Page 3 of 3 Afghan women? Their place is
in the burqa By Ann Jones
remain in force today, side by side with
the new constitution and international documents
that speak of women's rights.
Tune in a
Kabul television station and you'll see evidence
that Afghan women are poised at a particularly
schizophrenic moment in their history. Watching
televised parliamentary sessions, you'll see women
who not only sit side by side with men - a
dangerous, generally forbidden proximity - but
actually rise to argue with
them. Yet who can forget poor
murdered Shaima, the lively, youthful presenter of
a popular TV chat show for young people? Her
father and brother killed her, or so men and women
say approvingly, because they found her job
shameful. Mullahs and public officials issue
edicts from time to time condemning women on
television, or television itself.
Education gap Many people
believe the key to improving life for women, and
all Afghans, is education, particularly because so
many among Afghanistan's educated elite left the
country during its decades of wars. So the
international community invests in education
projects - building schools, printing textbooks,
teaching teachers, organizing literacy classes for
women - and the Bush administration in particular
boasts that 5 million children now go to school.
But that's fewer than half the kids of
school age, and less than a third of the girls.
The highest enrollments are in cities - 85% of
children in Kabul - while in the Pashtun south,
enrollments drop below 20% overall and near zero
for girls. More than half the students enrolled in
school live in Kabul and its environs, yet even
there an estimated 60,000 children are not in
school, but in the streets, working as vendors,
trash-pickers, beggars or thieves.
None of
this is new. For a century, Afghan rulers - from
kings to communists - have tried to unveil women
and advance education. In the 1970s and 1980s,
many women in the capital went about freely,
without veils. They worked in offices, schools,
hospitals. They went to university and became
doctors, nurses, teachers, judges, engineers. They
drove their own cars. They wore Western fashions
and traveled abroad. But when Kabul's communists
called for universal education throughout the
country, provincial conservatives opposed to
educating women rebelled.
Afghan women of
the Kabul elite haven't yet caught up to where
they were 35 years ago. But once again
ultra-conservatives are up in arms. This time it's
the Taliban, back in force throughout the southern
half of the country. Among their tactics: blowing
up or burning schools (150 in 2005, 198 in 2006)
and murdering teachers, especially women who teach
girls. The UN estimates that in four southern
provinces more than half the schools - 380 out of
748 - no longer provide any education at all.
Last September, the Taliban shot down a
middle-aged woman who headed the provincial office
for women's affairs in Kandahar. A few brave
colleagues went back to the office in body armor,
knowing it would not save them. Now, in the
southern provinces - more than half the country -
women and girls stay home.
I blame Bush,
the "liberator" who looked the other way. In 2001,
the US military claimed responsibility for these
provinces, the heart of Taliban country; but
diverted to adventures in the oilfields of Iraq,
it failed for five years to provide the security
international humanitarians needed to do the
promised work of reconstruction.
Afghans
grew discouraged. Last summer, when the US handed
the job to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), British and Canadian "peacekeepers" walked
right into war with the resurgent Taliban. By
year's end, more than 4,000 Afghans were dead -
Taliban, "suspected" insurgents and civilians.
Speaking recently of dead women and children -
trapped between US bombers and NATO troops on the
one hand and Taliban forces backed (unofficially)
by Pakistan on the other - Karzai began to weep.
It's winter in Afghanistan now. No time to
make war. But come spring, the Taliban promise a
new offensive to throw out Karzai and foreign
invaders. The British commander of NATO forces has
already warned: "We could actually fail here." He
also advised a British reporter that Westerners
shouldn't even mention women's rights when more
important things are at stake. As if security is
not a woman's right. And peace.
Come
spring, Afghan women could lose it all.
Ann Jones, who was a
humanitarian-aid worker in Afghanistan
periodically from 2002 to 2006, is the author of
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in
Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006, and soon
to be in paperback). The New York Times described
her book as "a work of impassioned reportage ...
eloquent and persuasive". That's journalese for:
what she saw in Afghanistan really made her mad.
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