What (Afghan) women want

They want peace. This op-ed could stop with those three words and still be essentially complete. Ninety-five percent of Afghan women dream, hope, and pray for peace 95 percent

of the time.

Women are the silent partners in Afghanistan’s 23-year catastrophe. Except for statements from spokeswomen of dedicated but unrepresentative exile groups (see below) and snippets of coverage from refugee camps, we’ve heard nothing from Afghan women – and not only because of the new Islamism (see below).

Instead, over and over again, we hear from Afghan men, many of them constructive and sagacious. But this too must be said about men, at least about the hordes of young men (from, say, 16 to 26) all over the “underdeveloped” world: War is preferable to a “peace” whose day-to-day themes are boredom, poverty, and frustrated expectations. We’ve seen that wild gleam in the eyes of young, newly armed, but otherwise unempowered Hutus, Hazaras, Kashmiris and Kosovars. Compared to peace with neither satisfaction nor stimulus, war is fun. In some ways even more fun than sex, especially where Islam forbids sex to unmarried males. So grab your hand-held rocket launchers! (Note that these phallic symbols par excellence are mostly Western manufactured.) Come on, guys. Let’s get ready to rumble.

Women everywhere know better. Here’s why more power should be entrusted to them, especially to those who, in pursuit of power, haven’t become imitation men on the order of Margaret Thatcher. The women of Afghanistan, more continuously over the past quarter century than anywhere else of earth, have known war’s horrors first-hand. They have been killed, maimed, raped, starved, orphaned, widowed, left to bury their children, and – until last week – brutally repressed by the Taliban. They want peace.

But there’s a potentially troublesome rub. Ninety-five percent of Afghan women don’t want that peace threatened – if, indeed, it can be achieved in the first place – by what we know as feminist reform. The modern Western model of femininity, so long in gaining acceptance here and now so valuable, may appeal to a tiny segment of Afghan women in exile. It may attract the support of Mavis Leno and the Feminist Majority whose justified outrage exceeds their knowledge of Afghan history.

It may also wreck hopes for peace and solid reform in Afghanistan. It has done so twice before, decisively

In the audience three weeks ago on Rome’s Capitoline Hill was a handsome gray-haired woman who introduced herself after my talk. At first I couldn’t believe it: “Princess India,” the daughter of Amanullah who in 1919 was the first Afghan to be crowned “king” and who fled Afghanistan ten years later in the face of bloody revolt. The cause of conflict? Amanullah tried to modernize too much too quickly. In particular, he tried by written fiat to change the unwritten cultural understandings which have traditionally surrounded gender in Afghanistan. Back from a heady voyage to Europe, Amanuallah called for unveiling and co-education. Other factors contributed to his downfall, but none was more symbolically damning than these abrupt proposals. Whatever their political correctness nowadays, they struck at the heart of what was then – and, mostly, still is – the basic, age-old Afghan concept of female propriety.

Amanullah never returned to Afghanistan. Princess India, born in exile, has never been to Kabul. Modernization in general was stopped dead in its tracks. Liberalization of gender custom was set back exactly thirty years. Not until 1959 did the women of Zahir Shah’s family stun the country and begin a slow trend by appearing unveiled on Independence Day in August 1959.

That trend, albeit sure for the next two decades, went very slowly indeed. By the mid-1970s (and thus on the eve of chaos) only a slim fraction of Afghan women wore Western clothes and lived modern, public lives. Even in Kabul they were a minority. In the provinces the only unveiled women were a few professionals (teachers and health care providers) and poor peasants and nomads whose manual labor required freedom of vision and movement. Otherwise women wore the burqa outside home. Less than 10 percent of Afghan women were literate. Only four women were ever elected to public office.

Time now for a fact seldom admitted among American watchers of Afghanistan: The great moment for female opportunity came – are you ready? – under Soviet-sponsored communism. Decree No. 7 of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was promulgated on October 17, 1978 – six short months after the leftist-coup which started the current and still far-from-quelled sequence of violent conflicts. Its aim: to ensure “equality of rights of women with men in all social, economic, political, cultural, and civic aspects.” Its provisions included restriction on bride price, prohibition on forced marriage, and establishment of minimum age for marriage partners.

Successive Afghan communist regimes (1978-1992) struggled to increase educational and occupation opportunities for women. All for the good, most of us would agree, but all in vain. Communism failed in Afghanistan not only because of the incredibly courageous Afghan Resistance (largely financed by the United States) but also because of the manner and content of communism’s proposed reforms. Like Amanullah, the Soviet puppets went too far, too fast, and too ineptly. But let’s be honest: For apolitical women who simply wanted a modern, comparatively liberated life, Kabul was at its all-time best during the communist 1980s.

Some of the women who remember those days have banded together in exile. They are not – repeat not – communists; most never were. Rather they were and are women trying to live a freer life than previously possible. For them, at least with respect to personal liberties, the 1992 mujahedin capture of Kabul from Najibullah, the last communist ruler (desperately trying to transform himself into a nationalist), was more disaster than victory.

Hence the blanket condemnation by today’s Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women (RAWA) of both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance (which it calls “Jihadis”). RAWA regards both as equally Islamist and thus equally repugnant in terms of gender philosophy.

The truth is otherwise: While both groups are grounded in Islamist philosophy, the Taliban have been infinitely harder on women. I will never forget my visit last April to a struggling but determined and basically secular school for adolescent girls supported by the Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani (as this piece is written, yet again the boss of Kabul). Rabbani may be “Islamist,” but he was four-square behind that inspired, remarkable school. Some leaders of the Northern Alliance, notably the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, are not Islamist at all. Forget prayer;

Dostum’s after raw power.

Back to RAWA and a sample of its rhetoric:

We are resolved never to lower the glorious banner of “Freedom, Democracy and Women’s Rights”. As is evident from its name, RAWA believes that attainment of even a portion of the aims and objectives it has set for itself will be no less than a veritable “revolution” in a country like Afghanistan. We are proud to be combatants in such a revolutionary women’s army.

Afghanistan can’t now afford another “veritable revolution.” Peace (keenest desire of 95 percent of Afghan women) would be its first victim. Time out! It’s a fine and significant thing that this past week’s Bonn conference included prominent Afghan women. So it should. But what the country needs now, more than anything else, is political stability and ideological moderation. Please note that “moderation” must be defined within the Afghan, not the Western, ideological spectrum. What’s desired by RAWA and Ms. Leno and other advocates of radical feminist reform is infinitely far from the minds of most Afghan women. An immediate feminist agenda, no matter how laudable in the Western abstract, would tear Afghanistan apart yet again, and rob Afghan women of what they really want.

Translation into policy: Concentrate on providing education for girls and young women. Don’t force their parents to send them to school, but have the schooling available. Likewise don’t require the burqa, but don’t ban it either. Stress stability and moderation. Peace, time, education, Afghan good sense, and inevitably greater exposure to the world – these (rather than sudden, alien feminism) will give Afghan women what they want. Not only now but in the future.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.