While

outrage over the Taleban’s requirement that Afghan women wear a head-to-toe veil

continues, a new comprehensive study shows that the majority of Afghan women

consider the Taleban’s dress codes a non-issue, and many choose to wear the

burqa or chadari whether the Taleban decrees it or not.

Physicians for Human Rights’s 2001 study corrects for some biases in its hugely

influential 1998 report, The Taliban’s War on Women. "We made a huge deal in the

last report about the clothing edicts," says PHR’s Susannah Sirkin, sparking

nationwide feminist outrage with the Taleban regime. But that report "was not a

randomized sample," says PHR’s Dr. Lynn L. Amowitz. "It was a discussion of what

was happening to educated Kabulese women who had abandoned traditional

practices." For their first study, researchers interviewed about 80 women in

Kabul, the country’s most modern city, and 80 refugees in Pakistan. Amowitz led

last year’s 3-month study in Afghanistan, which entailed interviews with over

200,000 Afghan women and men, from both rural and urban areas, some under

Taleban control and others not.

While

the media were “all over” the first study, PHR says, there’s been precious

little attention paid to this latest one. A wire service report was apparently

ignored. The Los Angeles Times buried a brief mention on the most obvious

finding—that the majority of Afghan women and men say the Taleban has worsened

their lives—at the end of a story. Barbara Crossette’s article on the study has

yet to be published by the New York Times.

The

results paint a more nuanced and complex view of Afghanistan’s closed society

and the brutal Taleban regime, in particular the vast differences between Kabul

and other urban areas and the Afghan countryside. Whereas many women in Kabul

worked, went to school, and wore Western clothing, in rural areas, tradition,

poverty, and war had prevented many women from entering public life even before

the Taleban rode into town. Most of the adult women in the new survey–subject

to mandatory education during the 1970s and 1980s–attended school for less than

2 years. Today, while Taleban edicts drastically restrict women’s access to

health care, over half of Afghan women say the main reason they can’t get

medical attention is because they can’t afford it.

Most

striking in the face of U.S. feminist campaigns against the veil is the finding

that over 80% of women in non-Taleban controlled areas say they wear the chadari

all the time and over 90% say that their dress rarely affects their daily lives.

Over 80% of all respondents consider persecution for dress code infractions an

unimportant issue.

Feminist campaigns have been crucial in educating Americans about Taleban rule

in Afghanistan. Amowitz, however, says she’s concerned that the attention "is

not for the issues that are most important." Feminist campaigns raised public

awareness in many cases by making the burqa–and American repulsion to it–the

emotional center of their projects. Oprah Winfrey’s critically acclaimed reading

of Eve Ensler’s "Under the Burqa," to 18,000 people at New York City’s Madison

Square Garden told the story of an Afghan woman under Taleban rule, ending with

the appearance of a burqa-clad Afghan woman. Audience members, who afterward

signed petitions against the Taleban in the thousands, pinned bits of fabric

from burqas on their lapels in remembrance.

The

burqa is a "symbol of the total oppression of women," says Feminist Majority

Campaign’s Norma Gattsek. Thus, the centerpiece of the Feminist Majority’s

Campaign to End Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan, launched in 1997 as the group’s

first foray into international politics, is a project that distributes burqas to

schoolchildren across the country. Over 600 groups participate in the Feminist

Majority’s "Back-to-School" campaign. The campaign draws attention to the fact

that the Taleban outlawed female education and employment (today, they allow

girls’ religious education up till the age of 8). In addition to viewing a

wrenching Marlo-Thomas-narrated video, hearing lectures, and donating money to

Afghan girls’ home schools and NGO-run schools, participants are lent burqas to

try on. Thousands of others buy the group’s "symbol of remembrance," a small

swatch of mesh material representing the burqa

"It

is the most smothering experience to put one on," says Gattsek. "Anytime a group

has used one, they have told us that that moment of putting that on was

overwhelming. Because it really made them feel, how could I live like this,

totally cut off from the world?"

A

more accurate rendition of women’s Taleban-induced problems would probably

entail an enforced fast and/or being stoned by classmates. The Taleban continues

to impose hangings, amputations, and deaths by stoning, in a society of gross

deprivations and ongoing civil war. International repugnance with their regime

has isolated the country. This January’s latest round of UN sanctions aimed at

pressuring the Taleban to hand over Osama bin Laden may intensify the civil war

and deepen poverty, human rights advocates say. International flights have been

banned, and a lop-sided arms embargo prohibits military aid to the Taleban but

not to the factions fighting against them, which have openly stated that foreign

powers continue to fund their war.

All

of this has especially dire ramifications for women and children, who comprise

three-quarters of all refugees from the country, making feminist activism in

defense of Afghanistan’s women especially critical. The work of the Feminist

Majority and other women’s rights groups–drumming up humanitarian aid,

funneling funds to women’s clinics and home-schools, petitioning the

administration to pressure Pakistan and other countries to stanch the flow of

arms to Afghanistan–is exemplary. But the tactic of capitalizing on American

horror of the Muslim veil, while it may work well in drawing attention to the

heartbreaking plight of women in Afghanistan, has now been undeniably uprooted

from reality. Let’s drop it.