The Lovers (47 page)

5
.   Barbara Crossette,
New York Times,
Mar. 19, 2011. “Taliban Explains Buddha Demolition,” www.nytimes.com/2001/03/19/world/19TALI.html. The Taliban objected to any representation of human or animal form, whether statues or artworks, and carried out similar depredations on objects and paintings in the National Museum of Afghanistan.

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.   At least one of the girls remained in the shelter even more than a year later, as of early 2015, according to sources in the Bamiyan provincial government. Their names are changed for their protection.

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.   “It’s actually considered a shame if someone knows the name of your wife,” said Wazhma Frogh, an Afghan women’s activist with the Research Institute for Women, Peace & Security. “No one is allowed to ask this. We are considered the property of the father, husband, brother—even your younger brother has the right of ownership over you. You are not a person, you are the wife of a person, the sister of a person. We are not considered as human beings in our own rights.”

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.   One popular joke goes like this: There’s a knock on a mullah’s door, and he opens it to see his daughter standing there crying. “What’s the matter?” he asks. She tells him her husband has been beating her. Immediately he slaps her in the face and orders her to go home. Then he calls her husband and berates him for beating his daughter. “I got even with you, though,” he said. “I smacked your wife. How do you like that?”

2: DEAD FATHER’S DAUGHTER

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.   Hazarajat refers to the central highlands of Bamiyan and neighboring provinces, where Hazara people predominate. Some other remote northern areas such as Badakhshan Province in the far northeast were also free of Taliban control during that period.

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.   The Hazaras were subjected to a campaign of massacres in the nineteenth century, which they describe as a genocide, followed by their widespread enslavement by the dominant Pashtuns. The Taliban are mostly Pashtuns. Hazaras have long been Afghanistan’s underclass, but their status has only recently begun to change. See www.hazara.net/hazara/history/slavery.html.

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.   Although education was free, having children in school is costly to farm families because of the reduced labor force.

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.   Because of the dubious Afghan belief in the religious sanctity of the burqa, it can actually be risky for foreign women to wear it, as some of my female colleagues do in dangerous parts of the country. Wearing it is an effective disguise only from a good distance. Afghans are quick to spot foreigners in burqas, either from their shoes or by how they carry themselves in such an unfamiliar garment. Similarly, male suicide bombers who have tried to dress in a burqa to get close to a target are usually quickly spotted by Afghan guards. Afghan men often boast that they can tell if a woman is beautiful, even when she is wearing a burqa.

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.   The
Night of the Lovers
program’s Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/arman.fm/videos.

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.   The
Night of the Lovers
program had been running for sixteen months when he was interviewed in June 2015, airing close to a thousand love stories, of which only ten were happy ones—1 percent.

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.   Of the 176 prisoners in Badam Bagh Prison in November 2014, according to Qazi Parveen of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, 75 to 85 percent of them are convicted or charged with moral crimes. Seven of the prisoners are pregnant, three have given birth since their incarceration, and forty small children are living with their mothers in the prison. When I visited Badam Bagh on November 14, 2014, the population that day, according to inmate rolls provided by the officials on duty, included seventy-six adultery cases, twenty-two cases of runaways, seven cases of alcohol consumption, and five cases of attempted adultery, or about 65 percent moral cases. Note the runaway charges, despite the abolition, in the EVAW law of 2009, of the charge of running away from home.

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.   Official figures on drug use among the Afghan security forces have shown that from 12 to 41 percent of Afghan National Police recruits test positive for illegal drugs, usually hash or opiates. Figures among army soldiers are lower but still worrisome.
New York Times,
May 16, 2010, p. A4, “Sign of Afghan Addiction May Also Be Its Remedy,” www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/world/asia/17afghan.html.

10
.   Desertion has been the bane of the Afghan military, which loses a third of its force annually to attrition, including casualties, failure to reenlist, and especially desertion, which is so common that the government does not dare to criminalize it. See
New York Times,
Oct. 16, 2012, p. A1, “Afghan Army’s Turnover Threatens U.S. Strategy.” Further data on attrition can be found in the Brookings Afghanistan Index, www.brookings.edu/~/media/Programs/foreign-policy/afghanistan-index/index20150520.pdf?la=en.

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.   A good summary of the EVAW law’s provisions is available in this report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, “A Long Way to Go,” Nov. 2011, www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/AF/UNAMA_Nov2011.pdf.

14
.   UNICEF, “Monitoring the Situation of Women and Children,” May 2015. By age fifteen, 15 percent of Afghan girls are married; 40 percent are married before age eighteen. The legal age of marriage under Af-ghan law is sixteen. See http://data.unicef.org/child-protection/child-marriage.

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.   Khadija’s husband, Mohammad Hadi, now lives in Kabul, where he married again at age twenty-three, and says he is not sure whether Khadija was killed or whether she might have escaped from her family; he is reluctant to believe the worst and still loves her, he said. Unfortunately, Mohammad’s family was under such threat after the controversy over their marriage that they all relocated to Kabul around the same time that Khadija disappeared.

“She had a lot of courage, she was courageous enough to escape, but we had to flee our home, and she wouldn’t know where to find me,” Mohammad said. He still hopes that one day Khadija will find him and says his new wife is no impediment. “If she came back, I would live with them both,” he said. Marrying up to four wives is legal under shariah law, and having two wives is not uncommon in Afghanistan.