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 Rahman Khan believed that these customs are outdated interpretations of the Quran’s teaching.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.”