By Nasema Zeerak (5 August 2020)
Human rights advocates and feminists around the world are worried about the exclusion of Afghan women in the intra-Afghan negotiations and the possible subsequent return of women’s rights violations at the hands of the Taliban, if not meaningfully represented at the table. Contrary to the dominant narrative, violations of women’s rights in Afghanistan predate the Taliban regime and can be traced back to the Saur Revolution and the consequent occupation by the Soviet Union in 1978.
It is maintained that the Taliban’s emergence and the implementation of their brutal Sharia law were in the face of mass abuses carried out by the Soviet Union soldiers.[1] With the Soviet withdrawal, the resulting civil war, and the absence of comprehensive accountability measures, the Taliban took control and started their own interpretation of Sharia law in the face of civil war and lawlessness, destroying the modern concept of human rights. It was not until 2001 that the international community and the United States listened to the plights of Afghan women and intervened in Afghanistan under the banner of democracy and liberating Afghan women.
In this article, I argue that Afghan women’s rights have been politicized by many different actors at different times, resulting in their victimization and suffering. In particular, the failure of the United States’ in acknowledging its role in enabling the violations of Afghan women’s rights, but later co-opting it to first justify the military intervention, and then sustain it over time.
I make my point by illustrating how Afghan women’s rights were violated well before 2001 for two decades before the US-led coalition intervened. I further present the “Afghan Women’s Writing Project” as a case study which was initiated in 2010 when there was a lack of support for military intervention in Afghanistan to garner support in the western world for continuing the military intervention. In the second part of the essay, I discuss how rendering the Taliban as the only violators of women’s rights overlook other reasons behind the violations of women’s rights.
Politicization of Afghan Women’s Rights at the Onset of Saur Coup D’état
The realities for Afghan women before the Taliban are thought to be the few black and white photos of women in short skirts sitting in university class rooms;[2] however, this is far from reality. Afghan women faced massive rights abuse well before the Taliban, during the coup and the Soviet invasion, at the hands of many different factions.
More importantly, Afghanistan has always had a group of elite women who belonged to the royalty and represented a very tiny population of the country that marched towards modernization. In fact, they often faced resistance from rural tribal leaders who contested the women empowerment rhetoric of elites in the capital and other cities. Consequently, most Afghan women who lived in rural areas often faced oppression.
In 1972 the Soviet Union-backed People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), while gaining momentum in an attempt to overthrow the then government of Afghanistan, started utilizing women’s right to gain support from the elite groups in Kabul.[3] Among other violations against women, PDPA members engaged in the superficial promotion of women entertainers – that went against traditional Afghan culture- and forced literacy courses for Afghan women as a way to highlight their women’s empowerment façade and justify their support for the Soviet Union influence in the country.
In reality, the emancipation-liberation of women from “enslavement” of men and from traditional boundaries and stereotypes has always been an important part of the Soviet propaganda in the Muslim dominated parts of the USSR. Soviet officials often emphasized “the emancipation of Central Asian women from patriarchal structure both in public and private spheres of life,” although their “policies were shaped by the survival motivation of the regime”.[4]
After their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Soviet-installed regime made many reforms that were accompanied by fascist attempts to stifle indigenous opposition to the occupation.[5] It was also around this time that the Soviet-backed government started highlighting women’s empowerment as their public-facing strategy in modernizing Afghanistan. They focused on high numbers of women’s enrollment in universities and ignored low men’s enrollment due to the mass exodus to escape communist execution and oppression.[6]
The opposition, the mujahideen, that was fueled in the face of rising repression was funded and supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia to counter the Soviet influence.[7] The mujahideen rejected the Soviet Union’s reforms, in particular, their focus on women’s empowerment, and to counter it, they attacked women’s rights.[8]
On the other hand, the United States and Saudi Arabia were funneling sophisticated weaponry to the mujahideen ignoring their radical ideology and the attack on women’s rights.[9] For instance, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the opposition groups’ leaders funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was known for throwing acid on the faces of Afghan women who refused to wear the veil.[10]
In 1989, with the Soviet withdrawal, and the increased mujahideen control over Afghanistan, Afghan women were dramatically impacted by what followed. Among other atrocities committed at the hands of mujahideen, they introduced new laws for Afghan women including the requirement that women must be veiled.[11] By 1993, there were reports of rape and ill-treatment of Afghan women by the CIA-backed mujahideen that were considered unprecedented in Afghanistan.[12]
This was four years after the Soviet withdrawal, and the United States and Saudi Arabia continued funding the mujahideen that targeted the Afghans they were purportedly protecting.[13] The darkest era for Afghan women began with the emergence of the Taliban from a select group of mujahideen who had their own extreme interpretation of Islam and Pashtunwali.
The United States remained silent despite the mounting rights’ abuse and continued to support them.[14] In 1994, the Taliban captured Herat and closed girls’ schools throwing thousands of girls out of school. They continued gaining power, and in 1996 took over Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Among other harsh policies, they introduced a complete removal of women from public life.[15]
This was a direct result of Saudi Arabia’s financial and ideological backing, besides the mushrooming of hundreds of madrasas in borders areas of Pakistan, as they wanted to expand their ultra-conservative versions of Islam.
There is consensus among scholars that if it was not for the extension of the Cold War in Afghanistan, the Taliban, the oppressors of Afghan women, would not have emerged.[16] Caught up in between the rivalry of the Soviet Union and the United States, Afghanistan was used as a battleground and women’s rights as a political tool.
The “War on Terror” Under the Guise of “Unveiling Afghan Women”
Research shows that the US military is more likely to engage in a campaign to protect human rights than for security reasons, such as threats to democracy or terrorist activity.[17]Additionally, public support for military intervention can be garnered comparatively easily if it is to protect civilians and human rights.[18] This was exemplified by the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, after the horrific 9/11 attack.
As Flanders argued, the US façade of supporting Afghan women was a “feminist glow on some of the most brutal bombings of the 2001 campaign”.[19] Much like before, Afghan women’s rights became a tool for the U.S. government to garner national support to justify military intervention.[20] Specifically, it was the blue burqa that became the center of focus, implicitly suggesting that the burqa was the worst that had happened to the Afghan women, and now they had a choice to remove it.
The Bush administration failed to acknowledge the role of the US in supporting and nurturing the Taliban, the oppressors of Afghan women; and started the campaign of “unveiling” Afghan women ignoring the context within which Afghan women’s rights were being abused. By doing so, the US government placed the Taliban as the only culprits of Afghan women’s oppression, rendering the complex needs and issues of women invisible.[21]
In the years that followed, there was an unmatched momentum in proclaiming to restore the Afghan women’s dignity and facilitating the full realization of their rights by US-funded projects and western feminists. However, the majority of the projects remained focused on invoking certain women’s stories to justify their continued military intervention. This approach, unfortunately, continued many years after 2001.
Afghan Women Writing Project (AWWP)
Fernandes has argued that the U.S. government has long coupled soft power strategies, such as storytelling, along with geopolitical strategy as a foreign policy tool to pursue their economic and political interests in the region.[22] This is exemplified by the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP), a series of online creative writing workshop conducted by US-based mentors with Afghan women in the English language.
While the focus of the project was to enable Afghan women to share their stories in an authentic way featuring women who have overcome oppression through education, the stories were narrated and evoked keeping western women in mind showing Afghan women as passive and silent victims.[23]What is critical to note about the project is the timing, as Fernandes has highlighted, the project was funded by the U.S. Department of State, in the aftermath of Dutch troop withdrawal in 2010.[24] The confidential memo by the CIA calling for using empathy as a weapon was released in 2010 by Wikileaks as following:
Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.[25]
It was also in July 2010 that The Time magazine published the cover-story of 18-year old Aisha with the headline “What happens if we leave Afghanistan”.[26] Much like the AWWP project, this cover-story depicting Afghan women as passive victims implicates the Taliban as the only abusers of Afghan women’s rights and encourages responses of rescue by outsiders rather than a critical analysis of US military engagement.
Further, Afghan women’s black and white photographs in miniskirts from the 1970s were shown to the President of United States, Donald Trump, in 2017 by his national security advisor in an effort to convince him not to pull out troops from Afghanistan.[27] The photos were meant to highlight that Afghan women were free during the Soviet invasion and that defeating the Taliban could ultimately result in reversing that period.
In invoking stories that showed Afghan women as vulnerable and fantasizing about the modern liberal West, the United States not only garnered support to stay engaged militarily but also reproduce structural conditions of the subjection of Afghan women rather than challenging them. Portraying Afghan women as passive and voiceless further victimized them which reflected “treating symptoms”.[28] The structural foundations on which the violations of Afghan women’s rights are based on are not only the Taliban but the destruction of the social fabric and cultural framework in four decades of war and violence.[29]
The Perpetuation of Women’s Human Rights Violations
The Bonn conference that was very critical for the establishment of the present-day Republic of Afghanistan brought together the United States and their allied mujahideen – except those like Hekmatyar who had switched sides in the 1990s – implicated with grave human rights violations, to reach an agreement. Excluding the civil society and women’s groups from the process, the conference granted impunity to all the former mujahideen for their past crimes.[30]
As Berry has argued, the US administration failed Afghan women by enabling and empowering ex-mujahideen members to co-opt the political process while dismissing the outcry of Afghan.[31] This process, coupled with the presence of perpetrators of human rights violations in key government positions, “perpetuation of state-sponsored misogyny”.[32] She has further argued that the presence of militarized masculinities and injection of aid to reconstruct the country has rather resulted in the emergence of insecurities for Afghan women signifying new forms of sexual violence.[33]
Additionally, the aid has failed to deal with the institutionalized misogyny that is embodied by the ex-mujahideen members in positions of power that had surfaced during the Taliban era.[34] In the face of institutionalized violence and abuse, women feeling hopeless and with no prospect for the end of the war has turned to self-immolation and suicide which is a new practice in the face of lawlessness post-2001. Scholars have interpreted Afghan women’s self-immolation as a symbolic way of ending their lives.[35] Self-immolation, a violent act, is used as a means of both escaping their misery and speaking out against abuse.
Afghan Women’s Rights and Their Inclusion in the Peace Negotiations
Amidst the current talks about the intra-Afghan negotiations with the Taliban, it has been repeatedly called on by rights advocates and feminists to safeguard women’s rights and include Afghan women in the peace process to prevent the return of harsh policies of the erstwhile Taliban regime for Afghan women. An example of this is the bipartisan congressional dialogue with Rep. Susan Davis and Rep. Martha Roby at the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) in October 2019.[36] In this dialogue, Afghan women were not only portrayed as passive, but it was also stated that the freedom Afghan women experience today has resulted in large part from the U.S-led coalition involvement.
Implicit in this narrative is the suggestion that the United States is the liberator of Afghan women and the Taliban are the sole perpetrators’ rights abuse. This damaging narrative is not only misleading, portraying Afghan women as weak, but also overlooks the United States’ role in creating the conditions for rights violation at the onset of the Soviet invasion as well as its own role in the perpetuation of women’s rights abuses through the continuous culture of impunity, resulting in institutionalized misogyny.
To facilitate the full realization of Afghan women’s rights, it must be acknowledged that the Taliban are not the only culprits of women’s oppression and their removal in 2001 was not the new dawn for rights. While the inclusion of Afghan women in the peace negotiations will be a way forward, it will not be the end of women’s journey in realizing the full potential of their rights. For as long as the institutionalized misogynistic culture and the culture of impunity are in place, Afghan women’s rights will continue to be violated. Hence, one must be skeptical of invocations of women’s rights and women’s roles as it relates to the peace negotiations.
Focusing solely on the inclusion of Afghan women in the peace negotiations can serve as a distortion from other serious enablers of women’s rights abuse. In light of the inclusion of women in peace negotiations, the protection pillar can be co-opted to continuously portray women as weak victims that need to be saved, resulting in the perpetuation of the negative self-image and suffering for Afghan women.
Supporting Afghan women to gain their rights requires an honest account of the history and how their rights and roles were abused by different parties to make advances in their political agenda both by internal and external actors at different times. While the United States wants to leave, it is important to prevent women’s rights from becoming a tool in the hands of internal and external actors yet again.
Afghan women’s rights and the continued violations against them must be viewed in the context of the broader conflict, and the United States’ support for the most extreme fundamentalist groups, and the institutionalized misogyny. It is important to protect Afghan women’s rights not only from the Taliban, and their interpretation of Sharia law but also from being politicized in the hands of other actors for political advances, as I have illustrated in this article.
(Nasema Zeerak is a candidate in the MSc in Conflict Resolution and Management of Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego. She writes on human rights, transitional justice, and the peace process in Afghanistan. Views expressed are personal.)
REFERENCES
[1] Rangelov, I., & Theros, M. (2019) Political functions of impunity in the war on terror: Evidence from Afghanistan, Journal of Human Rights, 18:4, 403-418, DOI: 10.1080/14754835.2019.1629889
[2]Sarkar, M. (2015). Unveiled: Afghan women past and present. CNN. Retrieved from: https://www.cnn.com/2014/06/05/asia/gallery/afghan-women-past-present/index.html
[3] Samar, S. (2019). Feminism, Peace, and Afghanistan. Journal of International Affairs, 72(2), 145-158. Retrievedfromhttps://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/feminism-peace-and-afghanistan
[4]ÖzDöm, Özge. (2018). Muslim women in soviet Central Asia. TarihIncelemeleriDergisi, 91-116. DOI: 10.18513/egetid.443313
[5] Kolhatkar, S (2002), “The Impact of U.S. Intervention on Afghan Women’s Rights”. Berkeley Women’s LawJournal, 17: 12-30. Retrieved from:https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1176&context=bglj
[6] Samar, S. (2019). Feminism, Peace, and Afghanistan. Journal of International Affairs, 72(2), 145-158. Retrieved from https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/feminism-peace-and-afghanistan
[7] Ibid.
[8] Deol, Satnam, S, Sandhu, Amandeep, K, (2018), “Diagnosing the First Democratic Regime in Afghanistan:
Human Rights Perspective”, A Research Journal of South Asian Studies, 33, 7-34. Retrieved from:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334391035_Diagnosing_the_First_Democratic_Regime_in_Afghanistan_Human_Rights_Perspective
[9] Berry, K. (2003). The symbolic use of Afghan women in the war on terror. Humboldt Journal of social Relations,27(2), 137-160. Retrieved from: https://genderandsecurity.org/projects-resources/research/symbolic-use-afghan-women-war-terror
[10] Kolhatkar, S (2002), “The Impact of U.S. Intervention on Afghan Women’s Rights”. Berkeley Women’s LawJournal, 17: 12-30. Retrieved from: https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1176&context=bglj
[11] Berry, K. (2003). The symbolic use of Afghan women in the war on terror. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations,27(2), 137-160. Retrieved from: https://genderandsecurity.org/projects-resources/research/symbolic-use-afghan-women-war-terror
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Kolhatkar, S (2002), “The Impact of U.S. Intervention on Afghan Women’s Rights”. Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, 17: 12-30. Retrieved from:https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1176&context=bglj
[15] Women in Afghanistan: the back story. (2014, November 25th). Amnesty International. Retrieved from: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/womens-rights-afghanistan-history
[16] Ibid.
[17] Wibben, A. T. R. (2018). Why we need to study (US) militarism: A critical feminist lens. Security Dialogue, 49(1-2), 136-148. DOI: 10.1177/0967010617742006
[18] Ibid.
[19]Flanders, L. (2001). Beyond the Burqa. Working for Change. Retrieved from: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=12497
[20] Ibid.
[21] Kolhatkar, S (2002), “The Impact of U.S. Intervention on Afghan Women’s Rights”. Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, 17: 12-30. Retrieved from:https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1176&context=bglj
[22] Fernandes, S. (2017). Stories and statecraft: Afghan women’s narratives and the construction of western freedoms. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(3), 643-667. doi:10.1086/689631
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25]ThismemowasreleasedbyWikiLeaksonMarch26,2010, as“CIAReportintoShoring Up Afghan War Support in Western Europe,” https://wikileaks.org/wiki/CIA_report_into _shoring_up_Afghan_war_support_in_Western_Europe,_11_Mar_2010.
[26]Stengal, R. (2010). What happens if we leave Afghanistan? The Times. Retrieved from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2007415,00.html
[27]Eberhardt, R. (2017). “Trump shown photo of Afghan women in miniskirts: report”, The Hill, Retrieved from: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/347446-mcmaster-showed-trump-1970s-photos-of-afghan-women-wearing-miniskirts-in
[28]Kennedy, D. (2002). The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem? Harvard Human Rights Journal. 15: 101-126. Retrieved from: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/15749103
[29]Ibid.
[30] Rangelov, I., &Theros, M. (2019) Political functions of impunity in the war on terror: Evidence from Afghanistan, Journal of Human Rights, 18:4, 403-418, DOI: 10.1080/14754835.2019.1629889
[31] Berry, K. (2003). The symbolic use of Afghan women in the war on terror. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 27(2), 137-160. Retrieved from:https://genderandsecurity.org/projects-resources/research/symbolic-use-afghan-women-war-terror
[32]Ahmad, L., &AnctilAvoine, P. (2018). Misogyny in “post war” Afghanistan: The changing frames of sexual and gender-based violence. Journal of Gender Studies, 27, 86-101.doi:10.1080/09589236.2016.1210002
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Aziz, N. (2011). What self-immolation means to Afghan women. A Journal of Social Justice, 23, 45-51, DOI: 10.1080/10402659.2011.548251
[36]United States Institute for Peace. (2019, October). What’s next for democracy and women’s rights in Afghanistan? [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWypZmxqenc
