BY SONALI KOLHATKAR
The US military campaign in Afghanistan was called Operation Enduring Freedom. In January, US President George Bush said in his State of the Union address, "The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free."
With all this talk of freedom, it is important to ask the question, how are Afghan women enduring US-style freedom? When we think of women's rights in Afghanistan, we think of the imprisonment of the burqa, the traditional Islamic head to foot covering that the Taliban forced women to wear. Bush certainly seems to subscribe to this view.
But many Afghan women wore the burqa before and after the Taliban. In the rural areas of Afghanistan, the majority of women covered themselves. Contrary to what Bush would have us believe, the problems facing Afghan women run far deeper than the type of clothing they wear. Food security, access to healthcare and safety from violence are key aspects of women's rights that the US intervention has largely ignored and in some cases even jeopardised.
Afghanistan's harsh winter returns in November and thousands of Afghans, devastated by three years of drought and 23 years of war and civil unrest, will be facing starvation.
Take the Badghis province of Afghanistan for example — one of the poorest. Roughly 50% of Badghis's population of approximately 400,000 will not obtain enough food this winter. Fatema, a resident of Badghis, doesn't know how she will feed her six children this year. Her 15-year-old son is the only one in the family who can earn any money and he does it by selling grass for fuel and food. Fatema's family is among the millions of displaced persons and refugees that have returned home since the fall of the Taliban.
When Bush announced that Afghan women were free, he assuaged his government's guilt as the bombs rained down on Afghanistan, picking off wedding parties, cutting off crucial winter aid routes, delaying the spring planting of wheat.
But, according to Bush, at least Afghan women can now walk around without a burqa. But what good is an uncovered face if that person is starving to death? Women's rights are human rights: survival is more important than clothing and survival has been the most difficult challenge facing women both before and after the US action in Afghanistan.
Health crisis
A recent report released by the US-based Physicians for Human Rights, (PHR) entitled "Maternal Mortality in Herat Province: The Need to Protect Women's Rights", noted that the rate of maternal mortality in a society is a critical indicator of the health and human rights status of women in a community.
The PHR report documented 593 maternal deaths in every 100,000 live births in Afghanistan, with the majority of the cases in rural areas. This maternal mortality rate is far worse than that experienced in all neighbouring countries. Pakistan suffers the next highest rate, with 200 deaths per 100,000 births. A PHR researcher concluded: "What appears to be simply a public health catastrophe ... speaks of the many years of denial and deprivation of women's rights in Afghanistan."
Widows are an especially vulnerable sector of the Afghan society. In Kabul alone, there are an estimated 40,000 widows who have lost their husbands in the decades of war in Afghanistan. Nationwide, the number of widows is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. An estimated 1.5 million Afghans were killed during the 10-year Soviet occupation and in the crossfire of warlord battles that followed in the early 1990s.
"While the plight of Afghan widows has improved psychologically, the main problems of finding shelter, food and income remain the same", says Awadia Mohamed, the coordinator for CARE International in Afghanistan. "Indeed, in some cases they have worsened."
Widows have very limited access to food and health services despite the absence of the Taliban. "Fifty-one per cent of widows surveyed reported being unwell, of whom 57.6% had fever, 13.6% had diarrhea, and 10% leishmaniasis wounds... Furthermore, calorie intake was insufficient, with most of the women and their children subsisting on little more than bread and tea, resulting in malnutrition problems and micronutrient deficiencies", the PHR report noted.
Hunger and lack of healthcare are indicators of the deprivation of the basic rights of mothers, daughters and widows. Where are the media and their cameras now?
Warlords
Since the Taliban fell, the warlords of the past have returned to their old fiefdoms and resumed what they were doing before the Taliban came to power. According to Agence France-Presse, "Northern Afghanistan remains plagued by factional and ethnic rivalries despite loose allegiances between warlords controlling the area, most of whom have offered pledges of support to the central Afghan government".
The media has failed to highlight that many of these warlords, who joined the Northern Alliance, were first empowered by the United States in the 1980s to repel the Soviet invasion, and then again during the 2001 military campaign to overthrow the Taliban.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) warned last year: "The Taliban and al Qaeda will be eliminated, but the existence of the [Northern Alliance] as a military force would shatter the joyful dream of the majority for an Afghanistan free from the odious chains of barbaric Taliban. The NA will horribly intensify the ethnic and religious conflicts and will never refrain to fan the fire of another brutal and endless civil war in order to remain in power."
Rather than heed the words of RAWA, the US engaged the services of the NA, with the CIA paying many warlords at least $100,000 each to gather armies.
Afghan women desperately want better security for themselves, and families are desperate for security. Even Hamid Karzai, installed as the president of Afghanistan with the USA's blessing, has asked for the International Security Armed Forces (ISAF) to be expanded throughout Afghanistan so that warlords can be disarmed. Instead, the US has been training a national army of Afghans, which is undermined by the fact that Afghan defence minister Mohammed Qasim Fahim himself has a private army of 18,000 men.
In March, the Washington Post published a story, headlined "The girls are back in Afghan schools". One could almost hear the collective sigh of relief across the US — the knowledge that their good war, meant to liberate Afghan women, was working.
But why isn't the media reporting the recent spate of attacks against schools in Afghanistan? Schools have been burned down in Kandahar, Wardak and Sar-i-Pul. In the most recent incident, a gunman forced a school in the Wardak province that served 1300 girls to close. In recent weeks girls' schools have been burned and bombed.
'Saving' Afghan women
It has become axiomatic that the issue of women's rights is always politically manipulated by the powerful, to justify almost anything. In the late 1970s, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and claimed to be "saving" Afghan women. The US backed the mujaheddin, which claimed it was "saving" women from the "godless" communists. These US-designated "freedom fighters" routinely raped women, forced them into marriages and tortured their husbands. The Taliban took over from the mujaheddin, claiming they too would "save" the Afghan women. They forced them to stay at home (for their own good), stop going to school and were denied access to medical care. And finally, George Bush organised a crusade to "save" Afghan women.
It is time to rethink promises made by powerful men to save Afghan women. Afghan women don't need saving. They know perfectly well how to save themselves: the brave work of RAWA in the fields of education, health care, political agitation and demands for secularism, democracy and women's rights is a testament to this.
To express solidarity with Afghan women, we need to understand what affects them, starting with what we are responsible for and have the power to change: the use of bombs and warlords as tools of US policy.
The struggle of Afghan women has been reduced in the US to a simplistic discussion about the burqa. Don the burqa and you're oppressed; take it off and, lo and behold, you're free.
We need to begin treating Afghan women with dignity and not reduce them to a piece of clothing. Afghan women's rights are a crucial part of the equation of Afghanistan. One year since the fall of the Taliban, it is clear that Afghan women are not "free" — they are simply enduring American freedom.
[Sonali Kolhatkar is vice-president of the Afghan Women's Mission, which works closely the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan to support health, educational and other programs for Afghan women.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 4, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.