Despite the fact that for a decade the western coalition has claimed that the liberation of Afghan women was a top priority of their war, a recent survey has ranked Afghanistan as “the most dangerous country for women in the world."[i] In October 2001 when the American led western coalition declared the war to overthrow the Taliban regime and replace it with a pro-western political arrangement with a democratic façade, they claimed that their war would liberate and improve the condition of Afghan women. In the words of Arundhati Roy, it seemed as if the western war machine was engaged in a “feminist mission.” Over the past decade of political reconstruction where Afghanistan would be made conducive to western interests in the region, the condition of Afghan women has been used as justification for the presence of the western armed forces and the continuation of war. To this end many NGOs, think tanks, and media outlets have emerged, benefitting from this Afghan Women’s Liberation Industrial Complex. Additionally, many bourgeois and petty bourgeois Afghan women have smartly taken advantage of this opportunity to enhance and consolidate their position within Afghan society’s class hierarchy.
Over the past decade there have been some opportunities for women in the cities: there are many educated women who have found jobs with national and international NGOs and receive what is commonly known as “dollar salaries.” Moreover, schools and universities have opened in major cities in order to provide education for those young women who can afford it. The Afghan constitution has allocated seats for women in parliament and in the senate. Many of the women benefitting from these new opportunities, however, acknowledge that the changes are mostly cosmetic, existing mainly to attest the existence of real project for improving the condition of women.
Despite some minor gains and accomplishments of a segment of Afghan women (mainly city dwellers), due to the brutal and archaic patriarchal social mores rampant in Afghan society, along with the extensive and widespread pauperization of the Afghan masses partly caused by the ongoing western counter-insurgency war against a very misogynist Islamist resistance, Afghanistan truly might be one of the worst places in the world for women.
A quick look at the facts should illustrate the wretched condition of women in this country. According to reports of the Afghanistan’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs, every 30 minutes a woman dies while giving birth––this marks the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. The life expectancy of Afghan women is 44 years, one year lower than Afghan men, though in many countries the life expectancy of women is higher than men. Moreover, about seventy percent of people suffering from tuberculosis in Afghanistan are women––areality that might be related to the fact that 90 percent of the back-breaking, boring and torturous carpet weaving labour is being done by women and female children.
Afghan women are performing various forms of hard labour from dawn till dusk. Although men own close to 100 percent of the country's property, it is estimated that about 70 percent of agricultural labour is performed by women. Thus, it should not be a surprise that 52 percent of women in this country are suffering from severe malnutrition. Given the patriarchal social values, families give priority to boys; therefore sons are fed at the cost of reducing the food intake of daughters.
Despite sloganeering around the question of women, the actual situation has not improved for the overwhelming majority of Afghan women. One could make the argument that due to the increasing and widening income gap, the pauperization of masses of peasantry and workers due to warfare, and various government policies, the situation of the majority of women has deteriorated and is even further deteriorating.
The western coalition at war in the country, along with its satraps at the helm of political power in Kabul and its multitude of NGOs, seem to have done little for Afghan women. Nor is there any reason to believe that this situation will improve in the foreseeable future. Furthermore the specter of the Taliban’s theocratic, utterly reactionary and misogynist movement, with its vision of establishing amono-gender dystopia, is also haunting the country.
The real and most distracting problem of women in Afghanistan is the weakness of a true and independent women’s political movement; the weakness of such a movement can partly be explained by the weakness of the democratic and progressive forces in this country and elsewhere. My sense, however, is that there is a progressive and revolutionary potential among the masses of women in Afghanistan. There are many discontented women, unhappy with the dominant patriarchal social relations and the cynical policies and behavior of both those in power and their international masters. Thus there is potential among women in this country to produce an independent opposition movement that would challenge the status quo.
The oppression of women in Afghanistan forms a major social contradiction in this country. Now the women in this country are stuck between two bad alternatives. On the one hand there is the social and patriarchal oppression held together by the Karzai led theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, its pseudo-democratic pretentions supported by the west. On the other hand there is a misogynist Islamist resistance. Both alternatives are interested in maintaining and continuing the patriarchal oppression in their own respective manner. This situation is not sustainable.
In the cities the masses of women in the workforce, along with students in educational institutions, possess a significant organizational potential. They could build a movement that could deny the national and international centers of power the cynical attempt to exploit their situation. Moreover, their active participation in challenging the Karzai government and its international masters would delegitimize the Taliban movement by breaking its monopoly of resisting the foreign forces and their puppet regime. The potential emergence of a mass women’s movement in Afghanistan could cause an epoch changing breakthrough in the national and international order in the coming decades.
Hamayon Rastgar is a Lecturer at Gawharshad Institute of Higher Education in Kabul Afghanistan. He can be reached at[email protected].
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