The Hidden History of Women in Afghanistan

Revolutionary Worker #1142, March 10, 2002, posted at http://rwor.org

The burkha --the full-body veil created to hide women completely from the gaze of men--is one of the most hateful symbols of women's oppression. These burkhas have been enforced for centuries in Central Asia by feudal patriarchs as a sign of their honor. A tiny mesh of cotton gauze covers the women's faces and barely allows them to see where they are walking. Women appear in that world as faceless swaths of color--made invisible, anonymous and powerless.

Something else has been made invisible today--the true story of the women in Afghanistan, their struggle, their conditions.

The U.S. government portrays itself as the "liberator" of Afghan women. We are told that the burkha came in with the Taliban regime, and that U.S. bombs made it possible for women to take that burkha off.

This is misleading and self-serving, since the U.S. was a key sponsor of the extreme fundamentalist forces who imposed the burkha as state policy in the 1990s. And the U.S. victory over the Taliban cannot, and will not, bring liberation to anyone.

Afghanistan's people live in dusty villages of herdsmen and farming peasants. In 1979, 85 percent of the people lived in the countryside--where the best land has always been owned by feudal landlords. Life is governed by tradition, and tradition supports feudal power. And this has changed little over the last century.

The burkha is part of Pashtunwali , the traditional culture of southern Pashtuns. In Afghanistan, there are many national cultures. But women throughout rural Afghanistan have suffered intense domination and exploitation.

Peasant women live with the burden of never-ending work: carrying water, working crops, grinding grain to flour, turning milk to yogurt, embroidery, gathering fuel, washing, child- rearing....

In areas of Nurestan and Jadaran, women carry out all farming without any help from men. Women are rarely paid for their work, and the tiny wages paid for jobs like carpet-weaving are generally handed over to the men. For the most part, women have had no right to own or inherit land.

At the same time, women widely live under purdah --traditional "gender apartheid." In some areas, women cannot walk outside their house without the chaperoning of family males. Women live under the thumbs of their fathers and husbands--with no say over their lives or larger society. Women are commonly beaten and even killed by their fathers, husbands and brothers for "dishonoring the family."

Afghan women have long been sold by their fathers, often at very young ages, in arranged marriages for bride prices. They have been given over as "blood prize" to be owned and raped by other clans--as a settlement payment in disputes.

In a 1999 speech in Quetta, a young Afghan woman described a woman's life in traditional society: "Her feelings as a human being, a partner who can think, are looked down on and ignored. When a man brings in a second or third wife, all these women are oppressed."

Illiteracy is common among Afghan women--most never attend school, few are educated after 12 years old. Health care is almost non-existent--male doctors are widely forbidden to see or touch female patients.

There has been much courageous resistance to all this. There have been underground movements of cultural protest--secret study of books and education of girls, illegal abortions provided for women, forbidden exploration of fashion, and love. Where possible, women joined organized political resistance, including armed struggle. Women have been organizing in the vast Afghan refugee camps--finding strength in revolutionary politics and solidarity.

The most widely known stories of female resistance involve educated and privileged women in the cities. There, away from village life, Afghan women have historically tried to defy feudal tradition.

Urban reform movements rose repeatedly in the last century, and faced repeated repression by feudal forces. Often they were closely tied to "modernizing" currents within the ruling classes and the royal family.

In the 1920s, King Amanullah tried to impose a western-style "modernism" by decree: establishing taxes and a central army, abolishing slavery and forced labor, organizing early schools, discouraging the veil and the seclusion of women. He demanded that men adopt western dress. But Amanulah's weak central state had little influence in the countryside, and he was overthrown when feudal lords opposed him.

In the 1950s, another wave of reform arose. Nurses and teachers in Kabul dared to go out without veils. When women in the royal family appeared with their faces exposed, scandalized feudals rose up in Kandahar. A hostile coexistence emerged between the feudal countryside and urban areas.

Women fought for entry into the universities, and soon made up almost half of college students, doctors and government workers. Still facing male supremacy, they became an important part of the revolutionary movements that erupted in the 1960s.

Student demonstrations and workers strikes raged in Kabul. Radical newspapers appeared. The Maoist Eternal Flame was quickly banned, but the new Maoist current grew and strained to develop roots among the peasants. Maoists in Afghanistan called for targetting both foreign imperialist domination and feudal tradition--and worked to mobilize the rural masses of peasants to carve out a new world for themselves through armed revolution.

A powerful reactionary Islamist movement arose to suppress any change. In 1970, mullahs and Islamists rallied in Kabul to demand the suppression of revolutionaries, prevention of women from any public office, end to co-education of girls with boys, and the enforcing of the veil.

The Islamist student leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar organized attacks--throwing acid on the faces of women who did not wear the veil at Kabul University. He personally murdered a Maoist student activist.

The U.S. now describes itself as the "liberator of Afghan women"--but it is the U.S. who sought out men like Hekmatyar in the late 1970s to finance, arm, and train them, and ultimately help them seize state power over Afghanistan.

In opposition to both the Maoist revolutionaries and the Islamic fundamentalists, there were forces inside the government seeking a capitalist style of "modernization" without liberation. Like the Turkish dictator Kemal Ataturk or the Iranian king Reza Shah, this ruling class current dreamed of knocking down those aspects of feudal society that were an obstacle to capitalist development, and especially imperialist penetration. But because they dreamed of becoming new exploiters, they rejected, feared and opposed any revolutionary mobilization of the masses of people, especially in the countryside.

By the late '50s, many of these forces looked to the USSR for backing. Capitalist restoration had taken place in the formerly socialist Soviet Union. The new social-imperialist rulers there were eager to expand their "sphere of influence" in Afghanistan.

In 1965 a pro-Soviet party was formed, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)--based in the monarchy's bureaucracy and military. This PDP was mockingly called "royalist pseudo-communists." They were completely isolated from the masses of people, especially in the countryside.

In 1978, the PDP staged a military coup d'etat and announced a series of bourgeois- democratic reforms, while attacking the revolutionary Maoist forces by the bloodiest means. Their decrees included reducing the traditional bride price, abolishing child marriage, compulsory education for girls, and canceling debts of poor peasants. Western-style dress became common in cities.

With no base among the masses, these PDP laws meant little outside the cities. Their top- down brutality quickly isolated them even further. This PDP soon faced widespread rebellion, including mutiny within their own army.

The whole logic of the PDP's politics led them to call on Soviet troops to save them. In December 1979, the troops of Soviet social-imperialism invaded Afghanistan--to prop up this tottering police state.

The bloody Soviet counterinsurgency caused tremendous suffering. Many revolutionary activists and leaders were tortured, raped and killed. Collective punishment and carpet bombing left villages in ruins. Hundreds of thousands of women were widowed. Millions of people were crowded into desperate refugee camps.

Facing mounting opposition, the Soviet occupiers decided that they needed a broad alliance between their loyal comprador capitalist forces (in the Kabul government) with domestic feudal forces. The Soviet occupiers cynically dropped many of the PDP's reforms. Education was no longer compulsory. Land reform was reversed. Islamic clergy were given state salaries and mullah landholdings were exempted from taxes.

Revolutionary and progressive forces, including the country's Maoist organizations, threw themselves into the fight against the Soviet invaders, but took heavy losses.

The U.S. poured massive support--in arms and money--into the most reactionary and extreme Islamist forces. The White House sent high-level officials and CIA agents to provoke a Muslim "jihad" against their Soviet rivals in Afghanistan.

Through the 1980s, an Islamic fundamentalist army with a quarter million fighters took shape in Afghanistan under CIA guidance. These forces were brutally opposed to any hint of women's liberation.

This was the largest CIA operation in history--spending over $600 million per year by 1987. By the end of the 1980s, Mudjahadeen commanders like Hekmatyar were openly meeting with U.S. leaders and being called "Afghan freedom fighters" in the U.S. media. The anti-woman patriarchs who imposed the burkha as state policy on Afghanistan gained power thanks to the arms and money of U.S. imperialism--sent by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and former CIA head George Bush the elder.

In 1998, Carter's national security adviser Brzezinski admitted that U.S. promotion of the Afghan fundamentalists started even before the Soviet invasion. The Nouvel Observateur interviewer asked if Brzezinski regretted unleashing these brutal forces on the world and he answered: "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea.... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?"

In February 1989 the Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed Mudjahadeen soon took power in Kabul, castrating the last Soviet puppet leader and displaying his mutilated corpse.

Their program for women was extreme. The burkha was required in public. Coeducation of boys and girls was forbidden. Women were ordered out of government and political life. All the hateful norms of tradition were to be imposed--including arranged marriage. Women were denied any right of association, expression or employment--which were declared "unislamic." Armed Mudja- hadeen troops challenged women going to work or elsewhere unaccompanied. Educated women working as teachers or doctors were widely threatened. In 1994, the Supreme Court of the Islamic State of Afghanistan issued their "Ordinance on Women's Veil" which demanded full burkha coverage for all women outside their homes--and added it was not just "because they are women, but for fear of sedition."

Even getting a burkha was often a hardship, since they cost about $33. For many poor people, the veil meant months of wages. And so the poorest women simply couldn't afford their cloth prison and were forced to share one with their neighbors--literally imprisoned in their homes while they waited their turn.

Intensely corrupt, these new rulers demanded the daughters of the people for sexual abuse. Mudjahadeen troops broke into civilian homes throughout the country, snatched women at gunpoint and raped them before killing them. They carried out systematic gang-rape of women of other nationalities.

The Mudjahadeen quickly launched civil war against each other, and never established stable rule over the country. In many places they never fully imposed their policies on women. That was left to the faction that emerged from their movement to dominate the country--the Taliban.

The extreme fundamentalist Taliban emerged after 1993--gaining foreign backing from Pakistan and U.S. oil companies. They claimed their goal was to end the civil war and "dishonor of women" in Afghanistan. They united many Mudjahadeen forces under their banner, especially the Pashtun chauvinists--and declared war on the rest.

Under Taliban, the suppression of women reached nightmarish extremes: Women were forbidden to work or go to school. Thousands of women were forced out of the universities, clinics and other workplaces. Hardest hit were widows--over 30,000 in Kabul alone--who suddenly had no way to provide for their families, or even step outside. Girls were forced from schools. Since most teachers were women, education for many boys stopped too.

The burkha was enforced strictly. Homes became prisons: House windows were even painted over so women could not be seen. Women were forbidden to speak loudly enough to be heard by strange men. They were forbidden to allow their shoes to make noise on the pavements. In the name of sexual virtue and family honor, films and books were banned.

Punishment was carried out directly by police with whips. A woman found walking with a man who was not a relative was considered guilty of adultery--unmarried offenders were publicly beaten, married women faced execution by public stoning. Homosexuals were executed by having a massive stone wall toppled onto them. Wearing nail polish could be punished by finger amputation.

Women felt buried alive. Many turned to suicide.

M.N. Cham writes in the international Maoist journal A World to Win (#24): "The women of Afghanistan have strongly opposed this oppressive and patronizing doctrine. The resentment accumulated through years of subjugation to male domination enforced by semi-feudal relations has started to surface. During a Taliban attack against Mazar-e-Sharif (at that time under the control of the Northern Alliance), women took up arms to fight them; there have been cases of women attacking the Taliban with kitchen knives. The protests of Afghani women in exile have made their way into Pakistani press. Women have lost their lives in struggles to keep the public baths open, and underground schools are being organized to educate women."

The U.S. government fell out with the Taliban during the late 1990s. And, after September 11, the U.S. overthrew the Taliban by invasion and bombing, using Northern Alliance troops as their colonial troops. U.S. media give the impression that women are now "liberated" thanks to this attack. Educated urban women are shown on TV returning without veils to their posts in the university and government. A few female government ministers are introduced to the world press.

It is still hard to document exactly what is happening now in Afghanistan, especially in its vast countryside, but this much is clear: for most women, the oppression of the old social relations remain.

The puppet forces the U.S. lifted into power have all been deeply involved in the politics of the past. The Northern Alliance, which opposed the Taliban, was notorious for their massive and systematic rape of women--and are deeply hated and feared for that reason. The head of the U.S.- installed interim puppet government Hamid Karzai was involved in the Taliban rise to power, providing them with both money and arms--and was considered by them for the post of international spokesman.

None of the forces the U.S. is backing--neither the Northern Alliance or the "interim government"--oppose the oppression of women or support any uprooting of either feudal or capitalist class relations. Many openly oppose the participation of women in public life.

On paper, the burkha may no longer be legally required. There are non-Pashtun areas where the burkha has been replaced by other forms of female covering that are more traditional in those areas.

But like bourgeois-democratic reforms in the past, these are changes aimed at improving the opportunities for imperialist penetration and have not touched the vast masses of women. Arranged marriage remains unchallenged. Father right--the unquestioned power of men to rule over "their" women--remains in place. All these things are also widely in place among the prominent allies of U.S. imperialism--Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey and Pakistan.

In fact, the U.S. imperialists (like the Soviet imperialists before them) are seeking to prop up their comprador capitalist puppets by forging a broad alliance with the feudal landlord class (who are called "warlords and tribal chieftains" in the U.S. media).

*****

The family patriarch, the feudal warlord, the religious fundamentalist, the foreign occupier, the imperialist bomber pilot have all made their harsh mark on the lives of Afghan women. In the refugee camps of Pakistan, Afghan women sing this song:

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