AFGHANS’ DESPERATE FLIGHT
Women who fought for and achieved rights dread what awaits them under Taliban.
When last I saw Malalai Kakar, she was smoking a cigarette after impatiently shucking off her head scarf.
“Now I wear it only when I’m not working, when I’m shopping at the bazaar, when I’m not armed. There are Taliban who would kill me if I were recognized out of uniform.”
They got her three months later. Two gunmen on a motorbike shot Kakar dead as she travelled to work. Her 18-yearold son was critically wounded. That was in 2008, in Kandahar City.
Lt.-Col. Kakar — daughter of a cop, sister to five cops — was the first female police detective and highest-ranking policewoman in southern Afghanistan.
One of the bravest women I’ve ever known.
There must be millions of Afghan women just like her. Maybe not so emboldened, maybe not so provocative to the Taliban, certainly not so high profile. But women, and girls, who have taken even small, courageous, precious steps over the past two decades toward a sliver of emancipation for their gender. Women who, in recent days, have risked their lives protesting the return of hardline Islamic Taliban rule.
Female journalists not allowed to enter their workplace.
Female bank tellers ordered to go home because men would be replacing them.
Female teachers fearful of returning to their schools.
Female civil service employees turned out of their jobs, “inappropriate” for women.
Females threatened on the street for not being sufficiently covered, for not being in the company of a male relative. They beat them with sticks. Always have.
Female athletes, Olympians even and members of the national soccer team, begging to be rescued before the Taliban finds them, punishes them. Basketball player Samira Asghari, who was elected to the International Olympic Committee in 2018 at age 24, pleaded via Twitter for international help in evacuating her country’s sportswomen and coaches. “We must get out of Taliban’s hands … Please do something before it is too late.”
I wish we could airlift them all out of the country — some 19 million females. Because they are doomed. Upwards of 70,000 are war widows, often the sole breadwinner in the household, taking in sewing or doing menial labour, begging at the bazaar when there’s no other source of income. A war widow could expect at most $150 in survivor benefits from the government. And that was the central government that is no more, toppled by the Taliban 2.0.
Indeed, what’s left of the Afghan economy may very well collapse if those women aren’t permitted to work, with the United States and the international community likely to turn off the donor taps.
Afghan women are putting their lives on the line, certainly their physical safety, by joining — at times even leading — the anti-Taliban demonstrations, carrying or wrapping themselves in the national flag, green, black, red, that has immediately become a symbol of resistance. I am in awe of them.
They’re not all cowed and they’re not their mothers either, who had no choice except to submit when the Taliban — ignorant, uneducated except in Qur’an-reciting madrassa, raised with no exposure to women outside their families, and suspicious and spooked by the female gender — plunged Afghanistan into seventh-century medievalism. A country where women wore mini-skirts in the ’70s.
Women’s sexuality frightens the bejeezus out of them. So it’s the women who must be cloistered, kept under their dirty thumb.
That is not, of course, why the U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan in 2001. It was a punitive military offensive, retribution against Taliban hosted al-Qaida for the 9/11 attacks. But it would remain a salient selling point of the nation-building mission that followed as the international community set itself upon creating a stable central government. The West had for years been appalled by the mistreatment of Afghan women, the girls who were not permitted to attend school, the beating of females who dared step outside their homes without being shrouded in a burqa. Feminists railed — not all of them, to their shame, as some defended the burqa as a shield against ogling by men — but nobody lifted a finger to help until geopolitical urgency blasted open a pathway.
For God’s sake, president Hamid Karzai’s obstetrician wife was never seen in public.
Now barely pubescent Afghan girls are terrified that they will be forced into marriage with Taliban fighters.
But this isn’t 1996, when the Taliban first seized power amidst the wreckage of a civil war. There have been many gains. And Afghanistan no longer exists in a black hole of unknowing. Social media and satellite dishes have opened their eyes to the ways of the modern world. Even goat shepherds have cellphones. Rapid pace telecommunications have completely changed the landscape. Even the Taliban have upward of a million Twitter followers.
The Taliban, however, are still fundamentally medieval, despite their hollow assurances of a more moderate ethos, principally that women will continue to enjoy equal rights in accordance with Islam — their austere, cruel and discredited version of Islam under sharia law.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid claimed this week that women would still have rights to education, health and employment, and that they would be “happy” within the framework of sharia. As if the Taliban has ever asked them.
Shabnam Khan Dawran, an anchor at RTA (Radio Television Afghanistan), told TOLO, an independent TV network in Afghanistan, that female journalists have been forbidden from doing their job. “I wanted to return to work, but unfortunately they did not allow me to work. They told me that the regime has changed and you cannot work.”
Khadija Amin, also an RTA anchor, was taken off the air by the Taliban, replaced by a man.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating reports that Taliban militants searched the home of am editor working for a German broadcaster, shooting and killing a member of his family, wounding another.
Women who fought and achieved rights won are in dread of what awaits them, especially once the world turns its eyes away from the chaos at Kabul airport, where foreign nationals and Afghans who “collaborated” with the West scramble for evacuation.
The Taliban must be judged by their actions, not their duplicitous words. While there have only been keyhole views and second-hand testimony of those actions over the past fortnight as the militants raced unobstructed to the capital, reports emerging of savage beatings and executions leave little doubt of how the Taliban intend to maintain control.
What women can expect is what ethnic minorities swamped by the blitzkrieg have already endured. Amnesty International on Thursday reported that nine ethnic Hazara men — the Shiite Hazara are among the most viciously persecuted ethnic constituencies in Afghanistan — were killed after the Taliban took control of Ghazni province last month.
Witnesses gave on-theground researchers harrowing accounts of what occurred in the village of Mundarakht. Six of the men were summarily shot and three were tortured to death, including one man who was strangled with his own scarf and had his arm muscles sliced off.
“The brutal killings likely represent a tiny fraction of the total death toll inflicted by the Taliban to date,” says a statement released by the organization, “as the group have cut mobile phone service in many of the areas they have recently captured, controlling which photographs and videos are then shared from these regions.”
Said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general: “The cold-blooded brutality of these killings is a reminder of the Taliban’s past record and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring.”
Iron fists inside iron gloves, wielding sticks to batter women, and “collaborators” hanging from lampposts.
It took 20 years to even begin lifting Afghanistan out of darkness. A mere 10 days to undo it all.