The Lovers (52 page)

3
.   Eurasia.net online news report, Aug. 25, 2011, www.eurasianet.org/node/64092. The leaked State Department cable can be found at https://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/12/06DUSHANBE2191.html.

4
.   Piedras Negras, Mexico; Doha, Qatar; and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, all have bigger flags than Tajikistan. See www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-flag-flown.

5
.   Under Tajikistan’s laws “Refugee Status Determinations” are not made by UNHCR, as is normally done in most countries, but rather by the Tajik government, in effect, operating through the Rights and Prosperity NGO under the pretense that the organization is independent of the government, which it is not. That allows the Tajik authorities to greatly limit how many refugees are given legal status, and it also provides them with much greater opportunities for extortion and abuse of asylum seekers and refugees.

6
.   UNHCR officials were aware of the problem with refugee applications in Tajikistan, said Babar Baloch, a spokesman. “In some instances asylum seekers may face harassment, arbitrary detention, and deportation. We have raised these concerns with the Tajik authorities in line with UNHCR’s mandate and remain actively engaged to support Tajikistan in applying asylum procedures according to the 1951 Refugee Convention and within the adopted Tajik refugee law.”

14: A DOG WITH NO NAME

1
.   
Takfiri
is an epithet used to refer to extremist Sunnis who accuse Shias of being apostates and not true Muslims. Besides the Taliban, other
takfiris
include the Islamic State, or ISIS, and Al-Qaeda extremists.

2
.   Afghanistan had a birthrate of 3.88 percent in 2014. See
CIA World Factbook,
Afghanistan, available online at www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/af.html.

3
.   See the website of Development and Support of Afghan Women and Children Organization at http://dsawco.org/eng.

4
.   
New York Times,
Mar. 9, 2015, p. A7, “Back in Afghanistan Modern Romeo and Juliet Face Grave Risks,” www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/world/back-in-afghanistan-modern-romeo-and-juliet-face-grave-risks.html.

5
.   
New York Times,
Oct. 20, 2014, p. A6, “Bartered Away at Age 5, Now Trying to Escape to a Life She Chooses,” www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/world/asia/times-video-presents-to-kill-a-sparrow.html. This is not the same Soheila as the girl from Kabul who eloped to Pakistan, discussed earlier in this chapter. Both use only one name.

6
.   Her family considered her married at age five, but consummation of the marriage would not take place until after the wedding ceremony, when she had reached legal age; in many families that would happen after puberty, although in Soheila’s case it was to be at age sixteen, the country’s legal age of consent. That also enabled the family to deny in court that she had been illegally married at age five. And it guaranteed the other side that she could not back out of the arrangement when she got older, because in the eyes of Islam, in their view, she was already legally married.

7
.   Healthy life expectancy in Afghanistan is 48.5 years for men, 46 years for women, according to the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index for 2014 at http://hdr.undp.org/en/con tent/human-development-index-hdi.

8
.   Center for Investigative Reporting,
To Kill a Sparrow,
video at http://cironline.org/feature/kill-sparrow.

9
.   Nobody ever thought to show Soheila the Iranian filmmaker’s video; apparently miffed by restrictions imposed on her filming, Ms. Soleimani left any actual mention of Women for Afghan Women out of it, even though the group had saved both Soheila and her husband from prison, won her legal case, sheltered her for four years during threats and attacks, and finally made it possible for them to marry officially and formally. The young woman first saw it, downloaded on an iPhone, when I interviewed her in WAW’s offices. At first she was entranced and interested, though stunned to see how young she’d been when the filming started in the shelter—realizing how much of her youth she’d spent there, protected from her father and brother but not really free. She watched from behind a veil pulled mostly across her face, for modesty and in an attempt to hide her emotions. There is a very touching scene early on when her father, Rahimullah, having put her in prison, along with her young child, with his bogus accusations of bigamy and adultery, comes to visit her there. While playing with his grandson, then a toddler, he talks fulsomely about how Islam decrees that daughters should obey their fathers, who are the only ones who can choose their mates for them. As he plays with her son, it’s as if she were seeing what might have been if her father had something more than misogyny in his heart, and she wept. Later her father demanded that she kill her son if she wanted to reconcile with the family. Then her half brother Aminullah appears on the screen vowing to kill her. She pushed the phone aside in disgust and refused to watch any more.

See also
New York Times,
Times Video,
To Kill a Sparrow,
www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/world/asia/times-video-presents-to-kill-a-sparrow.html.

EPILOGUE

1
.   The Persian year 1394 began on March 21, 2015.

THE JIHAD AGAINST WOMEN

1
.   Every important local official in the country, from the governors of the more than three hundred districts to the police chiefs in rural provinces, was appointed in Kabul and still is.

2
.   Amanullah Khan’s reign is discussed in more detail in chapter 7. See also Abdullah Qazi, Afghanistan Online, Apr. 24, 2011, “Plight of the Afghan Woman, Afghan Women’s History,” www.afghan-web.com/woman/afghanwomenhistory.html.

3
.   Afghan airlines now use mostly foreign women or men as flight attendants.

4
.   George Crile,
Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). Reissued as
Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times
(New York: Grove Press, 2007).

5
.   See the website of Afghanistan National Institute of Music at www.afghanistannationalinstituteofmusic.org.

6
.   See the website of Razia’s Ray of Hope Foundation, “Women and Girls in Afghanistan,” at https://raziasrayofhope.org/women-and-girls-in-afghanistan.html. The World Bank’s website, at http://datatopics.world bank.org/gender/country/afghanistan, says that 17.8 percent of workers in nonagricultural sectors are women, but that is based on statistics from the 1990s, and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs of the Afghan government says it does not have current data for female nonagricultural employment, which seems implausible. More than three-fourths of women are agricultural laborers, nearly all of them unpaid, whereas among men half of those who work on farms receive pay for doing so, according to World Bank and UN data. My own impression from regularly seeing workers heading out of their workplaces in Kabul, where working women are more numerous than elsewhere, is that fewer than 10 percent of urban workers are female, even in the capital. See also Ministry of Women’s Affairs and United Nations Development Program monograph, “Women and Men in Afghanistan, Baseline Statistics on Gender,” 2008, p. 32
,
www.refworld.org/pdfid/4a7959272.pdf.

7
.   In December 2014 a suicide bomber struck a concert that Dr. Sarmast’s students were staging at the French Institute in Kabul; the Taliban later announced that he had been the target. The concert had been called “Heart-beat: Silence after the Explosion” and was intended to be a condemnation of suicide bombing. One person was killed, a German in the audience. Dr. Sarmast’s hearing was damaged in the blast, but he went back to teaching and running the music institute, in between surgeries on his ears. See BBC News online, Dec. 11, 2014, “Kabul suicide bomber attacks French school during show,” www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30431830. See also Sune Engel Rasmussen,
Guardian,
May 25, 2015, “He was the saviour of Afghan music. Then a Taliban bomb took his hearing,” www.the guardian.com/world/2015/may/25/he-was-the-saviour-of-afghan-music-then-a-taliban-bomb-took-his-hearing.

8
.   Sergey, the Russian POW, human mine detector, and mujahideen rape victim, was seriously wounded in the blast but not killed; the bomb he tripped was intended to maim. Mines that kill remove one person from the battlefield; those that maim remove three, the victim and two people to carry him out. The maimed victims are also a demoralizing advertisement to their comrades.

To their credit, the muj did evacuate Sergey for medical treatment that saved his life. They said he deserved as much for having told them the truth, that he had not known where the mines had been put.

9
.   Global Rights, Mar. 2008, “Living with Violence: A National Report on Domestic Abuse in Afghanistan.” This large-scale survey of Afghan women, mostly married women, the most comprehensive ever carried out, revealed that 11.2 percent of them had been raped, 17.2 percent had suffered sexual violence, 39.3 percent had been beaten by their husbands within the previous year, 58.8 percent were in forced marriages (arranged marriages to which they objected or that took place when they were underage), 73.9 percent had suffered psychological abuse from their spouse, and 87.2 percent had been subjected to either physical, sexual, or psychological abuse. See www.globalrights.org/Library/Women%27s%20rights/Living%20with%20Violence%20Afghan.pdf.

10
.   Ibid., p. 17.

11
.   U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994–2010, Special Report,” Mar. 2013, www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvsv9410.pdf.

12
.   United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, report of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, Apr. 2015, “Justice Through the Eyes of Afghan Women,” https://goo.gl/RhsrTS. See also Ministry of Women’s Affairs, Afghanistan, Mar. 2014, “First Report on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) Law in Afghanistan,” http://goo.gl/DgrYPb.

13
.   United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences,” May 23, 2012, pp. 73–75, www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Women/A.HRC.20.16_En.pdf.

14
.   Office of the President, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Press Release, May 30, 2015, “President Ghani: Women’s Rights Shall Not Be Compromised for Peace,” http://president.gov.af/en/news/47135. See also Sune Engel Rasmussen,
Guardian,
Nov. 6, 2014, “Rula Ghani, the Woman Making Waves as Afghanistan’s New First Lady,” www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/rula-ghani-afghan-first-lady.

15
.   Afghanistan during the two Karzai administrations had only three other women cabinet ministers: Husn Banu Ghazanfar, women’s-affairs minister, who was unmarried; Soraya Dalil, public-health minister; and Amina Afzali, youth minister.

16
.   Margherita Stancati,
Wall Street Journal,
July 5, 2013, online, “Afghan Women Fear Rights Slipping Away,” www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324853704578587491774651104.

17
.   Dr. Massouda Jalal, Asia Society, “Women’s Leadership in Afghanistan’s Reconstruction,” Sept. 8, 2005, http://asiasociety.org/womens-leadership-afghanistans-reconstruction.

18
.   The Afghan EVAW law is detailed in the English-language brochure
Know Your Rights and Duties: The Law on the Elimination of Violence against Women,
Aug. 1, 2009, www.humanitarianresponse.info/system/files/documents/files/Know%20Your%20Rights%20and%20Duties%20-%20The%20Law%20on%20Elimination%20of%20Violence%20 Against%20Women%20(English),%20IDLO.pdf.

19
.   The same year that the EVAW law was enacted, Mr. Karzai also enacted a law limiting the rights of Shia women. See Human Rights Watch, “Law Curbing Women’s Rights Takes Effect,” Aug. 13, 2009, www.hrw.org/news/2009/08/13/afghanistan-law-curbing-women-s-rights-takes-effect.