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Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs
Afghan Women: Recovering, Rebuilding
Sima Wali
Abstract
The United States’ foreign policy in Afghanistan has a long history of misguided plans and misplaced trust—a fact that has contributed to the destruction of the social and physical infrastructure of Afghan society. Afghans contend that after having fought as U.S. allies against the Soviet Union— with the price of more than two million dead—the United States swiftly walked away at the end of that bloody, twenty-three-year conflict. The toll of the war on Afghan society reflected in current statistics is so staggering as to be practically unimaginable: 12 million women living in abject poverty, 1 million people handicapped from land mine explosions, an average life expectancy of forty years (lower for women), a mortality rate of 25.7 percent for children under five years old, and an illiteracy rate of 64 percent.1 These horrific indicators place Afghanistan among the most destitute countries in the world in terms of human development.
In 1996 the Taliban walked into this breach, immediately issuing edicts banning Afghan women from the public domain. The harshness of the terms of segregation evoked comparisons with South Africa’s apartheid regime—leading human rights organizations in the West to call it “gender apartheid.” Women were prohibited from working outside their homes, attending school, or appearing in public without a close male relative. They were forced to ride on “women only” public buses, were forbidden to wear brightly colored clothes, and had to have the windows in their houses painted so that they could not be seen from outside. Initially, they could only be treated by female doctors; later, they could be examined— but not seen or touched—by male doctors, in the presence of a male relative. The standard punishment for theft and adultery was public stoning, or even execution; yet a woman had no right to petition a court directly.
These ultraconservative policies and the hardships they imposed are by now quite well known—thanks in part to work done before the war in Afghanistan by women’s groups in the United States. In 1998, for example, an alliance of women’s rights groups protested the U.S. oil company Unocal’s collaboration with the Taliban regime in a project to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan. This grassroots campaign, much like the 1980s anti-apartheid movement for South Africa, publicized the plight of Afghan women and provided a new set of interlocutors in U.S. foreign policy. In essence, the message of this movement was that the conditions of life for Afghan women symbolized the total devastation of Afghan society.
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