financially backing any government that doesn’t respect women’s rights,” he says.

For Smith, predicting the shape of the future government is impossible, but he knows that it will be hard for any future regime not to listen to Western countries. He says the Taliban understand that risk, and if the Taliban run the future Afghan government, they know that they need to have the right answers on women. “There’s a risk that if the Taliban try to impose harsh rules on women, on the media, and on the minorities, Afghanistan could end up as the North Korea of South Asia, diplomatically isolated and cut off on trade ties.”

Terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 forced the American-led military campaign to overthrow the Taliban regime in a matter of months. Years of barbaric treatment of women by the Taliban soon topped the list of everything that was wrong with the Taliban regime. World leaders promised a new chapter for Afghans, particularly for women: a bright future, equal rights and better conditions for Afghan women by the West and the United Nations.

A keen awareness of the conditions in Afghanistan grew among Western leaders, a number of whom publicly addressed them between October and December 2001. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in October 2001: “To the Afghan people we make this commitment: The conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the outside world has done so many times before.” In a radio address to the nation in November 2001, U.S. First Lady Laura Bush said: “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women. Join our family in working to ensure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan.” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, on November 19, 2001, said: “The recovery of Afghanistan must entail a restoration of the rights of Afghan women; indeed, it will not be possible without them.” And, in a summit in Brussels on December 5, 2001, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: “There cannot be true peace and recovery in Afghanistan without a restoration of the rights of women.” 

However, Donald Trump has called the war in Afghanistan “ridiculous” and claimed that he could easily win the Afghan war by “wiping out the country from the world map” but that he did not “want to kill 10 million people.” This is not how the Taliban see it. Their spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, declared the Taliban the winners of this war and believes that “heavy casualties and the high cost of war are unaffordable for Americans to continue this war…It’s not only the Americans who lost the war in Afghanistan, also the entire NATO countries who fought in this war have lost,” said Mujahid.

President Trump can use the peace agreement to bring home some of the 12,000 U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan so he can claim he has ended the war. American diplomats told The New York Times that number of U.S. forces will fall to around 8,600 by the end of June 2020. 

The Taliban’s deputy chief negotiator on peace talks, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, addressed a gathering of Taliban supporters in Doha in 2019. Marking the 100th anniversary of Afghanistan’s independence from Britain, Stanikzai said: “After 18 years of Jihad (holy war) against the Americans, today Americans are defeated with the help of God, and now they are taking the escape route. The battlefield where our Mujahideen, our lions, and our heroes in villages, in the mountains, they are attacking the enemy like a lion attacking a jackal.” Stanikzai added: “Accordingly, the Emir of the Faithful, the late Mullah Mohammed Omar when he was alive, decided that the Islamic Emirate’s political section should be based in Qatar and start its political activity from there. The only aim of this political activity was to open the door of negotiations with Americans.” His speech was more like a message of victory to their fighters in Afghanistan: “When Afghanistan gets liberated and the foreign forces leave, you have to enter the cities and towns in very modest ways and with compassion.” 

A personal note: I interviewed Mujahid on October 29, 2011, when I was working for Al Jazeera in Kabul. A massive Taliban suicide car bomb targeted an American military convoy in Kabul, killing 13 Americans and four Afghan civilians. That was the deadliest attack on Western forces during the 10-year period of the Afghan war at the time. It was the peak of NATO’s presence in Afghanistan with 140,000 foreign soldiers based in the country. I had to call the Taliban spokesman for reaction.  What made them think that they could win this war? Mujahid’s answer was short: “Foreigners have the watch, we have the time.” I was not convinced by his logic at the time, but now almost 10 years later, it makes sense. 

According to a BBC study released in 2018, “about 15 million people – half the population – are living in areas that are either controlled by the Taliban or where the Taliban are openly present and regularly mount attacks.” The report also notes that “more than 8,500 civilians were killed or injured in the first three-quarters of 2017, the vast majority of Afghans die in insurgent’s violence, but civilians often suffer the most from the military campaign, with U.S.-led forces fighting back. Civilians are affected by both the ground and air military operations.” 

The Afghan government has been claiming for years that the Taliban leaders have safe havens in Pakistan. Pakistan is known for being the main player of the proxy war, said Sediq Sediqi, the Afghan president’s spokesman in an interview. 

In May 2019 reporters from around the world came to Doha to cover the Taliban Peace Talks with the U.S. After months of negotiations between American negotiators led by Khalilzad and the Taliban, both sides signalled that they are very close to an initial peace deal for Afghanistan, perhaps in the coming days or weeks. Sources were telling Al Jazeera TV that a joint statement was ready to be signed reflecting an agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. on two issues – a rough timeline on U.S. forces withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban to give guarantees that Afghan soil will not be used against any foreign country by any extremist group. But the two sides were faced with a new deadlock; three sources (working for both Afghan and international outlets) involved in talks confirmed to Al Jazeera that the talks between the U.S. and the Taliban were stalled over disagreements on the Taliban’s title on the communiqué.

In the communiqué, the Taliban were insisting that they be referred to as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), which had been the name of the Taliban government before 9/11. The U.S. negotiator refused to the use the title in the joint U.S.-Taliban statement because if the U.S. agreed to call the Taliban ‘the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ it meant that it was negotiating with a government, not a group or a movement. For some, that would delegitimize the Afghan government in Kabul. 

For weeks, journalists have continued waiting for any development in the talks that could lead to the end of the Afghan War. Details of the negotiations were so secret that reporters waited hours to hear anything. Usually, word came through social media. For example, on May 2 Khalilzad tweeted: “Peace will require that we find common ground on four inter-connected issues: troop withdrawal, counter-terrorism assurances, intra-Afghan dialogue & negotiations, and reduction in violence leading to a comprehensive ceasefire. Nothing will be final until we agree on all four issues.”  

On the other hand, the Taliban spokesman in Doha, Suhail Shaheen, tweeted: “Talks between IEA and U.S. negotiation teams continued today as well to reach a final agreement on withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan and not allowing any one to use the soil of Afghanistan against any other country (a reference to Al Qaeda and the Taliban). This is crucial for other issues to be taken on.”

The talks were ongoing when, in a tweet, Trump canceled a secret meeting with the Taliban’s “major leaders” on September 8, 2019, at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. Afghans were shocked about its secrecy and the fact that the Taliban leaders were invited to Camp David. So many had seen the Taliban’s attacks that they could not understand why Trump was trying to negotiate with them. Almost three months after closing the talks, Trump visited American troops for Thanksgiving in Afghanistan. He announced the reopening of peace negotiations: “The Taliban wants to make a deal, and we’re meeting with them,” he said. 

The U.S. government calls this a peace negotiation, but the Taliban recognize it as the U.S. forces’ withdrawal negotiation. Amidst this complex diplomatic arm-wrestling, Afghan women are concerned that the world will abandon them again to the 1990s. Their fear is based on the Taliban’s history of imposing restrictions on women and their opposition to the education of girls during their six-year control of Afghanistan before 2001.

In December 2019, The Washington Post published a series called “The Afghanistan Papers.” The investigative reports were based on internal documents from the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. It revealed that “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable,” writes Craig Whitlock.

The Washington Post obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act.  The papers include hundreds of confidential interviews with key players involved in the U.S. war in Afghanistan. James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told interviewers for the papers, “we don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” adding in 2016, “we don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful, and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.” 

Many doubt the withdrawal of foreign troops will bring peace and stability to Afghanistan. It depends on the Afghan political settlement. The Taliban say they will bring peace to the country if “the occupation” ends from outside forces.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader and operational commander of the Taliban, wrote an opinion piece(“What We, the Taliban, Want”), published on Feb. 20, 2020 in The New York Times. “We are ready to work on the basis of mutual respect with our international partners on long-term peace-building and reconstruction. After the United States withdraws its troops, it can play a constructive role in the postwar development and reconstruction of Afghanistan,” he said.

 Haqqani is still classified as a terrorist by the United States. The U.S. government’s “Rewards for Justice” program is offering up to $10 million for information leading to his capture. He is also the commander of the Haqqani network, a sub-set of the Taliban organization that is responsible for dozens of deadly suicide bombings, kidnaping of foreign citizens, and hundreds of military operations against the U.S./NATO and Afghan security forces. Now Haqqani promises that they will work with other Afghan stakeholders to “build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity.”

But it will not be the end of the fight for everyone. The secrecy around the talks between the U.S and the Taliban created an atmosphere of doubt among some elite women in Afghanistan and it has turned into the Taliban’s campaign of resistance. These women want to send a simple message to the world that they don’t want to go back to the 1990s.

Farahnaz Forotan, 27, a journalist and women’s rights activist, has taken to social media with the hashtag #MyRedLine. She draws a line that the Taliban should not cross if they make peace with the U.S. and the Afghan governments. Thousands of Afghan women and men have joined her online campaign. It speaks about the freedoms and rights that she is not willing to give up “in the name of peace with the Taliban.” She says she wanted to let the Afghan and the international decision-makers know that “peace cannot be achieved at the cost of women’s rights and freedoms.” For her, another Taliban government is not acceptable, neither is the peace that cannot “bring social justice to victims of all those years; that peace won’t be a stable peace.”

The Afghan government was not involved either in the talks or on the final deal but they hope to lead the intra-Afghan negotiations. The government says they will include women in the peace talks to raise their voice for protecting their rights and “women’s rights remain the Afghan government’s red line in the peace talks” said Sediq Sediqi, the president’s spokesman. Sediqi does not believe that the Taliban have changed their approach to women’s rights. “[The] Taliban still launch deadly attacks on Afghan women and there is no girls’ school in the Taliban controlled areas,” said Sediqi. For him the female presence should not be symbolic at the negotiation table: they should be the voice of half of the population in the peace process. “Women are no longer the victims of decisions on the future of Afghanistan.” 

The U.S.-Taliban peace agreement signed in February states that the Taliban also agreed to have intra-Afghan negotiations after a prisoner swap of 5,000 Taliban prisoners in return for 1,000 Afghan soldiers by March 10, 2020. It “will be followed by intra-Afghanistan peace talks,” said U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a statement. After the deal with the U.S., the next stage for the Taliban is to sit down with the Afghan government and other Afghan stakeholders to discuss the political future of the country.

But the prisoner swap has been delayed as Afghan president Ashraf Ghani refused to release all 5,000 Taliban prisoners at once. Only 1,000 Taliban prisoners were freed by the Afghan government in March and 300 members of the Afghan soldiers by the Taliban, according to Sediq Sediqqi’s Twitter on Sunday, May 24. Meanwhile, President Ghani has started the process to release up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners as a “goodwill gesture.” Sediqqi said it’s because of the surprise announcement of a three-day ceasefire by the Taliban during the Eid al-Fitr holiday and he also said in a tweet that the decision to release the prisoners was taken “to ensure the success of the peace process.”  

 According to the United Nations, violence has led to increased casualties among civilians in April 2020.The Taliban were responsible for 208 civilian casualties last month – 25 per cent more than April 2019 – and 172 civilian casualties caused by Afghan security forces in April, an increase of 38 per cent, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in a statement.

Mujib Mashal, senior correspondent for The New York Times in Afghanistan, visited a group of Taliban fighters in eastern Laghman Province.  “On one hand it’s very clear that they’re tired, they’ve lost a lot of men, that one unit that we visited lost half of their men when they lose 80 people, 90 people from 180.” According to Mashal that means every family in that small community has lost someone. This “sense of tiredness” cannot go on forever. “But on the other hand, this sense [that] we suffer so much [is] because we’ve lost so much. We deserve a full Islamic government, we deserve to undo the political system that is in place,” said Mashal in an interview.

Mashal, in an article published on May 26, 2020, says “a grim history looms. The last time an occupying power left Afghanistan — when the U.S.-backed Mujahideen insurgency helped push the Soviets to withdraw in 1989 — guerrillas toppled the remaining government and then fought each other over its remains.”

As the Cold War came to an end and the Soviet Union collapsed, the picture in Afghanistan was a bloody one. To those on the outside, war seemed to have ended with the fall of Kabul’s Moscow-backed communist regime. In reality, this was the dawn of a new era of violence and human-rights violations. Government-enforced oppression against women started in earnest. 

By 1992, 14 years of war had left nearly two million Afghans dead and disrupted the lives of millions of others. Soon the United States and other backers of the Afghan War lost interest in restoring order to Afghanistan. Having funded one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies, they all left the Afghan factions to sort out their differences among themselves. 

Kabul was invaded by heavily-armed factions, who saw themselves as untouchable following the fall of the Soviet powers. They soon started fighting for power. The so-called Islamic Republic became paralyzed by a full-blown civil war from 1992 to 1996. The alliances and hostilities between Mujahideen factions were based mainly on personal interests, many of which were short-lived.

Within a few years, the infrastructure of the country was destroyed, Kabul was razed, and the extremist activity brought out gross human rights and women’s rights violations.

“In Mujahideen-controlled territories, girls were often forbidden from attending school, and women from working outside the home,” according to a report by Ashley Jackson for Oxfam International in 2009. “In disputed territories, the threat of sexual violence or ‘fear of dishonor to the family’ by the Mujahideen forced most families to marry off their girls at an early age,” according to Jackson. The streets of Kabul were war zones. Every corner of the country was controlled by a different Mujahideen group. Despite all of these risks, some women continued to work outside their homes and pursue education. They were employed mainly as teachers and doctors.

Fawzia Koofi, the ex-Afghan Member of Parliament, recalls that she was 17 and a high-school student when the Afghan Civil War started. “My mother was afraid, like many mothers would have been in that situation,” she says, remembering how her mother would come out of the apartment and wait for her to return home: “On occasions when I would be late, she used to tell me: ‘Even if this education makes you become the president of the country, I don’t want you to be that… I want you to be alive.’” 

According to a report by Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) which promotes women’s rights and secular democracy, many of the misogynistic rules that the Taliban practiced were formulated and practiced by Mujahideen political parties in power during the same time span of the Afghan Civil War. 

Jane Ferguson, an award-winning international journalist and Special Correspondent for PBS News Hour, traveled with the Taliban for a day in November 2019 to make a documentary, even having lunch with the Taliban fighters. “They just had me sit at the end of the room, a little bit away from them, but the fact that we ate together at all was surprising,” said Ferguson. They were friendly to her – even cooperative. “I was surprised that they were so willing to stand and look me in the eye for interviews,” said Ferguson. She had interviewed extremists in the Arab world where it’s much more challenging for her, but she thinks it’s because “I’m kind of [a] strange third sex as a foreign woman, for them.” 

On that all-day trip in the Taliban controlled area, “I never saw women in public; like, grown women in the street,” said Ferguson. She asked the Taliban repeatedly to visit a girls’ school, so the Taliban took her to a school. There, she saw three little girls. “They cannot have been a day over 10 years old, in a school that was a small Madrasa (religious school),” she said. “There wasn’t like a big class going on. So it was my impression that the girls in this area, small girls, were allowed to go to religious school, but weren’t going to regular school,” said Ferguson.

This is what concerns Afghan women: Taliban-style girls’ education and their version of women rights. Taliban fighters control more territory now than at any other point since the United States bombed them out of power in 2001. The Taliban are hoping to re-establish an Islamic Emirate (an Islamic state based on Sharia law).  The current peace talks with the Taliban may bring an end to America’s longest war.

But will it bring peace to Afghan women? 

---

Cover Photo: After weeks of fighting around the city of Kunduz, schooles reopened. May 2017. [Photo by Qais Azimy]

---

The Western world poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. One of the undisputed success stories of the war is said to be broadening freedoms of Afghanistan’s women. Under the Taliban, women were not allowed to go to school. Today more than 3.5 million girls are enrolled in school, and there are many programs promoting women’s rights and their freedoms. A significant number of Afghan women who had experienced the worst form of oppression started working as women’s rights activists soon after the fall of the Taliban, often supported by Western-funded NGOs. And with support from the international community, the Afghan women’s condition has improved significantly over the past 18 years. 

The rise of an educated generation reached every aspect of social life – from political leaders to entrepreneurs. Millions of women have voted in national elections, most of them for the first time in their life. Of 249 parliamentary seats, the Afghan Constitution of 2004 guarantees a minimum of 68 seats, or over 25 per cent, for women. Women hold are ministers or deputy ministers, and a number of women serve as ambassadors. A new Ministry of Women’s Affairs was created as part of the government cabinet, with departments throughout the country at the provincial level.

Women’s sports programs in Afghanistan were a favourite of Western funding; Afghanistan has a strong women’s soccer team and women’s taekwondo team. Afghanistan now also has an Independent Human Rights Commission chaired by a well-known defender of women’s rights. 

The extent of female engagement has reached the highest level of government in the country today. According to a recent Crisis Group report, “women now hold 27 per cent of civil service jobs.” In the 2004 Afghan presidential election, a female medical doctor ran against former president Hamid Karzai. Her name is Massouda Jalal; she was the only female candidate. While she didn’t win, she later served as Minister of Women’s Affairs for Afghanistan.

Another success story in Afghanistan is the establishment of freedom of speech and free media. Scholars say that this platform was invaluable in raising and supporting women’s rights; a common observation in research papers and interviews on this subject is that Afghan media are the voice of the voiceless. “Media absolutely empower women in Afghan society today, especially in public campaigning processes where it is more acceptable for men to participate, so it can be difficult for women to campaign. Media, especially in the 2005 elections, gave women the opportunity to campaign by giving them free access to the campaign,” said Peter Erben, a United Nations organizer of the Afghan election in 2005. 

“Media help dissolve gender and ethnicity boundaries” said Roya Rahmani, a Canada-based activist promoting women’s rights in Afghanistan. She believes Afghan media are particularly useful in fostering education and knowledge.“For example, by seeing women speaking in the parliament or a woman as an anchor on T.V., this builds confidence of women’s talents that have been missing for a long period of time.” 

Afghanistan was considered to have one of the freest media in the region among Iran, China and other central Asian countries. This is even more impressive considering how free media had been forbidden under the Taliban regime just 18 years ago. According to a 2016 Asia Foundation survey, Afghanistan had 174 radio stations, 83 private television stations and 22 state-owned provincial TV channels. Today these outlets effectively reach the country’s (estimated) population of 32.2 million.

Those achievements came at a high cost. The international community and the Afghans have paid in blood and treasure in Afghanistan for a prosperous and democratic country where women and human rights are respected. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan is said to be “the longest war in American history, a conflict that killed more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO soldiers and cost the U.S. taxpayers nearly $900 billion and left thousands of Afghans dead and millions more displaced.” 

With a power vacuum looming in the wake of the Taliban regime collapse in the last days of 2001, a group of prominent but underrepresented Afghans gathered in Bonn, Germany, to map out a path to forming a new national government. Coming mostly from the two main groups – the Northern Alliance who were fighting the Taliban in the north of the country, and the “Rome Group” representing exiled King Zahir Shah – they planned out a state where women wouldn’t be second-class citizens again.  The Bonn Accords of December 2001 articulated a three-stage process of political transition.

Hamid Karzai was chosen as chairman of the Interim Administration (I.A.), which operated for six months, at which point the second phase began. The I.A.’s duties included running the state in the short term and preparing to reform the judicial sector and civil service. The government was to temporarily operate under the 1964 Constitution, which called for equality between men and women, with no distinction between them. In the newConstitution that followed, the right to free education up to the undergraduate level, irrespective of gender, was established. 

Shahrazad Akbar, head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, is one of the few Afghan women who studied in the post 9/11 era in “Western” post-secondary institutions; she attended Oxford University in England and Smith College in the U.S. Akbar believes a lot has been done for the empowerment of women around Afghanistan over the past 18 years. In her view, access to political participation, health, and education have all increased for women, but she sees that a lot of work remains in some critical areas like access to justice, an important aspect of women’s rights. “For the first 15 or 16 years, there was a lot of investment in our justice sector, but a lot of it was misguided and for the most part a waste,” said Akbar.

For her, the years of fighting and instability in the country also disrupted access to services and justice. Akbar argues that the police force is corrupt, inefficient and unqualified for their roles. She says they do not have the required training or education, a significant number of them may get into the police force because of political connections and nepotism. All of this “again complicates woman’s access to justice, because women cannot trust the police, the police have harassed women, female police officers are not present in many places,” says Akbar. “Conflict and the increasing Taliban influence in parts of the country have unfortunately reversed some positive achievements and woman’s access to education.” 

In Fawzia Koofi’s journey to becoming a politician, she lived through civil war and the Taliban regime, rising to prominence after the collapse of Taliban rule. She was elected to the Afghan Parliament for the first time in 2005, and the following year she was elected deputy speaker of Parliament, the first woman in Afghanistan’s history to hold that position. Koofi says while the positive changes may seem significant compared to the Taliban’s dark ages, it still falls far behind the rest of the world. “We don’t have much freedom; right now Afghanistan is the worst country in the world to be a woman. So what freedom do we have?” asks Koofi. 

For Koofi, the achievements of the past 18 years have not erased the consequences of a darker chapter. “There are horrible cases of violence against women. If you look at the literacy rate, Afghanistan has the lowest of literacy rates in the region,” Koofi said. “If you look at employment opportunities, if you look at access to economic resources, if you look at the social structures of Afghanistan, even the kinds of freedoms that human beings should actually enjoy within the social norms, Afghan women are deprived of it all.” Sadly, Koofi believes most of these new opportunities were limited to major cities or the capital, Kabul. 

According to Human Rights Watch in 2017, “sixteen years after the U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan that ousted the Taliban, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school.”  Based on statistics from the Afghan government, 3.5 million children are out of school and 85 per cent of them are girls, According to Human Rights Watch report up to 80 per cent of Afghan women face forced marriages, many before the age of 16, and 87 per cent of Afghan women are illiterate. If the Taliban return to power this already grim prospect for women will plummet further. The Taliban refuse to give details on how they see women’s rights in the future, they simply describe the issue using religious contexts.

The Doha peace agreement was signed by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the co-founder of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and their current political chief. In January 2020, Baradar spoke to Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi who was working on a documentary for PBS-FRONTLINE (Taliban Country). At the end of the interview, Quraishi asked Baradar an unexpected question on how they would treat women if they rule the country again.  Baradar was vague: “There has been no change of Taliban mindset in this (women-empowering) regard. We accept all the rights that God has granted to women […] under the Islamic law, if they want to live and work, of course we will allow it.” “He was not happy with my question which is why I did not get a proper answer,” said Quraishi.

Even though Baradar said they have not changed, Quraishi thinks that Taliban could be more flexible now. “It’s good that [Taliban] leaders are now living in a country like Qatar, they can see some freedom of women there […] I think that might make them a bit open-minded and they could have a better look on women’s issues now,” said Quraishi, who  often traveled with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan as a journalist. For him, when the Taliban say they accept women must live “under the Islamic law,” it is a demand that could require a change in the current Afghan constitution. 

“The laws of Afghanistan are Islamic and even compared to some more progressive Islamic countries, it’s quite restrictive. Frankly, I can’t open a bank account for my son. Only his father can,” said Shahrazad Akbar, the head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission. As one of the few women who met the Taliban in Doha for peace talks, she is pro-Afghan engagement because she thinks “at least people [are] trying to put their narratives on the table.” Akbar is torn between hopes and fears for the future of women: “I’m exhausted like many Afghans … I’m also very concerned about the return to tyranny.” She thinks what the Taliban need to understand is that “their understanding, and their version of Islam is not necessarily acceptable to all.” 

---

Cover Photo: Children are nailing a tent peg as the destitute and powerless grandmother watches over. War forced hundreds of families to move to this camp for displaced families in the northern city of Kunduz in 2017. [Photo By Qais Azimy]

---

Although life for women in Afghanistan has improved in recent years, as we have seen, women still face domestic violence, widespread physical and sexual abuse, forced marriage, child marriage and honour killings. Nearly 90 per cent of Afghan women are illiterate. These are only some of the challenges women face in Afghanistan, known as the Graveyard of Empires.

Yet this is a great contrast to the historical place of women in the country. Afghan women are celebrated in literature, poetry, history and folklore as early as 1880. One well-known national folk hero is Malalai. She is known for inspiring Afghan freedom fighters in a battle against the British forces, taking place in 1880 during the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

During the battle, Malalai took the Afghan flag and ran with it to the frontlines of the demoralized Afghan army in Maiwand (district of Kandahar) on July 27, 1880. In a loud voice she read a poem addressed to her lover, encouraging him to embrace martyrdom for the country rather than losing the battle and coming home as a symbol of shame. British troops killed Malalai, aged 18 or 19, in that battle, but not before her words had spurred her countrymen to victory. The Afghan fighters defeated the British army despite their opponents’ superior power and weapons. In Afghan schools, Malalai is hailed as a symbol of strength, sacrifice and an equal to man in history textbooks. There are many schools, hospitals, and other institutions named after her in Afghanistan.

King Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) introduced many laws in an attempt to align customary social practices with the prescriptions of Islam. He forbade child marriages, forced marriages, exorbitant bride prices and marriage gifts. Rahman Khan believed that these customs are outdated interpretations of the Quran’s teaching. However, he also imposed the death penalty for adulterous women and decreed that men were entitled to full control over their women because, in his words, “the honour of the people of Afghanistan consists in the honour of their women.”

The idea that Afghan women should be considered full, contributing members of society beyond the home was first declared during the reign of Amir Habibullah (1901-1919). Habibullah believed Islam does not deny women the right to education and that it is an Islamic duty of men to provide them with the opportunity to function fully in society; therefore, having women only in the home would not benefit Afghanistan as a whole.

In April 1978 the Saur Revolution took place, through which Afghan Communists, the Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), seized power in a coup and killed President Daoud Khan and his family in the presidential palace. The revolution was led by Nur Muhammad Taraki, 61, who started his political career as a journalist. Soon after their entry into Afghanistan, Taraki’s forces tried to impose Soviet-style military and social reforms.

In the second week of its rule, the Revolutionary Council announced its “Basic Line of the Revolutionary Duties of the Government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan”. It basically repeated the guarantees made previously by the 1977 Constitution of equality of rights for women and men.

Dr. Anahita Ratebzad, a female member of the Revolutionary Council and Minister of Social Affairs, made a major address to her staff and Kabul’s teachers. She promised to put the Constitution into action and described the “duties of women and mothers as a force that shape the future of the country to bring up sons and daughters who are sincere and patriotic and take steps to consolidate your revolutionary regime.”

In 1978, after the Afghan Communist Party revolution, women once again became a strong part of the working society in big cities. The new regime, through its women’s organizations, announced the launch of an aspirational literacy campaign; with some 18,000 recruited instructors they planned to eliminate illiteracy within one year. In reality, however, this campaign was mostly based in the cities, particularly Kabul, and most of the content of the new textbooks reflected Marxist doctrine. This effort emerged, in effect, to be a perfect disguise for a “veritable political education campaign.”

The sudden widening of resistance to the regime and the increase in the number of people who left Afghanistan soon after the launch of the literacy campaign have been often linked to traditional Afghan society’s dislike of the notion of forcing literacy programs upon women.

By the early 1980s, with the direct Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, women’s issues in general took a secondary place in the agenda of the regime. Afghan Islamist parties started to mobilize and gain substantial power around the country. Most of their leaders were based in neighboring Pakistan. The parties used religion to get support from the grassroots and with the slogan of Soviet Union occupation of an Islamic country.

It was the religious duty of every Afghan man to fight for freedom, a routine called the Jihad. The anti-Soviet Union Occupation resistance all called themselves Mujahideen (freedom fighters). They held fundamentalist Islamic views with support from regional countries, the West and on to the United States. They were strict on women and developed their new female policy.

On April 27, 1980, the residents of Kabul were summoned to applaud at a parade of Afghan, Soviet and Soviet-bloc dignitaries. The crowd was celebrating the second anniversary of the Saur Revolution in that gathering in the centre of Kabul. Unexpectedly a girl named Nahed began shouting anti-government, anti-Soviet slogans; others joined her and the noise got louder. Bricks and stones flew towards the convoy; shots followed from party members and militiamen. When the riot was over, leaving some 70 people dead, Nahed was among them. In modern-day Afghanistan, she is a heroine.

Women were asking the mujahideen (freedom fighters) for small pistols with silencers which they could carry under their chadris (veils) to kill Russian soldiers. Bodies of Russian soldiers were found in the streets with increasing frequency. Some parents with young daughters chose to leave the country saying, “We have nothing left…but still we Afghans have to save the honour of our women” according Nancy Dupree.

After the fall of the Soviet-backed regime of Mohammad Najibullah in 1992, many Afghan Mujahideen political parties, which had support from the U.S. and many other Western countries during the Cold War, started fighting for power. The Afghan Civil War (1992–1996) started, signaling the beginning of the end of women’s freedom, rights and active participation in Afghan society.

Later in 1996 when the Taliban took power, women were considered blemishes, even shameful to families. Under the Taliban, women did not leave home, women were banned from working, and girls’ education was forbidden. A new darkness fell on Afghanistan.

Amid the strife and years of oppression, torture, rape and violence, the Taliban emerged in southern Afghanistan in 1994. Many were ex-Mujahideen, who fought during the Soviet-Afghan War. Others were religious students, or Talib, and had been educated in Islamic schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The new group promised relative peace, rule of law, and the stability that had been denied to ordinary Afghans; harsh punishments would be meted out to critics of the new social order.

Tired of years of civil war, Afghans were attracted to the Taliban. It quickly spread throughout Afghanistan, taking control of a significant number of cities in a matter of months. Within two years, the Taliban created a new government called The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, under the leadership of the one-eyed fugitive leader, Mull Mohammad Omar. In April 1996, Omar was named the “Commander of the Faithful” by his supporters, an important title both in Afghan and Islamic history. The ideology of the Taliban is considered to be something between Islamist views held by anti-Soviet Mujahideen fighters in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with strict anti-modern Afghan tribal ideology.

According to well-known Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, the U.S. also indirectly supported the Taliban’s rise to power through its ally, Pakistan. “Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia, and pro-Western,” said Rashid. “For example, it made no comments when the Taliban captured Herat (a western Afghan city bordering Iran) in 1995 and expelled thousands of girls from schools.”

In 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton appointed Robin Raphel as the first Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, a newly-created position. Part of her job was to focus on a growing problem in Afghanistan: Islamist and Taliban extremism, and women’s rights issues. As one of the first senior American officials to meet personally with top Taliban figures, she called on the former to engage with the latter.

Raphel’s support for the Taliban from its earliest days earned her a nickname “Lady Taliban”. Raphel also recommended a Unocal-led, Taliban-supported oil pipeline project on her trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 1990, the American Unocal Corporation was working on a project proposed by several oil companies to transport oil from Azerbaijan and Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. The $2.5-billion project was dismissed given the instability of Afghanistan.

According to Amnesty International, under the Taliban regime, “women and girls were discriminated against in many ways, for the ‘crime’ of being born a girl. The Taliban enforced their version of Islamic Sharia law. Women and girls were banned from going to school or studying,” and they were forbidden from working outside home. Only female doctors and nurses were allowed to work in hospitals that served women.

Fears that President Trump will abandon Afghan women leaving them at the mercy of the Taliban are not only growing in Afghanistan, but also among some American politicians. U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 2019 to push the Afghan government and the Taliban to include Afghan women in peace talks. Pompeo replied: “Senator, there are lots of issues that we’re working our way through.” Shaheen replied: “I understand that, but this is half of the population in the country.” The final answer from Pompeo was, “yes, ma’am, and I hope they will make their voices heard.”

A week later Senator Shaheen visited Afghanistan as member of a congressional delegation. She met with Afghan women. Shaheen told reporters: “We in the Senate will be watching very carefully what happens as the result of any ongoing discussions.” In a conference call with media, she said: “I remain concerned about the future for Afghan women under any agreement with the Taliban, which is why I continue to press the [U.S.] Administration to prioritize women’s inclusion in this peace process.”

Women in Afghanistan are worried. Pashtana Durrani, the young activist, fears the Taliban will never change. “They are the same people who used to lash women proudly in the streets” she says. She is disappointed with the peace deal because there is no commitment to support women. “They (Americans) came 20 years ago, they said, ‘enough with the flogging of the women, enough with the stoning of the women, enough with the cutting off the noses of the women’ and then 20 years later after everything that the women have done and achieved so far, they (Americans) sell us to the people who made us suffer 20 years ago and to the same people who are planning to do the same in the future.”

The future? Durrani, for her part, is studying for her Bachelor’s degree at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. She says it is her dream is to get her PhD in political science — though whether that is possible under the Taliban is highly uncertain. She believes Afghanistan needs well-educated women politicians and does not trust anyone anymore to fight for her rights. She believes that it should be Afghan women themselves who defend their rights as full members of society – and they will.

“I’m not ready to sacrifice my freedom for peace,” she says. “I’m ready to fight for peace.”

---

Home | Sources | Author’s biography | Acknowledgements