Afghanistan (37 page)

The harshest of the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban’s impacts on gender relationships were, in practice, reserved for areas they saw as a threat to their control, especially Kabul and the Hazara Jat. Educated Afghan women—indeed, most of the educated elites of any ethnicity—were effectively totally marginalized, losing jobs and being excluded from economic or social activity, helping the Taliban consolidate their hold. The Taliban was less repressive in their heartland of southern
Afghanistan. Some women in Kandahar kept their jobs. In rural Pushtun areas, women’s labor, especially the drawing of water and the gathering of firewood, continued much as before without the all-enveloping burqa (the one-piece covering with a view slit) that was enforced on urban Afghan women. This was because the Taliban did not view them, or their kin, as a threat to their hegemony.

Similar contradictions were also apparent in the Taliban’s harsh policies affecting male homosexuals (the Taliban apparently did not believe in female homosexuality). The Taliban made a point of nominally turning against the traditional Afghan attitudes of toleration and willful ignorance by imposing harsh, even fatal punishments on a few individuals who were known homosexuals. But, in reality, the Taliban widely used sexual degradation and relations with boys as a tool of establishing power. In Kabul, the Hazara Jat, and elsewhere, this included taking custody of boys from the local population and sexually abusing them. The use of boys, especially singers and dancers, as catamites by powerful men,
bacha bazi
(play by boys), was part of the Afghan traditions the Taliban rhetorically opposed. Throughout Afghanistan, girls were pressed into forced marriages, often as second or third wives, with Taliban supporters that would otherwise have not had the resources or status to marry. Where this and other examples of the pre-2001 Taliban’s failure to achieve the rectitude they claimed became known, even to their supporters it was a powerful blow to their legitimacy. That the Taliban used sex as a tool of political power and degradation of opponents has led to non-Taliban and anti-Taliban Afghans adopting these tactics in retribution, and it remains widespread.
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It was apparent long before Dr. Freud ventured into political philosophy that frustrated manhood could find expression in political and social action, seldom for the better. Gender issues are used to rally the insurgency as shorthand for the insurgent’s claim to defend Afghanistan’s culture and religion from destruction by Western intervention. “Foreign influence makes our women immoral and destroys our honor” has been a widespread rallying cry, reinforced by such Western counter-insurgency tactics as house searches. Other Western imported practices are presented as being as much an attack on Afghan and Islamic ways as those brought
by the Communists. This reflects the insurgents’ maximalist approach to Islamist practice, especially toward those they believe are lax in their Islamic devotion. If Islam requires modest dress in women, then it is better still to prescribe an all-encompassing dress like the burqa and insist on women’s exclusion from the public sphere, versus any other previously accepted social practice.

Since 2001, there has been much that seems to threaten Afghanistan’s honor in the eyes of conservative Afghans, not just the insurgents. The “gender issue” is essentially the final straw, but still part of an amalgam of cultural conflicts. The arrival of television opened a new front in Afghanistan’s cultural conflicts that is still ongoing, while the arrival of large numbers of foreigners in Kabul—imagined by many Afghans to be drinking and fornicating behind their compound walls—made their living apart from, and their often imperious and disrespectful attitude toward, Afghans they claimed to be helping even less tolerable. Many foreigners involved in Afghanistan perceived their mission in terms of moral uplift and insisted that Afghanistan have the benefits of advances in gender equality and suffrage that had only come about in their own countries in the past generation, and this after a century of male and female literacy and democratic institution-building. The Afghans often respond with a lack of comprehension, failing to see what they mean in terms of Afghan life or Islam. In some ways, it is like imposing post-modern views of women on the Europe of previous centuries, yet in other ways the Afghans have been receptive to these outside influences when presented to them as being congruent with their core values.

The Afghan and Pakistani insurgents share a devotion to maintaining and expanding gender-defined boundaries to relationship, power and behavior. These are believed, in most cases, to be ordained, inviolate, and compulsory upon all Muslims. As with much else in the Islamic practices embraced by the insurgents, these beliefs represent Pushtun folkways for which Islamic legitimacy is claimed and held. In 2008–10, insurgents in both Afghanistan and Pakistan were reported to be targeting clinics that provide contraceptives.
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Imposing dress restrictions, separate education, and ultimately exclusion of women from the public sector is increasingly being seen as a goal of radical parties through Pakistan, including areas
remote from the insurgency.
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The more the West is seen as being the source of gender equality, the harder these groups will push for repression.

The fact that serious Islamic theologians around the world would not support these actions does not make the insurgents’ approach to gender relationships any less powerful or compelling to their followers. Gender relations have been at the heart of the narrative Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other insurgent groups produce in order to mobilize their followers and legitimize their actions against the West and elected governments in Muslim countries. The 1990s saw Western press reports of demands by ulema associated with the Taliban in Kabul that pop-culture figures like Michael Jackson and Kate Winslet be turned over to them for harsh punishment for crooning songs or appearing in films that extolled romantic love rather than arranged marriage. These were only precursors to the widespread theme of today that the infidel outside world is seeking to destroy Islam, starting with Afghanistan and the Pushtuns, by attacking their culture through an intrusive foreign presence that specifically is focusing on women, and therefore kinship, lineage, and the core of their society. More than the West’s celebrity culture and the Vortex’s Taliban culture misunderstanding each other, the whole premise of romantic love, or even “choice” on the part of the participants, calls into question the validity of the potential marriages the Taliban’s clients might seek to arrange for their children or enjoy themselves, especially if they had gained status through their service to the cause and were cementing this with familial ties via an arranged marriage. Romantic love, as practiced in the West, has no place or meaning in the insurgents’ world, however much individual insurgents may love their wives and children.

Harder to identify, but no less significant, a cause to the gender issue in Afghanistan are psychosexual fears and insecurity. Islamic ideology, expressed by Al Qaeda-generated propaganda and used post-2001 by groups such as both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, has been able to make use of the insecurity in the face of what is seen as a world dominated by infidel culture that does not respect or understand the importance of honor valued in patrilineal Pushtun societies. With satellite television, radio, cassettes, and the DVD providing increased familiarity
with—but not increased understanding of—an outside culture that is at once attractive and existentially threatening: even those without sophisticated psychological insights can still use this disconnect and fear to extract support. If you do not take arms to fight the foreigners in Kabul, your women may become like those in the bootleg Bollywood movies the Taliban have taken such pleasure in burning. Or even worse, your women might become like those you imagine exist in the infidel world, which would render it impossible to live as a Muslim and as a man of honor and so bring shame to your kin. “The most common Pushtun feeling is that there is a war on our culture,” is the sentiment according to Massoud Kharokhail of the Kabul-based Tribal Liaison Office, which is a developmental NGO. Afghans of other ethnicities are more likely to agree with these Pushtuns than elites of their own groups. While no group is as conservative as rural Pushtuns, Afghan cultural conservatism cuts across ethnolinguistic divisions. They share an emphasis on Islam and kinship, even if they lack the Pushtun’s tribal divisions.

Westerners have tended to view the complexities of Afghan gender relationships in a way that reflects the gender-consciousness of their own societies. This led to the 2009 Shia personal status law, signed by President Karzai on 27 July only after international protests over restrictive provisions, including those that limited married women’s rights to travel without a spouse’s consent and attempted to give the force of law to a husband’s sexual access.
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The Afghans considered that providing the Shia with their own personal status law rather than one based under Sunni Hanafi-based jurisprudence was a multicultural and good thing. While many of the more offensive provisions were removed, the incident showed Karzai as submitting to outsiders in the eyes conservative Afghans; and it alienated foreign donors, who considered allowing Afghan politics to stand in the way of achieving international human-rights standards unacceptable. But this incident revealed more than the disconnect in the worldviews between the Afghans that sit in the parliament and the Westerners that advocate human rights in Afghanistan. Westerners have no problem with using the state’s rule of law to regulate gender relations, whereas to many Afghans this is not an inherently obvious solution. Murder is normally not a crime but a tort under Pakistan’s FCR or the
customary law of Afghanistan’s Pushtuns (under Pushtunwali). This means that if someone is killed, many Afghans do not want the state to come in and try and punish the murderer: they want the murderer’s kin to make them whole for the loss of a family member by turning over as compensation valuables such as money, weapons, livestock, or, in some cases, unmarried women to become the wives of aggrieved family members. This is a traditional justice mechanism and, as such, is opposed by the Taliban, who insist that their brand of state justice, using Sharia law, must prevail. The Taliban banned the exchange of women between kinship groups to settle feuds and blood debts, claiming it has no status under Sharia law.

Westerners see the injustice, frustration, sheer waste of human potential, and barriers to development inherent in much of Afghanistan’s gender relations. Yet to change these social constructs, there is a risk that even the most well-intentioned of efforts, however legitimate according to international norms (and Afghans do want to be recognized as a country like any other) and Islamic theology, can still lead to widespread opposition because of how it is implemented. Afghanistan is a conservative country, and the harder change is pushed, the more the Afghans will either cling to tradition or, more often, grasp at change but in a way that they believe makes them more Islamic. Gender can be an issue where, in order to maintain the proper relationships they see as required by religion, a particular code of honor or to avoid shaming their kin, Afghans will feel compelled to make common cause with the insurgents, largely because of the alternative approach to gender relations they represent.

Despite this, both the Kabul government and the international community are committed to mainstreaming gender issues. But in reality, the Ministry of Woman’s Affairs has often proved to be the only political advocate for women, and its relation with parliament, which often tends to cut its funding, has often limited its effectiveness. To compound this, the deteriorating security situation in Kabul in recent years made even fewer Afghan women willing to do anything that would make them vulnerable. The Taliban view on the appropriate role of women—that they need to be absent from the public sphere—is shared by many who oppose the Taliban (Karzai’s wife, though a medical doctor, does not appear in
public). Despite the government’s accession to international agreements, the set-aside representation for women at multiple levels of government, and the foreign-supported gender-mainstreaming policies, women’s role in the public sphere remains limited and contested, not only politically but by threats of intimidation and violence. According to one educated Afghan woman in Kabul in 2008, “Women will be attacked if we go too fast, not by the Taliban but by our own groups.”

Kinship is all-important. An American woman with many years of experience in Afghanistan said “Kinship precludes choice.” This collectivist orientation applies to politics as well as life; in 2009, 59 percent of the Afghans polled agreed with the statement that a person should vote how his or her community votes, not according to individual preference.
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Afghan women can rely on few other links outside of kinship. This reduces options for women through fear of alienating valued male relatives. What a woman wears outside the family compound, the scarf-like chador or the enveloping burqa, is seen as a reflection on the entire family. There is a reason why the word
purdah
comes from veil or curtain: a veil not only hides women, it literally saves face (of her kin). Many of Afghanistan’s powerful and influential women are so because they have access, through kinship ties, to resources and networks.

Attitudes on gender-based power cut across political, religious, and cultural lines. Yet it remains in Afghanistan that many of the “good guys”—especially but not limited to Pushtuns—remain highly conservative in their views on the place of women in society. What differentiates these attitudes from those of the Taliban is that the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban used state power to enforce them. This hurt their legitimacy and support even among conservative Pushtuns. Having the religious police beat women in Kabul with car radio aerials for dress-code violations was something deeply alien to the Afghan conscience. It was one of the many blows to the old Afghanistan from which it has not recovered.