The Underground Girls of Kabul Page 6

  To quell the boredom in what was virtually a form of house arrest in Badghis, Azita took it upon herself to carry on the education of her younger sisters. With time, other girls from the neighborhood discreetly joined them. Officially, they were just gathering to read and reread the Koran many times over, but Azita offered lessons in math, geography, and language. Books posed a risk—both to carry around and to keep at the house—so teachings mostly consisted of Azita’s own recollections from her Kabul school.

  Around the same time, Azita began to quiet herself in the presence of her father, Mourtaza. She had always been his confidant and vice versa. They would sit together and talk about politics, history, and literature. But as the war raged on and the Taliban gradually began to dominate Badghis, Mourtaza changed. He became irritable. At night, he was restless and did not sleep much. The children tried to steer clear of him during the day, but it was difficult in the small house when the girls could not venture outside. It confused Azita that her father seemed to have lost interest in their conversations, and she was sad that he did not give her the attention he used to.

  Two years into the family’s stay in Badghis, Mourtaza received an offer of marriage for his eldest daughter. It came from one of his nephews and was delivered by his widowed sister-in-law. Marriage between first cousins is both favored and common in Afghanistan, as a way to keep property and other assets within the extended family. Most important, such marriages are thought to strengthen family bonds by avoiding dilution by outside blood.

  Azita had been regularly targeted for marriage by both relatives and sons of entirely unknown families since the family had settled in Badghis. She did not give it much thought; in her mind, people had no way of knowing she just wasn’t available on the Badghis bride market. At least not yet. She was on a different track—in Badghis, she considered herself merely on hiatus from the rest of her life. Several of her classmates in Kabul had nurtured forbidden fantasies about marrying for love and having fairy-tale wedding parties. But Azita had remained fairly oblivious of the idea throughout her teenage years. If anything, she had been guilty of pride and raw ambition. In her staked-out immediate future, there was no time for boys. She had never even met those who proposed marriage in Badghis—they were received by her parents, who had a stock answer for anyone who came asking for their daughter: “She is going to be educated, and we don’t want to waste her talent.” And certainly not on an illiterate farmer like her cousin—to Azita, that was almost too obvious.

  SHE WAS UNPREPARED for the conversation she overheard one evening. Mourtaza was angry again. He had been fooling himself that Kabul would return to normal any time soon, he told his wife. It put him in an impossible situation. He could not maintain the family with just their ten-year-old son. If Azita had been a boy, she heard him say, it would have been different. The family would have been stronger and more respected. Azita’s younger sisters only added to the difficulty, and made Mourtaza weak, with a weak family, exposing him to threats from outsiders and with few prospects for future income.

  For nineteen years, Azita had hoped her father was not angry she had been born a girl. But it was what he said next that took her breath away. He had changed his mind about the initial proposal from Azita’s cousin. Mourtaza would accept it. Azita was to be married.

  Her knees buckled, and she sank to the floor.

  It would solve their problems, Mourtaza continued. Marrying his daughter to a relative would tie another adult male to his family and carry them all through these hard times. It would ensure the safety of both Azita and her younger sisters: If the eldest was married, at least, it showed his resolve to others; that he had a plan for his daughters. She must agree, he said to his wife, that it was better to have Azita safely married to a man they knew than to risk the family’s future.

  But Azita’s mother, Siddiqua, did not remotely agree. She begged her husband to change his mind. She even raised her voice to him. It would not be a good marriage, she said. What would become of their daughter if she married into an illiterate family from the village? The argument escalated into a fight, and Mourtaza threatened to leave Siddiqua if she did not support him. His decision stood firm, and he demanded that she bring Azita the news. It is how it should be done, he told her: It is a mother’s task to tell a daughter she is to marry and who her parents have chosen for her.

  When Siddiqua came to her daughter the next day, she began by asking her forgiveness. She had lost the battle, she said. She cried as she told Azita that she would soon be a wife. After more than two decades with Mourtaza, she could not go against him but had to keep the family together. Siddiqua bowed her head in sorrow before her daughter, pleading that she would honor her parents’ decision.

  “This is your destiny,” she told her daughter. “You must accept it.”

  Azita rebelled as best she could. She screamed. She cried. She was silent and refused to eat for days. She existed in a delirium between sleep and the barest consciousness from lack of food and complete exhaustion. Some things she dreamed and some were real; she could not tell it apart. There was little she could do—if she had run away, she would most likely have been arrested, beaten, and imprisoned as soon as she left the house. She knew escape was not an option. To refuse her parents would draw shame over the entire family, and her father would be disgraced.

  She needed at least ten more years, she told her mother as she tried to negotiate. The situation in Afghanistan would change. She could go on to university, just as they had planned. Make them proud, and become extraordinarily successful.

  “I will do whatever you want. Just give me more time,” she implored her mother.

  “I am sorry, my child,” Siddiqua responded. “I cannot do anything more. It is over.”

  Later, Azita thought she had perhaps been naive. She had only vaguely imagined getting married someday, to a man who would share her goals in agreement with her parents. It would be someone educated, like herself, and they would both work. Perhaps an academic, like her father. Someone to look up to, who in turn supported her own ambition. But her illiterate cousin, whom she had not seen since they were toddlers?

  A few months later, Azita left her parents’ home with her new husband. She was carried away on a donkey, headed for her mother-in-law’s house in a remote village. As a bride price, Azita’s father received a small piece of land and one thousand American dollars.

  TODAY, AS SHE steps out of her morning ride in dark sunglasses and nods at the security guards, Azita represents the law in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Today, like any other day, tribal elders from her province will come and ask for her favors. Leaders of political factions will try to court her vote. Businessmen will attempt to negotiate her support.

  She receives them all in a parliament annex, presiding over meetings at the head of a long mahogany conference table. Meetings are rarely timed or scheduled and have no set agenda, but just keep rolling throughout her day; there is always another group of men waiting outside. She is paid two thousand dollars a month to sit in the national assembly’s lower house, tasked with creating and ratifying laws and approving members of government.

  A visitor can reach the steps of the yellow building only after being approved for passage through four sandbagged roadblocks; the final checkpoint is flanked by two American Humvees, with machine gunners sticking their heads out on top. The guards may be local, but this government, as well as the very state itself, is upheld by 130,000 troops from forty-eight countries, though most are American. They are positioned just beyond the mountains in the distance, above the thick walls that surround the compound, with a single Afghan flag on a pole fluttering high in the air.

  The government was created using the standard playbook of “state building” by Western countries after a regime is removed. At a conference near the former West German capital of Bonn in November 2001, a few dozen Afghans selected from those who had aligned themselves with Americans were brought in to design the first national government s
ince the Soviet invasion of 1979, and to draft a new constitution. It was largely a gathering of winners, most notably of those Afghans representing the armed Northern Alliance, which had helped U.S. Special Forces to topple the Taliban. Leaders of several major Pashtun tribes deemed by foreigners to be close to the Taliban were not invited. Back then, no compromises were to be made in the planning and execution of a brand-new country.

  Around the same time, the liberation of women began to be described by politicians in the United States and Europe as one more rationale for the war in Afghanistan, almost equal to that of fighting terrorism. In the new country that was to be created, half of the population would be granted heretofore unthinkable concessions: After years of being unable to peer out of any window, Afghan women would be allowed to leave their homes without a blood relative escort. They should also be represented in government by the mandated 25-percent-minimum female share of seats; surpassing at the time both the United Kingdom, with 22 percent, and the United States, with 17 percent.

  A ministry for women’s affairs was created, and the new constitution stated, just as the Koran does, that men and women are equal. Western countries also soon set out to propel one of the world’s poorest countries into a shiny new state with the help of a massive infusion of foreign aid money and expertise. At the time of Azita’s entry into Kabul’s 249-member lower house in 2005, she personified the new American plan for Afghanistan.

  ON THIS DAY, she opens her first meeting by inviting three men visiting from Badghis to speak. They have come to argue on behalf of a brother, who has been sentenced to sixteen years in prison for drug smuggling. He is innocent, they tell Azita.

  She nods. Can she see the court documents? The men produce them. They also hand her another document, which they have written in advance, stating that a member of parliament knows their brother is innocent and that he should be released immediately. Could she please sign it, so they can take it to the provincial governor and just have him back?

  It doesn’t work like that, Azita explains. What the court has decided, she cannot change. She is a member of parliament, not a judge. The men are bewildered: “But you are our representative. You have this power. You should do this for us!”

  Azita suggests a compromise—she will help them appeal the brother’s case in the supreme court in Kabul. “That’s all I can do. I will ask them to investigate the case again. I will ask this of them and also tell them that you are my villagers.”

  There is no other way, she assures them while gently laying out the basic structure of the justice system, switching between Pashto and Dari so that all those present will understand. Another man from Badghis speaks up, offering a new detail about the situation: The jailed man has not only been found guilty of drug smuggling, he has also been sentenced for assisting the Taliban in the production of a roadside bomb.

  With that, Azita becomes impatient. “Is lunch ready?” she asks of a worker who has wandered in to wipe the table, midmeeting. She reassures her visitors that she will inquire with a lawyer whether the case can be appealed. Then she invites them to stay and eat with her.

  In the afternoon, she attends one of the daily drawn-out, sometimes chaotic assembly sessions inside the main building that still smells of paint and new carpentry. Inside the dimly lit theater, where participation is overwhelmingly male, sessions are frequently interrupted by procedural details, such as translations between the two official languages, and the fact that many of the representatives cannot read and need to have documents read aloud to them. And then there are the frequent power outages, where everything will go dark before spare generators rumble alive again.

  The chairman will not often grant Azita permission to speak, and when he does, others will protest or just interrupt her. When she proposes something, she is often ignored, only to later hear a similar plan discussed by others.

  Her sixty-two female peers, scattered in small groups throughout the assembly, can hardly be described as a sisterhood. They share no common cause vis-à-vis women’s rights. Some openly serve as placeholders recruited by wealthy and powerful warlords looking to strengthen their own influence. With some notable exceptions, the women in parliament generally remain silent. In their almost five years in office so far, they have seen laws ratified that actually discriminate against women, and like the male members, they have not objected when amnesty has been handed out for war crimes.

  Azita thinks of herself as a political pragmatist, trying to wisely use what little capital and room to maneuver she has, as she represents a remote province and lacks a personal fortune. For the campaign that brought her here, a supporter lent her two hundred dollars to register as a candidate. The fear of not being able to repay the money stayed with her throughout her campaign. With little experience campaigning, she did what she could to get her name out to the parts of her province where it was too dangerous to travel—where the Taliban or local warlords were in control. Azita believes her command of Pashto helped her win the seat in parliament, since some of the elder tribesmen cast their vote for her. She hopes at least a small share of the women in her province voted for her as well, with the permission of their husbands or fathers.

  Now, after being cut off and even ridiculed for daring to speak at the Ministry of Education on another day I was in the audience, she sits stoically on her assigned chair and just looks out into the air. In Azita’s reasoning, it is better to exist on the inside, where she at least has a vote, than to only shout about women’s rights from outside the barricades, where few but the foreign press might listen.

  Like Carol le Duc, Azita would never call herself a feminist. It’s a far too inflammatory word, and one associated with foreigners. Her own brand of resistance is slightly different. For instance, she never misses an opportunity to be on camera. The young and spirited Afghan press corps, much of which operates with foreign aid money, often ask Azita to comment on parliamentary negotiations, and she always accepts. She prefers to be interviewed on the lawn outside, as the plenum usually disrupts in angry murmurs and complaints at the sight of a video camera, although photography is indeed allowed. Azita never confronts colleagues who argue women should not appear on television, but to her, that is exactly the point. If a young boy or girl somewhere in Afghanistan catches a glimpse of a woman on television, and an elected politician at that, it has some small value. To show them that at least she exists. That she is a possibility.

  Azita guards her mannerisms carefully, on-screen and off, well aware that her appearance and personal life are thoroughly scrutinized. What she actually says, or how she negotiates, matters less. A slip of the scarf, an offhand remark, laughing out loud—it would all be inappropriate for a serious politician. The personal is always political here. She monitors and studies her female colleagues, constantly adjusting her own behavior to the unspoken demands and questions: What is she wearing? Is she too loud? Does she move her hands too much when she speaks? Does she walk too confidently? Is she a good wife and mother? How many sons does she have? Does she look like a devout, modest Muslim woman? Does she pray? How many times a day?

  The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is most often described as a strict Muslim society. Regardless of personal beliefs, the appearance of being anything other than very pious here can harm one’s reputation and present dangers. To complicate things further in a largely illiterate society, Afghans often differ on what exactly constitutes “a good Muslim.” The largest religious authority in the country, the National Council of Religious Scholars, or the Ulama Council, consists of three thousand members from around the country—most of whom have a mujahideen background from the 1980s. The council has been known to preach whatever suits its members’ shifting alliances and political purposes, frequently denouncing the presence of foreigners and issuing harsh decrees to limit the role of women in society.

  Louis Duprée described this contradiction in his work on Afghanistan: “Islam, in essence, is not a backward, anti-progressive, anti-modern religion, alth
ough many of its interpreters, the human, action component, may be backward and anti-progressive.” It is the classic curse of organized religion—when its interpretation is hijacked by mortals as a means to control others.

  To Azita faith is, and should be, personal: “I go to mosque. I go to the general prayer on Fridays. I believe when I pray that God listens, and that if you help others, God will love you more. Sometimes for my work, I go to the embassies, where people smoke and drink. I don’t do that. But I would not say anything bad about those people who do. I believe everyone can have their own idea, their own belief. So that is my version.”

  WHEN SHE RETURNS home at the end of the day, various supplicants have already lined up outside her apartment complex, where there are no guards or any other security provisions. One needs a job. Another asks her to broker a family conflict. They will all expect a meal and a place to sleep for the night, in her two-bedroom apartment. In Azita’s words: “As an MP, you are a guesthouse, a restaurant, a hospital, and a bank.”

  Constituents regularly ask to borrow money. Azita has no savings, but to decline without at least trying to offer a small travel contribution, for instance, could be seen as hostile. But it would not be as bad as turning someone away who needed a place to sleep. That is simply not done. It would risk having someone go back to Badghis saying Azita is a lazy and haughty representative who does not care about her people.