The Lovers (18 page)

Fatima continued to insist she was under threat from Zakia’s family. I had talked to Zakia’s relatives, met some of her brothers
and cousins and her father, and their determination to pursue vengeance made them worrisomely dangerous. But they had never expressed to me a desire to get back at Fatima, and their anger seemed much more focused on the Bamiyan shelter director, Najeeba, and of course on Zakia above all.

Shmuley called me that night, and he was ebullient. He had just attended a genocide conference in Kigali with President Kagame, and the Rwandan president was on board with Shmuley’s African rescue plan. I thought he had already been on board, but now he was apparently really on board. “Our donor, she wants to educate them, give them jobs, bring them to the United States,” Shmuley said. “We have the support of the State Department, we have everything ready to go, we just need passports. Samantha Power assured me she was interested in helping them, sympathized with their plight, and she would try to get their team on board. I took her assurances to heart.” The American donor, a high-net-worth individual, would pay the costs of getting Zakia and Ali to Rwanda and give them a stipend for their living expenses; President Kagame would treat them as his personal guests.

Shmuley’s enthusiasm was infectious, and he did have the attention of the State Department, although I’m not sure how deep their support for his plan really went. It was deep enough, though, to energize the American embassy to reach out to Ali and Zakia through an Afghan employee, Zmaryalai Farahi. After a chat on the telephone, he told them they would have to come into the embassy to discuss it further in person. When Ali tried to visit the American embassy, however, he only got as far as Massoud Circle in Wazir Akbar Khan before he saw that they would have to pass two or three cordons of Afghan police and guards just to get to the beginning of the road leading to the embassy. Suspicious that it was a setup to get them arrested, Ali turned away and stopped answering Zmaryalai’s calls.

Around the same time, Aimal Yaqubi had started calling Ali aggressively, as Ali recalled it, ordering Ali to meet with him to pick up the thousand dollars he was delivering from Shmuley. The
fixer’s pushiness frightened the couple, and Ali just stopped picking up when he called. Ali was now no longer talking to the two contacts who perhaps could help them to safety, and he was only barely speaking to Jawad and me.

Shmuley was mystified. At my suggestion he had offered Aimal a bonus if he was able to help the couple get out of the country, but the amount was much more than I expected: $5,000. Perhaps that was the problem. In a society where two hundred dollars a month is a living wage, five grand is a lot of money. Even compared to Aimal’s fees as a fixer, two hundred dollars a day, five grand was just too much incentive. In a way it was a small metaphor for the entire failed American enterprise in Afghanistan: Throwing money at the problem, however well intentioned, often makes matters worse.

Examples of this phenomenon abound. Consider a $35 million “go fly a rule-of-law kite” program, dreamed up and funded by a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, a commercial firm that is now known as Tetra Tech DPK.
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Their idea was to stage a public event at which they would hand out kites, comic books, and posters with slogans printed on them touting equal rights for women and respect for the rule of law. Hundreds of kids and some adults showed up. Because the contractor was an American company, a large contingent of police was on hand to protect the American employees. First, no one could read the slogans on the kites and posters, let alone the text-heavy comic books; most of the kids were too young, and most of the adults who came were either jobless or policemen—neither a group with a high literacy rate.
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Then handing out the kites went badly awry when policemen systematically stole them from the kids who had come, in order to take them home to their own cildren, beating some of the kids at the event with sticks when they didn’t cooperate. Finally, gender equality was hard to come by. The few times any girls got their hands on the free kites, their fathers took them away and gave them to their sons instead. Despite critical coverage
²²
that made the fly-a-kite program a laughingstock in the aid community, the contractor deemed it such a success that it was repeated later in Herat, and the contractor continued to
dream up other methods of public outreach funded by U.S. taxpayers’ money.

Similarly, indiscriminate American largesse dispensed by the embassy financed a rock concert in a country where rock music is little followed, infuriating the mullahs; a yoga charity with the stated goal of getting the Taliban to the peace table via the yoga mat; an Afghan adaptation of
Sesame Street
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for Tolo TV, featuring the American ambassador posing in Kabul with Grover, in all likelihood a war-zone first.
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The American embassy also pumped more than $100 million into underwriting indigenous television stations, so that any minor press conference in Kabul has more television cameras
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in attendance than most major news events in New York City or Washington, D.C. None of this was any more sustainable long-term than flying a kite; all will come crashing down once the American-financed windfall ends.

That May when we dialed Ali’s number, we got love-song ringtones, a different one every few days, but he never answered. One frequent song was “Your Unkempt Hair,” by the famous Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir.

Afghan women are rarely seen in public without at least a head scarf.

If the early morning breeze

Should ruffle your unruly hair

All hearts would be ensnared

In that trap of love and suffering.
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7

HONOR HUNTERS

The lovers had no idea how many friends they had, but late that May and early June it was hard to persuade them that they had any. Everything seemed to be going wrong for them. Zakia’s family was actively looking for them. They were miserable in hiding. Escape abroad seemed impossible. Money was running out. Faced as the couple was with a hopeless situation, their suspicious refusals to accept aid made it all worse.

While their hideout at Ali’s aunt’s house on the hill in Chindawul seemed secure, it was crowded and small and a hard place for anyone to spend much time. Remaining in hiding was getting increasingly difficult, particularly for Ali, but if either of them still wanted to flee abroad, they had a funny way of showing it. They were no longer answering the phone at all—not to Rabbi Shmuley’s fixer, Aimal, not to the American embassy’s human-rights officer, not even to us at the
New York Times.
They were low on prospects and almost out of hope.

Their pursuers had come to town in force, and Zakia’s brothers and cousins were being spotted often. Zakia’s father, Zaman, had left Bamiyan and resettled his immediate family in Kabul. This
was partly because they had suffered so much contempt from their Hazara neighbors after they became the nationally notorious villains persecuting Zakia and Ali and partly because Zaman could not bear the humiliation of facing his Tajik neighbors after the loss of his honor. Mostly, though, as they told everyone who would listen, they wanted to exact revenge on the lovers, no matter what it took. Zaman and his sons had given up their tenancy on the farm in Bamiyan and looked for what work they could find as day laborers in Kabul, expecting to find the couple there.

“Honor and dishonor is like this: According to Islamic and shariah law, the girl cannot run away from home,” explained Zakia’s cousin Najibullah, an uneducated farm laborer. “It will be seen by the people as, ‘Ha, your daughter has run away. You should no longer live in this village. If she had not run away, her father never would have quit the village. He quit it because he is so dishonored that he cannot live here anymore,’” he said. “All the people will mock him and jeer at him, like, ‘If you were a man, why did your daughter run away? Why didn’t you stop her?’ They say these things, so we cannot let it be. He is her father, and I am her uncle’s son, but it hurts our honor, too. I cannot live in Bamiyan any longer myself when they say my uncle’s daughter ran away. We could not bring her back, so people will say to us, ‘If you were men, had daring and courage, why couldn’t you get your daughter back from the government?’”

One of Zakia’s other cousins, Mirajuddin, was sitting with Najibullah; the two young men were among the relatives left in Kham-e-Kalak, although they no longer farmed the land and would soon join Zaman and his sons in Kabul to hunt the couple down. They had been in the courtroom when the melee broke out, although Zakia says they were not among those family members who attacked her physically. They were not close enough blood relatives to feel entitled to rip her clothes off and touch her, even if violently. “Your life is your honor, like your wife is your honor, and if your honor leaves you and goes to someone else, then this life is worthless,” Mirajuddin said. “If someone takes your wife, your life is not worth living.” Their position reflected a broader societal
concern, as the cousins saw it. “If today the government doesn’t do something about this, then tomorrow the wife of a farmer will elope with a schoolboy or a businessman and will say she can’t live with her husband. So in this way, after the first one left, the others will follow.” Zakia, in short, had challenged the entire structure of Afghan patriarchal society, and if she was not stopped, all women would abandon the husbands chosen for them. (“First one wants freedom, / Then the whole damn world wants freedom,” as the late Gil Scott-Heron put it in his song “B Movie.”)

In fact, there is a lot at stake for the women’s-rights movement in Afghanistan, even far beyond its borders. Afghanistan, because of the involvement of the West since 2001, is the only such country where serious efforts are under way to improve the lot of its women. “Afghanistan is still the great battleground of women’s rights in the twenty-first century,” says Nasrine Gross, an Afghan sociologist and women’s advocate. If women could win some measure of gender equality and equal treatment before the law in a country as backward and abusive as Afghanistan, that would be a provocative example to disenfranchised women in those other countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, the Gulf satrapies and Iran. “There are some countries that are very powerful in certain ways, and women’s rights is not something they want to discuss,” Ms. Gross says. By “certain ways,” she means power that comes from possessing vast oil and gas wealth. “They use the lack of women’s rights as a means of controlling their own countries, and they want to keep Afghanistan at bay in terms of women’s rights so Afghanistan will not become a role model for their societies. A place so poor, so illiterate, so backward, they cannot stand it if this poor Afghanistan would be a model of women’s rights.”
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Internally Afghanistan has long been a battleground for women’s rights, but the battle is one that women and their advocates have always lost. Probably in no other country
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have so many rulers been toppled over this particular issue, going back to King Habibullah, who opened the earliest girls’ schools and ushered in some rights for women before he was assassinated in 1919. His son,
King Amanullah Khan, went much further, banning the veil for women, instituting girls’ education in rural areas, and outlawing polygamy. King Amanullah began his reign as a popular leader, credited with defeating the British in the Third Anglo-Afghan War. When he returned from a visit to Europe with his liberal-minded queen, Soraya Tarzi, he declared at a public event that Islam did not require women to be covered, whereupon Queen Tarzi tore off her veil and the other government wives present did so as well. Under his rule women were allowed to divorce and to choose their husbands, bride prices were outlawed, women were encouraged to work and study. But in a country with no roads and little infrastructure of any kind and a weak central government and bureaucracy, Amanullah was unable to persuade his countrymen to embrace his reforms and instead provoked an uprising of mullahs and conservatives that drove him from power in 1929.
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This uprising was fueled in part by British agents, whose country was eager to get back at King Amanullah for its recent humiliation. They circulated pictures showing Queen Tarzi wearing a sleeveless gown at a state function and allowing her hand to be kissed during the European tour. Even today most educated women will not shake hands with men, while bare shoulders and arms in public would provoke a riot in Kabul.

Amanullah’s successor, Nadir Shah, tried to institute reforms but was himself assassinated. Subsequent Afghan rulers were much more cautious about women’s-rights issues. Not until the Communist era in the 1970s was any successful effort made to extend rights to women, and the sweeping progress decreed by the Communists on gender equality was the major reason for the uprising against them by mujahideen and their followers.
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Their problem was with feminism, not with Communism. Their jihad was first of all against women’s rights, and later against schools for girls, the right to divorce, and women in the workplace and public life. They did not object to Communism as an economic or political system; it was equal rights for women that bothered them.
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When many of these mujahideen leaders later joined with the Americans to oust the Taliban, the alliance was not motivated by the Taliban’s
social policies; in most cases Afghan warlords were as hard-line on women’s issues as the Taliban, and often even more regressive. The Taliban at least outlawed
baad,
and they officially disapproved of honor killings not based on their own judicial processes.
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