The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  Her father had been a member of a large but not wealthy clan, and was the first man from Badghis said to have pursued a master’s degree in Kabul. He carried that distinction when he returned to his province to marry. He had first met Azita’s mother, Siddiqua, when she was only twelve, and according to family legend, had fallen in love with her at first sight. They waited seven years to marry, and in 1977, their first child arrived, a much-loved and longed-for daughter. They named her after the Persian word derived from fire, or azar. Soon after celebrating Azita’s first birthday the family returned to build a life in Kabul, arriving just in time for the Saur Revolution, when the Communist People’s Democratic Party took over the Afghan government.

  With ideological and financial backing from Moscow, the new leadership proclaimed aggressive reforms, setting out to replace religious law with a more secular system, promoting state atheism, and forcefully trying to establish a more modern society. Each business sector and each official institution was to be overhauled, from agriculture and the legal system to health care and—most controversially—family law.

  The Russians were not the first to try to effect gender parity in Afghanistan, nor would they be the last.

  Amanollah Khan had tried to assert rights for women in the 1920s, together with his queen Soraya, who famously cast off her veil in public. The royal couple also began promoting the education of girls, banned the selling of them for marriage, and put restrictions on polygyny. The backlash was severe. To many Afghans, and particularly to the majority who did not live in Kabul, the reforms seemed outrageous: Tribal men would lose future income if daughters could no longer be sold or traded as wives. In 1929, under threat of a coup, the king was forced to abdicate.

  Three decades later, King Mohammad Zahir Shah made another, more cautious push for educating and emancipating women, proposing to grant them equal rights in the Constitution of 1964, and the right to vote. Privileged Afghan women were sent abroad for university studies, returning to become professionals and academics.

  Arline Lederman, an American development professional who taught at Kabul University in the early 1970s, remembers “a thrilling time” when elite Afghan women were more sophisticated than most of their liberal American counterparts. Women of Kabul’s royal family who wore raincoats, sunglasses, and Hermès head scarves and gloves “could have passed for Jackie Kennedy’s friends on an autumn day in Boston,” she observed.

  Those advances of a small group of elite women were significant, but they were exclusive to Kabul and a handful of other urban areas. In the rest of the country, women’s roles were largely stagnant.

  When Communist-era reforms rolled out on a large scale in the 1980s, however, they did not settle for the small elite in Kabul. In this new era, women and girls would no longer live in seclusion—they would receive mandatory educations, freely choose whom to marry, and be active participants in a new society. After the massive Soviet military force arrived to prop up the fragile Kabul Communist government, thousands of government-employed Russians also landed in Kabul to help execute Moscow’s idealized plan for a new Afghanistan.

  Agrarians, engineers, aid workers, teachers, and architects began to set up large-scale foreign aid projects with Soviet expertise. The programs were targeted toward turning around the whole country, and quickly. The Soviet leadership, which prided itself on having built an ideal, superior society at home, initially did not place much weight on historical references or failures by others who had come before them.

  One clearly stated goal was to educate and introduce more women in the workforce. The idea was sound: Only by gaining real economic power would women have the chance to gain real rights and redress imbalances. The execution would eventually prove to be as misguided as in previous attempts, with only a gradual and late understanding of the deep-rooted economics of patriarchy in the countryside.

  But in Kabul, a few female Afghan ministers and parliamentarians were appointed. Others took up work as doctors and journalists, police and army officers, and lawyers. Unions and associations were formed, and, occasionally, women led them. In the capital, segregation at restaurants and on public transportation was banned.

  In that progressive environment, Azita’s family settled into an upper-middle-class existence, where her father taught geography and history at the university and eventually invested in a small neighborhood store, selling paper goods, dried fruit, nuts, and other household staples. When he realized his daughter had a knack for languages, he bought her a small television set, so she could watch state newscasts broadcast in Russian and eventually translate parts of them for her parents. When Azita’s skill became known to teachers, she was singled out as a particularly talented child.

  With that, she had been chosen for a special purpose.

  As in any long game of invasion and nation building, the Soviets wanted to train the next generation of Afghan leaders and secure their loyalty to Moscow. Little Azita, who possessed a quick mind and a willingness to study, was moved to a more demanding school, with foreign teachers and Russian as the official language. She and other handpicked students would ascend through the new system’s most elite institutions—the breeding facilities for Afghanistan’s future power cluster. Their education would be crowned by a year or two of higher studies at the best universities of Moscow or Leningrad.

  Azita remembers this time being “like Europe,” in Kabul, where she would take an electric tram car to school, operated by a female driver. The female school uniform was a brown dress, a white apron, and brown shoes with white kneesocks. On their heads, the girl students wore only brown velvet bows.

  To the delight of her Russian teachers, teenage Azita was athletic, too, and she was made captain of the girls’ volleyball team. She planned to take her father’s academic legacy a step further, and make him even more proud of his firstborn. It did not matter that she had not been born a boy—this newly reformed country that promoted women was on her side. She would become a doctor. Failing that—which did not seem likely—she saw herself as a news anchor, inspired by the unveiled, modern women she saw on her television set. Azita was the Soviet plan for a new Afghanistan incarnate.

  But tradition still ruled in the provinces, where the political manifesto mandating equality between the sexes directly contradicted much of Pashtun tradition around inheritance and ownership. Rapid attempts at reforming society and culture were met with great resistance and fury aimed at the government for again issuing decrees to ban child marriage and the lucrative trading of women and girls, and for stating that no women should be sold for marriage, or married against her will. Once more tribal men saw the risk of losing both cash and influence. If women were to be educated and work outside the home, they would “dishonor” their families by being seen in public and potentially develop other, even more subversive ideas. And who would care for the children if women took over the tasks of men? Society would undoubtedly fall apart. Worst of all, another proposed decree would allow women to initiate divorce more easily. Clearly, foreign influence brought decadence and subverted Afghan traditions. The reforms were declared un-Islamic by many religious mullahs.

  Meanwhile, armed resistance to the Soviet occupation built around the country. Parts of the mujahideen opposition to the Soviet occupation had found a sympathetic ally in the Pashtuns next door in Pakistan, who were eager to exert influence in Afghanistan. The Soviet-instituted reforms proved to be an efficient pretext for recruiting followers: Women’s education as well as all women’s rights were despicable, pernicious poison-pill notions that stood to destroy the very fundament of Afghanistan’s culture and way of life.

  Power has always been held by those who manage to control the origins of life by controlling women’s bodies. The old Afghan expression zan, zar waa, zamin summarizes the ever-present threat against men’s personal property, which was always the main reason for taking up arms: Women. Gold. And land. In that order.

  Resistance against the Soviets was boosted by gener
ous financing and logistical help from abroad: U.S. president Jimmy Carter had declared that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan constituted “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” As the fight against Communism was a battle between good and evil, Islamic fundamentalists made excellent partners in this mission as they, too, had clear views of good and evil, albeit from a slightly different perspective.

  And so the gains of women in Afghanistan once again directly contributed to war, as their fate was mixed into the powder keg of tension between reformers and hardliners, between foreigners and Afghans, and between the urban centers and the countryside.

  Yet, the outside world did not seem to notice the central controversy of Afghan women. The foreign powers instead seemed to agree that there were much bigger problems with Afghanistan than such a peripheral issue, which would have to be revisited at some other time, when the men had stopped fighting. The threat of Communism—and the need to contain it—ensured American dollars and arms kept flowing to the Soviet opposition, moderates and extremists alike.

  AZITA’S FAMILY HELD out in Kabul for a while, through violence and power struggles following the eventual Soviet troop withdrawal, when mujahideen groups fought for control of the capital. When the violence shut down schools and many areas of the city, a routine was established for the now seventeen-year-old’s rare outings with her father. Azita always carried a note with the phone numbers for relatives in her pocket and a few bills in one of her shoes, in case an attack should separate them.

  In the spring of 1992, Kabul erupted into full-blown civil war. Azita gradually trained herself not to panic when a first blast set off a series of explosions, or when she, like most other children in Kabul at the time, saw body parts and corpses on the streets. Her memories from that time largely revolve around shock waves, vibrating buildings, and the fires that ensued: “It started from everywhere. Shooting, bombarding, blasting, killing. Everywhere, there was something. One day we had fifteen or sixteen rocket blasts in our neighborhood. The house was shaking all the time.”

  Her father, Mourtaza, decided the family had to leave. His family had grown, with three more daughters and one son arriving after Azita, and he could not find a way to take them to Pakistan. Instead, they made a difficult journey back to their remote home province of Badghis. The apartment in Kabul was boarded up, the store left behind. It would be ransacked, but there was nothing they could do to stop it—everyone they knew was fleeing, too. After packing all they could in a small car, the family drove off as refugees in their own country. As their car became a target for snipers the family abandoned it by the road, continuing for eighteen days by bus and by foot, sleeping in mosques and trying to avoid rebels and looters along the way. Those are days Azita cannot recall anymore; her brain has buried them somewhere.

  When they reached what they saw as a semblance of civilization again—the city of Herat in western Afghanistan—they were certain of survival, as war had not yet reached nearby Badghis. Her youth would end there, and she would not return to Kabul for many years.

  She remembers being angry about the war, and that she had not been able to take any of her books with her, from the small library her father kept in the house.

  “Did you have a favorite book?” I ask her in the car, as she describes her last days in Kabul.

  “Of course. Love Story.”

  “Oh. I read that, too.” I had found it at my grandmother’s house once, in my mother’s collection of books. “Do you remember the quote at the end? ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’?”

  “Yes, yes.” Azita smiles and her eyes drift off a little. “It was difficult for me to understand, but I cried a lot in the end when she died. I cried a lot. When I grew up I understood the exact meaning. I watched the movie, too, several times.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  She looks at me, silent for a moment before she speaks.

  “I love my husband, Jenny.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE SON MAKER

  Dr. Fareiba

  THOSE WHO MAKE it here are the lucky ones.

  Most often, the promise of new life arrives by car. Poor hydraulics and patchy road make the heavily pregnant patients under powder-blue burkas sway in the backseat of the battered Toyota Corollas. The sign on the gate shows a crossed-out machine gun: No weapons allowed. That rule will be disregarded, as most everywhere else in Afghanistan. The guards, who have watched each car barrel down the hillside, give a nod to swing open the steel doors. Inside is a two-story hospital, where a handful of doctors work in shifts at this sole medical clinic in a largely Taliban-controlled area of thirty-two thousand people. Some patients are nomads; most are from poor, rural families.

  On average, one hundred and sixty-six new Afghans are born in the maternity ward here each month, according to the hospital’s records. It rests in the middle of a quiet flat plateau in the Wardak province, about an hour’s drive from Kabul. Quiet, that is, on a good day: A few miles north of the hospital is an American military base—the primary target for rocket attacks by insurgents, as all resistance to foreign troops is dubbed. Those insurgent fighters take aim at the foreign enemy from several angles, the hospital squatting between themselves and the target. When fired, the rockets arc through the sky above the little hospital and often hit just outside the grounds. At times, they fall a bit short and hit the hospital.

  Thermal cameras on unmanned drones hum in the air above, trying to discover the rockets while they are still on the ground, often mounted on makeshift piles of stones and sticks, connected to batteries and timers. If the drone operator spots something of interest, an attack helicopter armed with machine guns, rockets, and missiles can be dispatched in a preemptive attack.

  Regardless of who aims to kill whom out there, most efforts inside the clinic frantically revolve around life. Nobody will ask patients what family or clan they belong to, or who they may have been fighting outside the gate. Every ragged, hollow-eyed child is cared for, every pregnant woman is ushered inside. The men will wait outside, leaning back in rows on benches along a yellow stone wall with a backdrop of snowy mountains, while the fate of their families plays out in the hospital. Most are in the typical villager dress of white cotton pants, vests, and plaid turbans, with open sandals or plastic shower shoes also in the iciest of winter.

  Inside, layers of burkas, hijabs, and shawls are pulled back by sunburned henna-painted hands. The hands often look older than the faces underneath, with their soft cheeks and unwrinkled eyes. A few mothers-to-be have only recently become teenagers. Every few hours, a woman’s struggle to have a son ends here, inside a white-tiled room, where three gynecological chairs have been covered with black plastic bags. A baby boy is triumph, success. A baby girl is humiliation, failure. He is a bacha, the word for child. A boy. She is the “other”: a dokhtar. A daughter.

  The woman who returns home with a son can be celebrated with a nashrah ceremony, where music is played and prayers are said. Food and drink will be brought out in abundance. The new mother will be presented with gifts: a dozen chickens or a goat to celebrate her achievement. She may even be offered a few pounds of butter to help her breast-feed her baby boy to become healthy and strong. She is elevated to a higher status among women. She who can deliver sons is a successful, enviable woman; she represents both good luck and a good wife.

  If a daughter is born, it is not uncommon for a new mother to leave this delivery room in tears. She will return to the village, her head bowed in shame, where she may be derided by relatives and neighbors. She could be denied food for several days. She could be beaten and relegated to the outhouse to sleep with the animals as punishment for bringing the family another burden. And if the mother of a newborn has several daughters already, her husband may be ridiculed as a weakling with whom nature refuses to cooperate, a mada posht. Translation: “He whose woman will only deliver girls.”

  One kind of child arrives with the promise of ownership and
a world waiting outside. The other is born with a single asset, which must be strictly curtailed and controlled: the ability to one day give birth to sons of her own. She, like her mother before her, has arrived in what the United Nations calls the worst place in the world to be born. And the most dangerous place in which to be a woman.

  “WE ARE THE Pashtun people. We need the son.”

  Dr. Fareiba emphasizes each word in hoarse, broken English. It should not be too hard, even for a foreigner, to understand this fundamental fact of her country. As with many women here, her weathered face betrays no precise age, nor will she offer a number. But she will gladly speak of everything else in short, assertive bursts with one corner of her mouth perpetually turned into an upward smirk. She has brought me through a back door into the disinfectant-smelling, bare-bones hospital for an education on the need for sons after extracting a promise that I will not attempt to speak to any of the husbands outside, which could alert them to the presence of a foreigner and endanger the hospital.

  Dr. Fareiba’s patients share many circumstances with the majority of Afghanistan’s women, whose lives are far removed from that of Azita and others in Kabul. These are the invisible women, now only temporarily out of the view of their husbands. For some, it is the only time they are allowed to have contact with people outside their own family. Most are illiterate and very shy, even in front of other women. Some hold hands and hesitate to step up to the examination table for the first time, where bulging bellies are carefully touched by doctor’s hands.

  Dr. Fareiba is known by reputation. She is greeted with respect as she sweeps around the corridors in her work uniform: a burgundy leather coat and a floor-length velvet skirt. She peeks into every room, where women nurse their newborns under thick polyester fleece blankets, or line up along the walls to see the gynecologist. Some smile; others hide their faces. The children, who have come with their mothers, do not smile. Much of the donated brightly colored clothing they wear is either too large or too small. None of them have anything resembling overcoats, and they, too, wear open sandals on soil- and dust-blackened feet. Only one little girl has a pair of red rubber boots. She looks to be around six years of age, with a matted mop of brown hair. Her pale gray eyes quietly follow the movements of the younger siblings left in her charge while their mother is seen by one of the doctors.