Taliban want to renew or reinforce the subjugation of girls and women

Patrick Cockburn, well-known for his excellent first-hand reporting in the Middle East, writes in the article below that the Taliban are bent on limiting the education of girls and restricting women to their homes and the close supervision of male relatives or husbands. Cockburn's most revealing evidence is from a Human Rights Watch report based on interviews "with 90 women in districts largely held by insurgents [Taliban] in four different districts." The report indicates that women in insurgent/Taliban districts "are being deprived of all rights."

Cockburn notes that the HRW report conflicts with the notion that most Taliban rank-and-file participants are local men who are joining insurgencies/Taliban for practical reasons rather than ideological reasons.

The article leaves us with questions. Would the results of the HRW report be confirmed by additional research? For example, have Afghan women been gaining rights to continue their education and to work outside the home in districts not dominated by the Taliban? Is the Taliban a single movement that is unified on the question of women's status in life? What about the position of girls and women in districts and villages that are dominated by warlords, drug-lords, or village elders?

The article and the question have important policy implications for whether the Karzai government's proposal to negotiate with some Taliban leaders is potentially harmful to or horrific for Afghan women.

We on this blog have taken the position that US military forces should be withdrawn from Afghanistan, beginning in a substanital way by next summer. We had hoped a withdrawal would commence sooner than this. Malalai Joya, Greg Mortenson, Andrew Bacevich, and others have influenced our view. They maintain the US-led military occupation does little to advance the interests of most Afghanis, is very costly in lives and resources for all involved, and therefore should be brought to an end. Malalai Joya and the Revolutionary Afghanistan Women's Alliance, among others, oppose the US-led occupation and war as the worst of all situations.


'Leave your job or we will cut your head off your body...'
With violence on the rise, Afghan women are terrified at the prospect of a deal between President Karzai and the Taliban


By Patrick Cockburn
Saturday, 17 July 2010

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/leave-your-job-or-we-will-cut-your-head-off-your-body-2028706 (The article was also printed at antiwar.com on July 18, 2010.)


A report by Human Rights Watch shows that Afghan women are again being deprived of their rights.

Women in Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan say they are once again being threatened, attacked and forced out of jobs and education as fears rise that their rights will be sacrificed as part of any deal with insurgents to end the war in Afghanistan.

Women have reported attacks and received letters warning of violence if they continue to work or even contact radio stations to request songs.

One female teacher at a girls' school in a southern Afghan province received a letter saying: "We warn you to leave your job as a teacher as soon as possible otherwise we will cut off the heads of your children and will set fire to your daughter."

Another woman, Jamila, was threatened in August 2009, in a letter bearing the Taliban's insignia when she was working for a local electoral commission. It said: "You work in the election office together with the enemies of religion and infidels. You should leave your job otherwise we will cut your head off your body."

Jamila ignored the letter, but days later her father was murdered. She left her job and moved house.

Activists are fearful that their rights will be sold out in a deal between the Taliban or other insurgent groups and the US-backed Afghan government. They believe that if the Taliban is given a share in power, women will again be reduced to a condition close to slavery, as when the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan in 1996-2001. Then, women could not leave their house without a close male relative and had to cover their faces and bodies with an all-enveloping burka or chadori.

Women, who had made up 70 per cent of teachers and 50 per cent of civil servants, were banned from working except in healthcare. Even as medical workers, there were severe restrictions and many women died either in childbirth or from disease because of lack of medical attention. The UN estimated that only 3 per cent of girls received primary education under Taliban rule.
With the war reaching a stalemate over the last year, Afghan and foreign leaders have prepared the ground for talks with insurgents by claiming they are more moderate and pragmatic than the Taliban government overthrown in 2001. The head of the International Security Assistance Forces' reintegration unit, Lt-General Graeme Lamb, said: "Who are these Taliban? They are local people. The vast majority are guns for hire; not fighting for some ideological reason."

The idea that the present day Taliban is less hostile to women than the old is contradicted by the experiences of women in Taliban-held districts. A report by Human Rights Watch – based on interviews with 90 women in districts largely held by insurgents in four different provinces – shows that women are being deprived of all rights.

The report, entitled The 'Ten Dollar Talib' and Women's Rights: Afghan Women and the Risks of Reintegration and Reconciliation, is released this week. It says the belief that new Taliban has emerged influenced by money rather than ideology is wrong.

It criticises the idea of the "Ten Dollar Talib" who fights for money, as an attempt by US and Nato forces to make power-sharing with them more palatable to western audiences who had previously been told they were an enemy to be defeated. Hostility to women is shared by other insurgent leaders as well as the Taliban. The strongest rebel force in the provinces south of Kabul is the Hezb-i-Islami, which Western and Afghan leaders have spoken of as a group that might be tempted to join the government.

The movement's leader is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose first political act was reportedly to throw acid in the faces of unveiled female students at Kabul University in the early 1970s.
The HRW report is the first time that repression of women in Taliban- controlled areas in Afghanistan has been systematically studied. All the women interviewed – who are referred to by pseudonyms for safety reasons – said they had lost freedoms. In some cases, women have been killed.

On 13 April this year a female aid worker, Hossai, 22, was shot as she left the office of an American development organisation and died the next day. She had been threatened by the Taliban the previous week. Many of the threats are contained in letters delivered to the door at night – known as "night letters" – or left at the local mosque. Soon after Hossai was killed, Nadia – who worked for an international NGO – got a letter telling her to stop working for infidels and "in the same way that yesterday we have killed Hossai, whose name was on our list, your name and other women's names are on our list". Sometimes the same letter is sent to a number of women. In late 2009, in Kapisa province east of Kabul, women were warned not to ring up radio stations and request songs. They were told if they did they would be beheaded or acid thrown in their faces.

Many women have been forced to give up their jobs and stay at home, even though half the population earns less than $2 a day and there is a chronic lack of employment.

Girls' schools, which sprang up again after 2001, are once more being ordered to close. In Kunduz province in the north, the shadow Taliban governor sent out orders that no girls were to be educated past puberty. One threatening letter delivered to a school read: "You were already informed by us to close the school and not mislead the pure and innocent girls under this non-Muslim government."

In Kunduz these threats were reinforced by arson, rocket and bomb attacks. There have also been outbreaks of unexplained sickness at several schools, which could be the result of mass poisoning. One Taliban spiritual leader explained the targeting of girls' schools: "We are opposed to un-Islamic education for women. We close those schools that teach adultery, nudity and un-Islamic behaviour."

Women active in politics have been targeted and a number of the most prominent assassinated. The failure to catch the killers discourages other women from playing an active role. The Afghan government has also been ambivalent in its attitude to the issue.

The report says that women should be involved and able to protect their interests in any negotiations about reintegration or reconciliation with the Taliban. One female member of parliament doubts this is possible because "the Taliban would rather see a woman die in the streets than go to a restaurant to get food if men were there. These are the kind of people we're talking about".

Letter of the law

"You are working with the government. We Taliban warn you to stop working for the government otherwise we will take your life away. We will kill you in such a harsh way that no woman has so far been killed in that manner. This will be a good lesson for those women like you who are working. The money you receive is haram [forbidden under Islam] and coming from the infidels. The choice is now with you."

US military/gov optimism dashed on the ground in Afghanistan

I have quoted some of the points from an article by Patrick Cockburn that were published in The Independent online site on May 16, 2010. The gist of the article is captured by the title, "'Nobody is winning' admits McChrystal." You can find the full article at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/nobody-is-winning-admits-mcchrystal-1974697.html.

From what I've been reading, the Obama administration/Pentagon generals may well fulfill the promise of "beginning" a withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. However, this may turn out to be a very small and slow troop withdrawal, given the lack of military success so far in subduing the "enemy." Indeed, the Occupation/war may be drawn out for many years to come. Cockburn offers evidence that as of now there is no better than a military stalemate between US-led forces and insurgents. Part of the problem, Cockburn emphasizes, is that US leaders have yet to understand that they are embroiled in a civil war in which they have implicitly taken sides.

In what promises to be an extended war and occupation, there are many losers, including, for example, the Afghan civilian population, the continued destruction of Afghan villages and infrastructure, the increasing number of US troop casulaties, the American taxpayers and the society as a whole as debt-financed wars deepen the national debt, and the lack of progress by the Obama administration in diminishing the US economy's growing dependence on foreign oil.

---------------------------
Quotes from Cockburng's article.

'Nobody is winning,' admits McChrystal
The weakness of the Kabul government is hindering attempts by US and Nato forces to gain much ground from the insurgents
By Patrick Cockburn
Sunday, 16 May 2010

"Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in London yesterday as US generals express doubts that the fight against the Taliban is having any success.

"The US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who was boasting of military progress only three months ago, confessed last week that "nobody is winning". His only claim now is that the Taliban have lost momentum compared with last year."

[....]

"... the failure so far of General McChrystal's strategy of using his troops to seize Taliban strongholds and, once cleared, hand them over to Afghan forces. He sold this plan, under which he was promised an extra 30,000 US troops, last November but all the signs are that it is not working. Starting in February, 15,000 US, British and Afghan troops started taking over the Taliban-held area of Marjah and Nad Ali in Helmand province."

[....}

"Three months after the operation in Marjah, however, local people say that the Taliban still control the area at night. Shops are still closed and no schools have reopened. Education officials who returned at the height of the US-led offensive have fled again. The local governor says he has just one temporary teacher teaching 60 children in the ruins of a school. Aid is not arriving. The Taliban are replacing mines, the notorious IEDs, removed by US troops and often use the same holes to hide them in.

"Pentagon officials increasingly agree with the Afghan villagers that the Marjah operation failed to end Taliban control and put the Afghan government in charge. This puts in doubt General McChrystal's whole strategy which also governs the way in which 10,000 British troops are deployed. He is being held to account for earlier optimism such as his claim at the height of Marjah offensive that "we've got a government in a box ready to roll in". Three months later, people in Marjah say they have yet to see much sign of the Afghan government.

"Lack of success in Marjah is feeding doubts about the promised US-led offensive in Kandahar, parts of which are under Taliban control. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned against destroying the city in order to save it.... Local elders have lobbied against it on the grounds that it will bring nothing but ruin to their city.

"So far the much-heralded attempt to turn the tide in Kandahar has simply terrified local people about what is to come. US and Nato supply columns thunder through the narrow streets, the soldiers guarding them gesturing menacingly to Afghan vehicles not to get too close. "An atmosphere of terror is hanging over Kandahar," Ahmad Wali Karzai, the president's much-criticised brother who is also head of the local council, is quoted as saying. 'People are breathing terror here.'"

[....]