The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  3 a “natural” aggression in sons Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  4 women today make up 15 percent of troops The ACLU press release “ACLU Challenges Ongoing Exclusion of Women from Combat Positions,” October 31, 2013, www.​aclu.​org, reads: “Women make up more than 14 percent of the 1.4 million active military personnel, yet are still excluded from over 200,000 positions despite the repeal of the 1994 combat exclusion policy in January.”

  CHAPTER 17: THE REFUSERS

  1 a longstanding Hindu tradition of sadhin See Serena Nanda, Gender Diversity (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2000), p. 40.

  2 “It’s normal around here” See Anees Jung, Beyond the Courtyard (New York: Viking by Penguin Books India, 2003), p. 125.

  3 women dressing as men for purposes See Andrea B. Rugh, Reveal and Conceal: Dress in Contemporary Egypt, Contemporary Issues in the Middle East (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

  4 religious authorities in Malaysia “Malaysia Bans Tomboys Saying Girls with Short Hair Who Act Like Boys ‘Violate Islam,’ ” Daily Mail, October 24, 2008, dailymail.​co.​uk.

  5 call themselves boyah Lorenz Nigst and José Sánchez García, “Boyat in the Gulf: Identity, Contestation and Social Control,” Universities of Vienna and Barcelona, Middle East Critique, Spring 2010. See also Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World (New York: Pantheon, 2013). El Feki visits a rehabilitation center, and what she is told by a psychologist at the center echoes the story in Afghanistan, in that most teenage girls she counseled who had been brought up as boys didn’t consider themselves troubled or needing a cure. “They feel it’s their freedom; they don’t feel it’s wrong,” a psychologist is quoted as saying.

  CHAPTER 18: THE GODDESS

  1 In the 1970s, Louis Duprée wrote See Louis Duprée, Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 1973, sixth impression, 2010) p. 104.

  2 Around 1,400 years before Jesus was born See Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, first published in 1979 by Routledge; and Jenny Rose, Zoroastrianism: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011).

  3 “almost any stone thrown in Afghanistan” See Louis Duprée’s Afghanistan, p. 104.

  4 recorded these same beliefs Lindholm writes, on page 166 of his book Generosity and Jealousy: “Swatis share with other Pakistanis and South Asians a firm belief that food, drink and even people are either ‘hot’ or ‘cold.’ The logic by which these divisions are made are by no means clear, and sometimes people disagree on whether a particular unusual food is ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ but there is widespread agreement about the major parameters of the system.”

  5 a primer for how boys and girls Chapter 16 of the Avesta, “The Bundahishn (‘Creation’), or Knowledge from the Zand,” can be found in English translation at avesta.​org.

  6 The Persian epic See Djalal Khaleghi Motlagh, Women in the Shāhnāmeh: Their History and Social Status Within the Framework of Ancient and Medieval Sources, ed. by Nahid Pirnazar, trans. from German by Brigitte Neuenschwander (Santa Ana, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 2012), p. 42.

  7 the same rainbow myth of gender-changing See Raymond L. Lee and Alistair B. Fraser, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth and Science (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

  8 Norse mythology from the Middle Ages See Helga Kress, “Taming the Shrew: The Rise of Patriarchy and the Subordination of the Feminine in Old Norse Literature,” in Cold Counsel: Women in Old Norse Literature and Mythology: A Collection of Essays, ed. by Sarah M. Anderson with Karen Swenson (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 90.

  9 a common Indo-European origin Viktor Rydberg wrote about this in “Fädernas Gudasaga” of 1923.

  10 the earliest recorded prayers of Zoroaster’s Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (Routledge, 1979), p 17.

  CHAPTER 19: THE DEFEATED

  1 embroiled in a heated national conflict Rod Nordland, “Candidates for Parliament Protest Afghan Elections,” New York Times, November 7, 2010, nytimes.​com, tells the story of the fraught election procedure: “Nationwide, the election commission invalidated 1.33 million or nearly a fourth of the 5.74 million votes recorded, according to an official fact sheet.”

  2 bloodiest year yet of the war Comparative numbers are found in Susan G. Chesser, “Afghanistan Casualties: Military Forces and Civilians,” Congressional Research Service, December 6, 2012, www.​fas.​org. American casualties in 2002: 49, wounded: 74, American casualties in 2011: 404, wounded: 5,204. The report also mentions that “up to 11,864 civilians were killed in Afghanistan from 2007, when the United Nations began reporting statistics, to the end of 2011.” In 2011, the civilian casualty toll was 3,021 killed and 4,507 injured—the highest numbers since UN reporting began in 2007.

  3 President Obama’s two-year “surge” Peter Baker, “How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan,” New York Times, December 5, 2009, describes the thinking behind Obama’s decision to temporarily send more troops into Afghanistan.

  4 $700 billion and counting to American taxpayers Anthony H. Cordesman, “The US Cost of the Afghan War: FY2002–FY2013, Cost in Military Operating Expenditures and Aid, and Prospects for ‘Transition,’ ” May 15, 2012, csis.​org.

  5 “This time it was the United States” The quote comparing the U.S. involvement to the Soviet Union’s is on page 290 of Sherard Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign (Harper Press, 2011).

  6 ignored by all but human rights organizations Several groups have warned about the dangers for women of any negotiated political deal with the extremists, including the Afghan-led Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization, in its 2012 report “Afghan Women After the Taliban: Will History Repeat Itself?,” ahrdo.​org. They write: “The current US and Afghan government-backed process of negotiating with extremist groups, and especially the Taliban, promises to increase the vulnerability of women in Afghanistan in the medium- to long-term. Any political deal with these forces means the selling out of women’s hard-gained achievements in the last ten years while most likely incurring unbearable cost for Afghan women.”

  CHAPTER 20: THE CASTOFF

  1 If an Afghan woman wants to divorce See “I Had to Run Away, The Imprisonment of Women and Girls for ‘Moral Crimes’ in Afghanistan,” A Human Rights Watch Report, 2012, hrw.​org, which explains: “Laws governing divorce in Afghanistan are discriminatory against women. The Afghan Civil Code of 1977, the key source of statutory family law in Afghanistan, allows men to divorce women very easily. Article 139 of the Afghan Civil Code states that: (1) A husband can divorce his wife orally or in writing. When a husband lacks these two means, divorce can happen by usual gestures which clearly implies divorce. (2) Divorce happens with clear wordings which, in customs, convey the meaning of divorce without intention. Women, however, face far greater obstacles in obtaining a divorce. Absent consent from their husband, women can only obtain a divorce through a court and must show cause on the grounds of (1) defect, for example because of illness; (2) harm; (3) non-payment of alimony; or (4) absence. Obtaining a ‘for cause’ divorce for women in Afghanistan is not easy, legally or practically.… Compounding these problems, many judges do not even apply the provisions of the Civil Code, but instead invoke their own interpretation of Islamic law, with some judges not even admitting that women are entitled to seek divorce.”

  CHAPTER 21: THE WIFE

  1 close to the bottom of the Human Development Index A yearly report by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, measures “development by combining indicators of life expectancy, educational attainment and income into a composite human development index, the HDI” and can be found at undp.​org. See also The Forgotten Front: Water Security and the Crisis in Sanitation, Afghanistan Human Development Report 2011, Centre for Policy and Human Development, Kabul University, cphd.​af
. The report analyzes Afghanistan after almost a decade of foreign aid: “[T]here has been progress in recent years, but the progress has been uneven and far too slow. According to the Human Development Index for 2010, Afghanistan is ranked 155th among 169 United Nations member states … 84 percent of Afghan households are multi dimensionally poor.”

  2 more than $30 billion The figures regarding Afghanistan’s aid are according to “Investments to End Poverty: Real Money, Real Choices, Real Lives,” a report by British research group Development Initiatives, London 2013, which collects global data on development aid from both donor and recipient countries; see devinit.​org.

  3 a scathing review Astri Suhrke, When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Dr. Astri Suhrke is a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway. Her work focuses on “the social, political and humanitarian consequences of violent conflict, and strategies of response.” She is a member of a committee of experts serving the Norwegian Nobel Committee; see http://​www.​cmi.​no/​staff/​?astri-​suhrke. What Dr. Suhkre in her book calls “the liberal project” in Afghanistan began already in 2002, with sixty government donors in the country. She describes in detail the aid community’s planning and implementation stages, and the mismanagement that ensued. For instance, she writes: “There were parallel structures of administration on virtually all levels of government. International advisers, contractors and NGOs were ubiquitous. About two-thirds of all aid was channelled through an ‘external budget’ administered directly by foreign donors.”

  Suhrke’s book is just one of several evaluations of how the foreign aid to Afghanistan has not only been questionably effective but may also have brought long-term negative consequences for the country and its economy. See also: “Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan: A majority staff report prepared for the use of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee” of June 8, 2011, U.S. Government Printing Office. The report cautions that Afghanistan may suffer a severe economic depression when foreign troops leave in 2014 due to the almost complete foreign aid dependency: “Foreign aid, when misspent, can fuel corruption, distort labor and goods markets, undermine the host government’s ability to exert control over resources, and contribute to insecurity. According to the World Bank, an estimated 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) is derived from spending related to the international military and donor community presence.”

  4 an auditor at the Office of the Special Inspector General James R. Petersen served as senior auditor for the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction. In his Politico story “Was $73B of Afghan Aid Wasted?” January 11, 2012, politico.​com, he offers an idea of how much of the foreign aid funds actually go to helping anyone at all due to high overheads and corruption: “But a mere 30 cents out of every dollar for Afghanistan goes to aid. It gets worse. Of that 30 cents, frequently only half reaches the intended recipient. The remainder is lost, stolen or misappropriated by Afghan workers and officials. Many projects don’t even attain their own internal goals, according to reports from inspectors general and the Commission on War-Time Contracting. The June 2011, Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded that few, if any, of these aid programs are sustainable in the long term. Add in the cost of the USAID’s bureaucratic superstructure—including $500,000 annually for each U.S. employee in Kabul, and the supporting staffs in Washington—and sometimes less than 10 cents of every dollar actually goes to aiding Afghans.” For more details, see sigar.​mil for quarterly reports on Afghanistan reconstruction.

  5 close to ten million students registered Rod Nordland, “Despite Education Advances, a Host of Afghan School Woes,” New York Times, July 20, 2013, nytimes.​com, goes behind the numbers to reveal that only about 10 percent of students make it through to graduation and that graduation rates are even worse for girls.

  6 more than seven hundred “projects” Again, information on 2011 foreign aid projects and numbers relating to “gender” were provided for this book by the British research group Development Initiatives; see devinit.​org.

  7 “gains are on the whole modest and reversible” Torunn Wimpelmann’s 2012 report for NOREF, Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, is called “Promoting Women’s Rights in Afghanistan: A Call for Less Aid and More Politics,” cmi.​no. Norway is a large donor of foreign aid globally, and one of the largest to Afghanistan. Wimpelmann’s research, based on extensive fieldwork in the country, explains the discrepancy between the foreign aid bubble of Kabul and the actual needs of Afghan women: “The polarised and politicised situation regarding women’s issues in Afghanistan clearly demonstrates that women’s rights can never be secured, at least not in a sustainable manner, in isolation from broader political developments. Yet this is exactly what Western governments often have attempted. High-profile-declarations of commitments to and funding for women’s rights have been occurring in parallel with other policies that have undermined the very institutions and conditions on which such gains depend, such as a formal justice system, a functioning parliament and a non-militarised political landscape.”

  EPILOGUE: ONE OF THE BOYS

  1 the relationship between gender and violence Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett, Sex and World Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). These authors’ research clearly shows what Afghanistan has seen many times over—that the treatment of women and girls is at the center of war and conflict, and never a side “issue.” In fact, they are the very best measure of the level of conflict both internally and externally, as “the treatment of women—what is happening in intimate interpersonal relationships between men and women—creates a context in which violence and exploitation seem natural” (p. 15).

  Their book also proposes the involvement of men to a greater degree, in redefining honor and advocating for women, maintaining that “societies that are more gender-equal are less likely to go to war” (p. 3). We would do well to remember this important conclusion: “We have found in conventional aggregate empirical testing that the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, or its level of democracy, or whether it is Islamic or not. The very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is its level of violence against women.… And the less willing a country is to enforce laws protecting women within its own borders, the less likely it is to comply with international treaty obligations. These empirical findings, we believe, are only the tip of the iceberg” (p. 205).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To those who have helped me, enlightened me, challenged me, corrected me, and kept me safe:

  Stephen Farran-Lee. Lennie Goodings. Rachel Wareham. Carol le Duc. Terese Cristiansson. Helena Bengtsson. Ola Henriksson. Lisa Furugård. Robert Peszkowski. Torbjörn Pettersson. Magnus Forsberg. Naeemullah Sephahizada. Björn-Åke Törnblom. Afzal Nooristani. Kim Sundström. Susan Chira. Kirk Kraeutler. Adam Ferguson. Familjen Nordberg. Nuri Kino. Claire Potter. Vanessa Mobley. David Halpern. Louise Quayle. Rachelle Bergstein. Laura Minnear. Dana Roberson. Gennine Kelly. Naheed Bahram. Lee Mitchell. Laurie Gerber. Ted Achilles. Solmaz Sharif. Ashk Dahlén. Phoebe Eaton. Anders Fänge. Hanneke Kouwenberg. Doug Frantz. Sari Kuovo. Mujahid Jawad. Saeedullah Reshteen. Diana Saqeb. Thank you.

  To those generous organizations from which I have received invaluable intelligence and support:

  The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, swedishcommittee.org

  Women for Afghan Women, women​for​afghan​women.​org

  SOLA—School of Leadership Afghanistan, sola-afghanistan.org

  Afghanistan Analysts Network, afghanistan-analysts.org

  Stiftelsen Natur & Kultur

  Publicistklubben

  Thank you.

  To those brave friends who have asked not to be named. Thank you.

  To Nils Horner. Thank you.

  #pressfreedom

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JENNY NORDBERG is an awa
rd-winning journalist based in New York. A correspondent and columnist for the Swedish national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, she has a long record of investigative reports for, among others, the New York Times, where she contributed to a series that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. In 2010, she was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism for a television documentary on Afghan women. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.