The Lovers (42 page)

“We women don’t have any other ally than the West, which is not much of an ally anymore,” she said. “We hardly see very strong pressure anymore. Two years ago I was a very strong voice, but now look how much I have been thwarted. I don’t appear in local media. I’ve stopped. I have lost hope. We hardly find any hope anywhere any longer. I’m not even a voice anymore.”
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After the warlord began threatening her, she decided to go to the United States for a few months to let the situation cool off. That March of 2014, however, she was turned down for a visa, because the
consular officer felt she would never come back. He might have been right, although Ms. Frogh denies that. “They give you an award, but they don’t support you when you need them,” she told the Associated Press in March 2014.
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“I always thought that if my government didn’t help me, I would always be able to turn to the United States. I never thought that they would turn their back on me.”

Ms. Frogh’s family was forced to resort to a traditional
jirga
(all male elders in this case) to mediate with the Uruzgan
arbakai
commander; the
jirga
ordered her to give him an offering of goats and cows and publicly ask for his forgiveness.
Arbakai,
the informal militia groups aligned with the government and often used as Afghan Local Police, are notorious for their behavior toward women.

“I was forced to apologize to someone who was ruining my life and, on a daily basis, the lives of other people, including women,” Ms. Frogh said. “If
I
had to apologize to someone who abuses our rights and
I
met the wife of the president of the United States, what hope does an Afghan woman in a village have?” Ms. Frogh’s lament is heard often now from Afghanistan’s women leaders, more than fourteen years after ousting the Taliban.

As she and other women’s leaders know, so many of their accomplishments are illusory. The Ministry of Interior says it is proud, for instance, of the four female generals it now has; the Ministry of Defense boasts another two. Jamila Bayaz, promoted to brigadier general in 2015, became the first female police chief of a district, Police District 1 in Kabul (the station where Mohammad Ali was held).
⁷⁸
Replaced in that job after President Ghani took office, she continued to work as a booster of the government’s efforts to recruit female police and soldiers and to promote women in the ranks. It is a pretty hard sell. Both the police and the Afghan military have failed abysmally to meet their intended enlistment goals; there were only two thousand female police officers and eight hundred female soldiers by late 2014,
⁷⁹
well under 1 percent of their respective forces, and every year since 2011 the government has said it plans to increase that to ten thousand, and every year it never manages to do so. Recruiting more women is important not only for the capacity of the security services to do things like search
women who might be strapped up with explosive vests but also to give women abuse victims someone they can trust not to rape them when they go to the station to make a complaint—something most women will never do out of just that fear.

Like the other female generals, and most other female senior officers, Brigadier General Bayaz joined the police in the Communist era—a detail the American-led international coalition and the Afghan government leave out of their glowing pronouncements about the success of female advancement in the security services. The official announcements also leave out the other three female senior officers who have fled the country in the past few years, including the previous one in charge of female empowerment and gender equality at the Ministry of Interior, Brigadier General Shafiqa Quraishi, who fled Afghanistan in 2012, two years after Secretary of State Clinton awarded her the International Women of Courage Award.
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Brigadier General Bayaz is careful not to mention that she herself applied to the Canadian government for asylum in 2014, according to Western diplomats in Kabul.
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Brigadier General Bayaz would join not only Fatima Kazimi, the Bamiyan women’s ministry head who protected Zakia and later fled to Rwanda and America, but other leading Afghan women who have given up and left. Hassina Sarwari, the head of the women’s shelter in Kunduz, who saved the life of Breshna, the ten-year-old raped by her mullah,
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now wants to flee to the United States and has been talking to lawyers there about doing so. She begged me to intercede for her with the American embassy, but as we’ve seen, I have little influence there, and they have little interest any longer in helping at-risk women to leave. She is also applying for asylum in Germany, and officials in the embassy of that country in Kabul were actively talking to her late in 2014. Afghanistan’s most famous missing person among women’s-rights activists is of course Malalai Joya, the woman who electrified audiences with her fierce opposition to her country’s patriarchs in 2002. She lives in Canada and visits Afghanistan in secrecy from time to time, but rarely appears in public there any longer. She is afraid to be interviewed in person or on the telephone and will take and answer
questions only by e-mail for “security reasons,” according to an anonymous person, reached through her website, who said he or she was the activist’s secretary.
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Ms. Joya has been quoted as saying that she is married but cannot name her husband, for his safety.
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She is no longer a player inside her own country, where she is a forgotten figure. The battered member of parliament, Noor Zia Atmar, has fled to India, where she has so far unsuccessfully applied for asylum to a third country. There now may well be more Afghan women’s activists outside the country than inside it, a trend that would be growing dramatically were it not that most Western embassies have stopped giving visas to Afghan women leaders—the visa-application rejection rate is now over 90 percent at North American and European embassies.
⁸⁵
Brigadier General Bayaz said she was turned down in August 2014, for instance, for a visa to attend a Canadian government-sponsored international symposium on increasing the participation of women in the police forces of developing countries; so much for her role as poster girl for that effort in Afghanistan, but of course the Canadians were probably aware that she was planning to claim asylum and never go back. The head of communications at the American embassy in 2013, the novelist and journalist Masha Hamilton, set the tone when she argued that if we keep helping women leave Afghanistan,
⁸⁶
there would be no one left behind to change things; that is an attitude that is embedded in American visa policy now, but it is not one accompanied any longer by the sort of advocacy and activism on behalf of Afghan women that the United States and its allies once practiced.

By almost any measure, the accomplishments of the international community on behalf of Afghan women have been disappointing, particularly considering the scale of the financial investment and the sweeping promises made back in 2002.

Official numbers, which are greatly exaggerated, say that some 2.5 million girls are in school who were not at the end of the Taliban era.
⁸⁷
Even if it were 2.5 million, that would represent just 37 percent of students, so boys’ enrollment is nearly double that of girls. Half of those girls enrolled will drop out when they reach puberty, usually about seventh grade, mostly because they
are forced to do so by their families. As the result, each year after seventh grade, the numbers of girls being educated dwindles further, until by twelfth grade only 10 percent of the enrolled students are female, according to figures from USAID. I vividly remember touring a show school in Kabul, Sardar Kabuli Girls’ High School, built by USAID at a cost of $27 million (in a country where an adequate, weatherproof school building for a thousand students can be built for half a million dollars), and visiting a class full of thirty or forty twelfth-grade girls. We asked the students how many of them wanted to go on to college, and nearly every hand shot up; that was unsurprising, considering what this 10 percent of Afghan girls must have endured to get as far as they had. Then we asked how many of the girls would be allowed by their families to go on to college, and all but three put their hands back down.

“All major social indicators continue to show a consistent pattern of women’s disempowerment in nearly all dimensions of their lives and Afghanistan remains one of the worst countries in the world to be born female,” the UN Women organization (formerly known as UNIFEM), said in 2014.
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Women remain disproportionately illiterate; 87.4 percent of women are illiterate, compared to 56.9 percent of men. Even among women aged fifteen to twenty-four, who would have come of school age after the Taliban era, when schools were in theory available for them, illiteracy remains at 80 percent.
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For all the official ballyhoo about girls’ schools, the average number of years of education for Afghan females is seven. (This number is based on 2011 figures, the latest available; it may be better today, but not by much.) In many areas the quality of education is so poor that even seven years can leave students functionally illiterate, barely able to sign their own names.

Other indicators are still worse. On the United Nations Development Program’s Gender Inequality Index, Afghanistan in 2013 ranked as the 169th-worst country in the world to be a woman, out of 187 countries studied.
⁹⁰
The year before, it was 149th-worst, so by 2014 it had declined a further twenty ranks. “It is still not
the
worst country in the world to be a woman,” said one Western ambassador in Kabul, the European Union’s Franz-Michael Mellbin.
“Yemen is.” Even that is arguable, but it is still not much of an achievement considering how comparatively little international aid Yemen has received. Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest birthrates among underage girls (86.8 percent) and a maternal-mortality rate of 460 per 100,000 live births,
⁹¹
a rate that has not been seen in developed parts of the world for two centuries.
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The lives of Afghan women are not only nasty and brutish but short; life expectancy for an Afghan woman is forty-four years, compared to forty-eight years for men (according to UN Women),
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which is a significant differential considering that there have been wars going on pretty continuously for the last thirty-five years and nearly all the combatants are male, yet still women live shorter lives on average. (Civilian casualties, including women, have been high, but never as high as casualties among combatants.) This is the state of things after fourteen years of massive international intervention, $104 billion in development aid from the United States alone by 2014, much of it earmarked to women’s programs and gender equality. Counting the military investment, which also had generous gender set-asides, America
⁹⁴
had spent well over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014.
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When General David H. Petraeus was running the Afghan War, he was fond of saying that the American military’s achievements in Afghanistan were “significant, but fragile and reversible.”
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When it comes to the achievements of Afghan women, the same could be said, although perhaps significant but disappointing, extremely fragile, and easily reversible would be a more precise description.

Many Afghan women’s activists have started to come to the conclusion that they went about it all wrong by relying on the international community to save them from their own society. In their personal lives, female activists like Ms. Frogh remain prisoners of their families and the men who run them. “This was the mistake we made,” she said. “There hasn’t been a women’s movement that has challenged what happens inside the home. We couldn’t challenge the relationships and power differences inside our families, so
we live in a kind of double role. Outside the home we are women’s activists. Inside our homes we go to a very different place.” Often a place where they are beaten and abused no matter who they are.

“Women’s activists have all had a terrible time,” said Ms. Koofi.
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“Either they don’t have a husband, like me”—she is a widow—“or they have a mess of a life, with lots of problems on their shoulders. We raise the awareness of women but not the standard of their lives.”

For most Afghan women, leaving is not an option, improved freedom is relative, better conditions are fictional, and the elimination of violence against them is more of an aspiration than a legal reality. Zakia has so far been more fortunate than most Afghan women. Most of them have had no practical legal protection under the EVAW law,
⁹⁸
and most of them lead lives unchanged by the trillion-dollar international juggernaut visited upon their country.

More typical are women like twenty-six-year-old Fatima.
⁹⁹
In 2014, Kabul lawyer Sher Saeedi took on her case, referred to him by friends of friends. Fatima had borne six daughters, eleven years old and younger, and no sons. With each new daughter, her husband would beat her for failing to have a son—there are widespread Afghan folk beliefs that women can control the gender of their babies, and that men who cannot have sons are somehow defective.
¹⁰⁰
“People say, if you don’t have a boy, you’re not man enough to make one,” Mr. Saeedi said. Finally Fatima left her abusive husband. Mr. Saeedi got involved when the husband demanded his right to take and marry off the oldest girl, the eleven-year-old, so he could collect the girl’s bride price. Mr. Saeedi told Fatima that she would lose the case if she went to court, even in Kabul city—“they always rule for the man in domestic custody disputes”—and advised her to go into hiding with her kids instead.