Whither Afghanistan?

By Anne Brodsky, Gadflyer. Posted September 15, 2004.

In August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had a gift for the women of Afghanistan. What did your tax dollars bestow upon half the population of a country where the majority of people don't have access to electricity, fresh water, sanitation, nutrition or the most basic life-saving medications? Twenty thousand battery operated, talking women's health books produced by Leapfrog, a "designer, developer and marketer of innovative, technology-based educational products and related proprietary content." A bargain at $62.50 a pop.

Listening to the administration, you might believe Afghanistan is a blooming democracy full of emancipated women and hopeful Olympic athletes. But while we send Afghans talking books, the real-life needs and underlying causes of the ongoing crises are being ignored, accelerating the situation in Afghanistan to the point of "implosion," to borrow language from a recent British Parliament report.

On the Precipice

The American press rarely reports the precipice upon which Afghanistan is poised. President George W. Bush makes frequent reference to the humanitarian advances in Afghanistan, especially among women. He offers platitudes, and smiles cheerily for photo-ops with soccer-playing Afghan girls as if their fates are somehow representative. But in every segment of Afghan life, there is glaring evidence of the gap between Bush's rhetoric and reality.

The thin veneer of liberation benefits those with power, money and guns, and unfortunately many of these people share the same ideology as the Taliban, albeit masked by their shaved faces, Western clothes, and facility with English rhetoric. In a telling moment of candor, Sebaghattullah Mujadiddi, the former, civil war-era president and chairman of the Constitutional Loya Jirga, told women in December 2003: "Do not try to put yourself on a level with men. Even God has not given you equal rights…under his decision two women are counted as…one man."

Of the five million children who returned to school after the fall of the Taliban, only 34 percent are girls. Two to three thousand young women were removed from school in September 2003 when President Hamid Karzai upheld a 1970s law banning married "women" (no matter their age or whether the marriage was consensual) from attending school with unmarried "girls."

The peril of the situation is abundantly clear from observations and conversations with Afghans about post-Taliban life, where guns and money substitute for the rule of law; upcoming elections, rather than being celebrated as a sign of progress, are dreaded for the violence and fraud that is already accompanying them (see guns and money substitute for the rule of law); the United States has provided a $25 million loan to rebuild a five-star hotel, and warlords are using money from opium poppies and CIA payoffs for fighting the Taliban to build palatial private residences on stolen land, while teachers and government workers in Kabul can not afford the $100 per month rent for three rooms without water or electricity on their $30-a-month salaries.

It is a country teetering dangerously on the edge of a steep precipice.

Liberation or Retaliation?

The Afghan people knew all along that the United States bombed Afghanistan for retaliation, not liberation. Many Afghan women asked me in December 2001, "If the United States was so committed to liberating us, where was your government for the past five years? Why did then Governor Bush invite Taliban officials to Texas? Why was the Clinton Administration trying to negotiate a pipeline while we were being beaten on the streets for showing our faces?" And now they ask: "Why did your government return the same criminals who destroyed our country in the civil war, and who were so brutal and repressive that the Taliban was welcomed in 1996 as liberating heroes?"

While 18,000 American and allied soldiers spend their time unsuccessfully searching for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar – the missing weapons of mass destruction from the Afghan conflict – only 6,500 NATO peacekeepers are on the ground to protect a population estimated to be 25 million to 28 million. This ratio of one peacekeeper per 4,000 Afghans is nothing like the 1:50 ratio that was maintained in Bosnia and Kosovo, and is laughable to a warlord and, until recently, provincial governor like Ismail Khan, whose personal army of 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers dwarfs the peacekeepers. President Karzai's attempt to control him by removing him as governor and promoting him to Minster of Mines and Industry last week was rejected by Khan and sparked deadly attacks on U.N., U.S. and Afghan interests in Herat.

Anne E. Brodsky is associate professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Since August 2001, she has spent six months in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and has interviewed more than 200 Afghan women, children and men about the risks to and resilience of Afghan women. The author of With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, Brodsky returned in July from her most recent trip to Afghanistan.

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