In 2001, when the United States and the United Kingdom arrived in Afghanistan, they sold their mission to the world not simply as a way of driving out the terrorist-shielding Taliban but also as a way of empowering women. As the wife of the UK premier, Cherie Blair, said in 2001: “We need to help Afghan women free their spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see.” Or as George Bush boasted in December 2001: “Women now come out of their homes from house arrest.”
Five years on, however, the Blairs and the Bushes have become less vocal about the women whom they were meant to have liberated.
I went to Afghanistan soon after the Taliban had been ousted from Kabul, and found that their departure was allowing women to hope again.
One of the places that stuck most clearly in my mind was a village called Sar Asia, on the outskirts of Kabul. There I met women who had been unable to leave their houses for education during the Taliban regime, who had just set up a literacy course with the help of Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. When I asked the students if they thought all women in Afghanistan wanted more freedom and equality, my translator struggled to keep up with the clamour: “Of course we do,” said one widow furiously.
Over the past few years, as news from Afghanistan has become less positive, I have been wondering what had happened to these women. Last month I was able to revisit the country, and one of the first things I did was to go back to Sar Asia. The teacher invited me back into the room that once had been crowded with women learning to read.
This time, the room is empty. “We’re not teaching here any more,” the teacher — I’ll call her Alya, because she has asked me not to use her real name now — tells me sadly. “They were threatening us, telling us not to do it any more, and we were scared. “
Alya has managed to find work as a teacher in a government school in Kabul, but hopes that the men in her village don’t know that this is what she does. She always wears the burka when she goes out. “We have heard that if somebody kills a male teacher he will get 20 000 Afghanis, but if someone kills a female teacher he will get 50 000 Afghanis,” she says.
You can’t say that things haven’t improved at all in Afghanistan since the Taliban were “removed”, and even Alya wouldn’t quite go that far. You can now see women moving around Kabul in a way they could not five years ago; the majority do not wear the burka.
During my time in the city I seek out evidence of change, and I certainly find it. I meet women in the government, including in the ministry of public health, where they are trying to deliver a package of basic healthcare for women. I meet women in NGOs working on literacy and advocacy projects, women professors and students in the university, and women in the media. But each of them has a negative to set beside the positive.
Farzana Samimi, a television presenter who anchors a weekly programme on women’s issues, is the target of constant threats.
“It’s not for me I’m scared, but for my children — if anything happened to them,” she tells me when we meet at the television studio just after her programme. “The situation here has not changed as much as we wanted it to change, and in the last year I have become more afraid.”
The situation in Kabul is inevitably far better than in the rest of the country. Human Rights Watch says that a third of districts in Afghanistan are now without girls’ schools, owing to attacks on teachers and students by the Taliban and other anti-government elements, and traditional practices such as child marriage and baad, in which women are exchanged like objects in tribal disputes, still continue unchallenged. “Every day women are sacrificed for their family or tribe,” Nilab Mobarez, a 45-year-old doctor who stood recently as a vice-presidential candidate, tells me angrily. “We still do not have the judicial system to resolve this.”
Malalai Joya is, at 28 years old, the youngest and most famous of all the women in the Afghan Parliament. In a way, her very presence in the Parliament is a powerful symbol of change. She rose to fame in 2003, when she made a speech attacking the warlords who still hold the balance of power in Afghanistan. On that occasion, one of the men she was attacking, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, rose and told her that her speech was a crime, announced that “Jihad is the basis of this nation” and asked for her microphone to be disconnected. The then speaker of the house, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, a former mujahideen leader, called her an infidel, and said that if she did not apologise she could not attend the next session of Parliament.
Since her historic speech, Joya has survived assassination attempts and constant denunciations. When she isn’t speaking, she looks calm and poised, but when she speaks she is on fire, raging about the situation for herself and her country.
“Here there is no democracy, no security, no women’s rights,” she says. “When I speak in Parliament, they threaten me. These men who are in power, never have they apologised for their crimes that they committed in the wars, and now, with the support of the US, they continue with their crimes in a different way. That is why there is no fundamental change in the situation of women.”
Joya talks like this to me, furiously, almost weeping as she catalogues the crimes against women: from Safia Ama Jan, the leading women’s rights campaigner assassinated in Kandahar earlier this year, to Nadia Anjuman, a poet murdered in Herat last year; from Amina, a married woman who was stoned to death in Badakhshan in 2005, to Sanobar, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and exchanged for a dog in a dispute among warlords.
She is desperate for people to take account of the silent women whose voices we never hear. “Afghan women are killing themselves now,” she says, “there is no liberation for them.” This is not just rhetoric: the Afghan Human Rights Commission recently began to document the numbers of Afghan women who are burning themselves to death because they cannot escape abuse in their families.
I visit an organisation called Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan (HAWCA), whose director, Orzala Ashraf, is a driven young Afghan woman. “It is 99% tragedy here, but there are always stories of hope,” she says. To illustrate that, she begins to tell me a story of a woman whom I’ll call Jamila. She ran away from home when she was 15, because she was being forced into marriage with an elderly man. Jamila dressed as a young man and came in a smugglers’ car to Kabul, but when she got to Kabul she was arrested and taken to prison — and, although she was guilty of no crime, she spent a year in jail. But then Jamila got lucky; HAWCA brought her to the women’s refuge, where she learned to read.
Ashraf suggested to her that she join the women’s police force. And that is where she is now. A few days later, I go to visit Jamila at the new female police academy. She works there in the administrative office.
“Once I was illiterate and I didn’t know about anything,” she says decisively, “but I was one of the lucky ones — I began to learn. Now I know that Islam gives rights to women as well as to men.”
The principal of the women’s police academy, Homera Dakik, a 25-year-old woman, is also eager to talk to us. She was forced into marriage 10 years ago with the head of the Taliban secret services.
After the Taliban fell, her father managed to get her away and brought her home. “It is really my dream now,” she says, sitting in her office with Jamila, “that we should be able to tell the world how such criminal things have happened to the women of Afghanistan.”
She and Jamila show us round the academy, which is empty. How many trainees can this place hold, I ask? Two hundred. How many do they currently have? Four. “Families will still not let their women join the academy,” Homera says sadly.
The empty academy, fronted by these brave young women, is a symbol of the fragility of Hamid Karzai’s government. Although Karzai may speak in favour of women’s rights, he does not have the resources to deliver. In order to get grounded in popular support, the government needed to rebuild everything from healthcare to roads in this devastated country. To do so it looked to the international community to help. Five years ago, Bush and Blair were quick with promises. But the consensus now is that those promises have not been matched by action.
These failures mean that people still do not have the clinics, schools, clean water and roads that they need to start rebuilding civil society after decades of war. Even in Kabul most areas are still poor, with no sewage system and just a few hours of electricity a night. But in one area of the city is an unexpected string of half a dozen brand-new wedding halls.
At the wedding celebration that Mobarez takes me to, I meet Kochai. She has come from Kandahar, where she works as a policewoman in the airport. She was married into a traditional family, and was abused for years by her husband. Like all the other women I meet on my trip, Kochai is sure that, despite all the insecurity and lack of progress, life would be far worse if Western forces pulled out. “If the British and American soldiers left now, we wouldn’t be able to leave our houses. We would lose all that we have.”
Yet everyone knows that the Taliban are regrouping in and around Kandahar; Safia Ama Jan, the head of the department of women’s affairs, was assassinated there recently, and Kochai says the actual number of kidnappings and assassinations is far higher than we hear about. “In one week, six women were killed. They were ordinary women, working women, but the Taliban say they are spies of the government.”
When I express my horror, Mobarez looks at me rather pityingly and says: “This is only one case among many. So many Afghan women suffer like this.” — Â