The Lovers (38 page)

The next night he brought it up again; it was on his mind. “So it wasn’t the birds?”

“I never liked the birds,” she said. “Why do you keep them in cages? They have wings—they should fly. Why don’t you let them go?”

He was a bit shocked by this. “Because I love them,” he said.

THE JIHAD AGAINST WOMEN

Sherzai Amin was a pretty typical, midlevel mujahideen commander. He picked his rotten teeth with a hunting knife. He was big and slightly fat but could walk all day up a mountain on barely visible goat tracks, without breathing audibly or sweating visibly. The fifty or so fighters under his command adored him; half or more were related by either marriage or blood. Back home he had three wives and he wasn’t sure how many children. Up here in the mountains of Kunar Province, he had an eighteen-year-old Russian prisoner of war named Sergey, whom he raped nightly in his camp tent, making crude jokes about it in the morning. Reports that another mujahideen unit had set up a firing squad for a group of Communist prisoners but replaced all the rifles with rocket-propelled grenade launchers brought tears to his eyes, he laughed so hard.

“Picture that,” he said.

It was the height of the jihad against the Soviets and their Afghan Communist clients, in the late 1980s, and I had been a week with Sherzai’s group, operating in the mountains east of the provincial capital of Asadabad. One evening he announced that the next day Sergey would have to guide us through what the muj thought was a minefield along our route. Sergey’s unit had planted the mines, so he should know where they were, they said. The boy
broke down and cried, pleading that he hadn’t a clue where any mines were buried.

“Then you’ll have to find them the hard way,” Sherzai said, to guffaws from his men.

We sat up late that night, talking for hours, because Sherzai and I both had something the other one wanted. I wanted him not to kill the Russian boy. Sherzai wanted me to give him my Swiss Army knife. It had a built-in toothpick that he was enchanted with.

As we both danced around our real issues, we whiled away the hours talking about Communism and what it meant to the muj, what they were fighting for, what motivated them to give up everything and take to these punishing mountains.

“Divorce,” Sherzai said.

“Divorce?”

“The Communists have given
women
the right to divorce
men
.”

“Most countries allow women to divorce.”

“No, only Communist countries. And jobs, they want to send women out to work. And schools, send girls to school, sitting next to boys. They want to turn our women and girls into prostitutes. Then, when they’re prostitutes, they send them to the police or their stupid army.”

One of his men piped up. The Communists had opened a home for war widows and had distributed soap to all the women there, he said.

“Soap?” General outrage greeted this news.

What was wrong with soap for widows? “Was it some sort of inferior Communist soap?”

They looked at me pityingly, just another ignorant foreigner—albeit one from a country that provided their weaponry and finances, so they couldn’t be too hostile.

“Orgies,” one of them said. “They’re giving them soap to start orgies. Soap, then group showers, then orgies.” The inevitability of that progression seemed to make sense to them.

Sherzai came back to the subject of divorce. “Are women in your country really allowed to divorce without their husbands’ permission?”

“Yes, if they have a good reason, and we’re not Communists. Some places have no-fault divorce, where they don’t even need a reason to divorce their husbands. Also, many women have jobs. All girls have to go to school, usually with boys.”

He had trouble processing all that. “Americans sound like Communists.”

“No, Communism is about politics and economics, not about women’s rights.”

“The first thing our Communists did was take our women away. They want me to get rid of two of my wives.”

“Polygamy is illegal in America, too, and in most countries, but that doesn’t make them all Communists.”

This discussion was unfortunately not endearing me to my hosts, who began to regard me with suspicion and concern. Either I was crazy or America was, they weren’t sure which. This was not helping Sergey’s cause any either. But Sherzai still wanted my Swiss Army knife. Despairing of winning him over, I decided to make a straight-up deal.

“I’ll give you my knife if you don’t kill the boy,” I said.

“Okay, I won’t kill the boy,” he said, and I handed the knife over. He kept marveling at the retractable toothpick.

In those Cold War years, the mujahideen were admired throughout the free world for facing up to the might of the Soviet Union and fighting them and their Afghan proxies to a standstill and, eventually, to defeat. Their jihad was seen as an anti-Communist crusade, and indeed it was, but only nominally. A jihad against women and against rights for women is what it really was. Sherzai Amin was no outlier, and his views on women and the jihad were commonplace.

What distressed the muj about Communism was not redistribution of wealth, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, or state control of the means of production—many of those principles were already somewhat present in Afghanistan or were just beside the point in a country with a preindustrial economy. The major industries and mines, such as they were, had always been nationalized. Since the days of King Mohammad Zahir Shah, who ruled from
1933 to 1973, when he was deposed, the Afghan state had been strongly centralized,
¹
however weak. The Afghan extended family practices a form of communal sharing of wealth and resources, property and responsibilities, that would rival that of any kibbutz. It wasn’t even Communism’s godlessness that infuriated the mujahideen, because the Afghan version of a Communist Party never challenged Islam nor advocated atheism.

What really infuriated the mujahideen about Communism and sent them on the warpath was its doctrinal and practical espousal of equal rights for women. Under Afghanistan’s Communist rulers from 1978 to 1992, modern attitudes toward women were introduced to the country for the first time since the abortive attempt to do so during the reign of Amanullah Khan in the 1920s.
²
Since they were Communists and their Soviet patrons wanted to make a point, gender reform was done on a massive scale, nationwide. Schools for women were opened throughout the country; jobs were set aside for women, and they were encouraged to work. Huge numbers of women were drafted into the military and police, far more than Western encouragement and financing has managed in this past decade. The national airline, Ariana, had female flight attendants under the Communists.
³
Social laws were modified to give women rights to inherit property, to keep their children, to divorce their husbands—all things unknown in traditional Afghan culture and still not the practice today. At its heart the jihad was not a response to Communism, it was holy war against feminism. In the narrow worldview of Afghanistan’s jihadis, Communism and feminism were synonyms. But they quickly learned that fighting feminism was not going to attract massive Western aid, even from womanizers like Congressman Charlie Wilson,
⁴
while fighting Communism qua Communism would.

The Communists brought in social and legal protections for women that were as far-reaching as those later instituted with American backing by the landmark 2009 law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. As the EVAW law later did, the Communists outlawed abusive customary practices such as child marriage and the compulsory marriage of widows to their brothers-in-law,
and they criminalized behavior like wife-beating and rape. In other words, EVAW law for the first time restored to Afghan women many of the protections that already had been granted to them by the Communists by the early 1980s and which provoked the jihad that ultimately, with massive Western aid, destroyed the Communists—and stalled any real progress on women’s rights in Afghanistan for two or three decades to come.

This is a piece of history commonly overlooked in the dialogue about women’s rights in Afghanistan. There tends to be an assumption now that the first time Afghan women had any rights at all was in the post-Taliban era, but in fact women were in many ways much better off during the Communist time than they are now.

Many older Afghans still speak about that period as the country’s golden age. While the Communists’ writ did not extend much beyond urban areas—especially once the jihad got under way—women in the cities and even in many towns were soon freer than they have ever been in Afghanistan, before or since. Dr. Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the irrepressible head of one of Afghanistan’s most admired institutions, the Afghan National Institute of Music,
⁵
was a college student in those days, and he remembers young men and women in Kabul University greeting each other by kissing on the cheeks—something so forbidden now that even foreigners do not do it in public or around their Afghan co-workers; few Afghan women, even among professionals and officials, will shake men’s hands today. By some estimates
⁶
over half of the urban workforce during the Communist era was female; it is a fraction of that today—even in government agencies where there are contractual set-asides and compulsory quotas from foreign donors. During Dr. Sarmast’s college days, young people of both sexes visited one another’s homes for lunches and dinners—equally unheard of today. Kandahar, a city so conservative now that few women are ever seen in public, and then only in burqas, was liberal and cosmopolitan even compared to Kabul. “When the Communists took over, their first activity, their first decree was to declare the freedom of women, equal opportunity for women, the compulsory education of girls until grade nine, the end of the sale of young girls
for big bride prices, the end of buying and selling girls like cattle,” Dr. Sarmast said. The tragedy was, as at so many other times in history, Afghanistan became a victim of the political currents and ambitions of other nations. “They were very progressive, taking society toward equality and justice especially in women’s rights, but the mujahideen and all the opponents identified those progressive measures as un-Islamic. It was a war between the Soviet Union and the West, and the people of Afghanistan paid the price. And today the West is paying a much bigger price for promoting the same values and the same progressive policies toward women’s rights and equality,” Dr. Sarmast said.
⁷

That old jihadi commander who got my Swiss Army knife, Sherzai Amin, would agree with this analysis. If Sherzai hasn’t joined the Taliban by now, as most of his mujahideen brethren up in Kunar Province have, he would nonetheless abhor what the West has tried to do for Afghan women since 2001. The morning after our quasi-philosophic exchange on Communism and feminism, having raped Sergey one last time, Sherzai sent the boy out on point, a couple hundred yards ahead of the mujahideen column as it moved toward the suspected minefield. When I realized what was happening, I protested that Sherzai had given me his word; I would soon learn how little that was worth in Afghanistan.

“I said
I
wouldn’t kill him.” He laughed. “If he trips a Russian mine, it’ll be the Communists who killed him. Anyway, he’s probably lying and knows where they put the mines.”

Shortly later there was a deafening explosion.

“Oh, well,” Sherzai Amin said. “I guess that boy was telling the truth.” He and the other muj shared a hearty laugh.
⁸

Afghan men can be as hard and brutal as the rocky and treeless landscape they inhabit. “Beat your wife every day,” goes a joke that is popular among them. “If
you
don’t know what she did,
she
will.” It is a joke that rings true. Over half of Afghan women report that they have been beaten by their husbands at some point, while 39 percent of those surveyed have been beaten at least once in the previous
twelve months. Include sexual and psychological abuse and nearly nine out of ten of the country’s women describe themselves as victims of their men.
⁹
Many Afghan men will argue that wife-beating is justified if a man’s woman misbehaves. Many Afghan men do not see rapists as criminals but are much more inclined to blame and punish their victims; unsurprisingly, 11 percent of Afghan adult women say they have been victims of rape,
¹⁰
which is fifty times the rate in the West.
¹¹
Many Afghan men approve of honor killing, or at least excuse it, hence the low level of judicial punishment in such cases.

The EVAW law was meant to change all that. Before the law’s enactment in 2009, most gender-based crimes were not even considered to be crimes in Afghanistan. Since the law’s enactment, there have been some notable improvements but also many dramatic failures. Still, fewer than 10 percent
¹²
of those accused of committing crimes against women are ever punished, and much larger numbers commit crimes that go unreported.
¹³

Nothing illustrates the imperfection of the EVAW law’s implementation more dramatically than the EVAW unit of the attorney general’s office in Kabul and the women who work within it. When I visited in September 2014, the unit had been relocated to a recently converted storage room in an office building off Darulaman Road. Its thirteen lawyers shared the single room, big enough for perhaps four desks, even six if they were packed close together. The EVAW unit had been moved there two months earlier and still had no furniture other than one desk for the head of the unit, a small table to the side, and some armchairs and sofas along the walls for everyone else. “You could call this office itself an example of violence against women,” said one of the prosecutors, Shazia Abbasi, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Afghan criminal-justice system. Small children ran around while their mothers, the clients, squatted on their haunches along one wall, some completely shrouded in burqas. A man wept openly in front of his burqa-ed wife, complaining of her gang rape by politically well-connected Afghan Local Police—militiamen who are trained by the American Special Forces—in Badakhshan. A teenage girl, a prosecutor’s
daughter whose school got out early that day, was doing her homework on the available corner of the small table. The other lawyers had piles of legal papers in their laps.