Recently in Rebuilding Afghanistan Category

When people in the US talk about the scourge of violence against women in Afghanistan, discussion tends to stop cold at one word: culture. As if culture is some sacred terrain upon which we dare not tread. The flawed syllogism goes like this: misogyny is endemic to Afghan culture. We can’t criticize that culture without reinforcing a racist agenda and justifying US military intervention. Therefore, we can’t take a stand against misogynist violence in Afghanistan.

We can argue the assumptions embedded in that logic, but ultimately, the culture conversation misses the point. Afghan culture may be misogynist, but so is every culture. There’s nothing unique about the suffocation of women’s potential to live as full human beings, backed up by extreme violence and justified by religion and nature. The difference between Afghanistan and any other place is the extent to which women have succeeded in winning rights and transforming culture in the process.

What, then, is obstructing progress for Afghan women? For one thing, women who seek to exercise their basic rights are systematically hunted down and killed. A new United Nations report grimly confirms what women in Afghanistan have been telling us all year: women are being harassed and even assassinated for holding jobs, speaking out for their rights or simply appearing in public without a male chaperone. Women politicians, teachers, nurses, artists, aid workers, journalists and other professionals are being targeted by ultra-conservatives aiming to create a society in which women have no rights and no role in public life.

Despite the danger, Afghan women continue to demand their rights. Remember the hundreds of women who took to the streets of Kabul in April? They took their lives in their hands to protest a new law sanctioning marital rape.

Ultimately, though, Afghan women’s prospects for transforming their society are undermined by the US-led war. In fact, many Afghan women activists identify the war as the biggest danger to women’s rights in Afghanistan

Over the past eight years, uncounted numbers of women and their family members have been killed, displaced and terrorized. The war has had a disproportionate impact on women, who have had to sustain family life and meet everyone’s needs for food, water, childcare and a host of other services through years of violence, constant insecurity and grinding poverty. In addition to endangering women’s lives, the war has eroded the political space for women to advocate for their rights.

That’s why the Feminist Majority Foundation’s endorsement of the US war in Afghanistan is so perplexing. The FMF rightly argues that the US owes a tremendous debt to the people of Afghanistan, having induced 30 years of war and misery there. They’ve got the history right, but the conclusion wrong. US guns, bombs and military occupation cannot bring about a society based on human rights. However, a US commitment to education, sustainable agriculture and equitable economic development just might.

Those kinds of policies are what’s needed to reinforce a beleaguered but vibrant Afghan women’s movement, including courageous activists involved in securing food, housing, healthcare and education for women and families, defending women’s shelters, holding peace demonstrations, demanding women’s full participation in public life and fighting for interpretations of Islam that support women’s rights. No foreign military occupation is going to do those things. Afghan women themselves will have to do it.

Through our Afghan Women’s Survival Fund, MADRE is working to support the women who risk their lives to defend women’s human rights.  For more information about the Fund and how you can help, click here.

*Cross-posted on myMADRE.

Karzai is a Pashtun, of the Durrani tribe. Hekmatyar is a Pashtun-Kharoti. Academics and journalists love to throw these details out to add context to a story. But what does it mean politically for Afghanistan and its people’s pursuit of peace? Here’s a quick guide to how Afghanistan’s tribal leadership, justice and dispute resolution system works, with links to the best related online media:

Marakas, Jirgas, and Shuras, Oh My

The Pashtun, Tajik, Hezara, Baluchi, Kuchi, Turkmen, and other ethnic groups of Afghanistan share a traditional societal structure academics call “segmentary lineage”. Others call it “tribal society.” Like many Arabs, Punjabis, Somalis, Chechens, and other groups, the people of Afghanistan have a long reliable path to peace in their traditional dispute resolution mechanism, which functions along their network of traditional tribes and clans which is, collectively, more powerful than the fledgling government. Yet many global decision-makers postpone talk with the tribal network and focus first on the state at risk of forging a law or agreement no one plans to follow.

When an Afghan family runs into a challenge—a wedding, birth, harvest, murder, rape, fistfight, stolen chicken, discovery of an alien spaceship, or what-have-you—the father does not go first to the state police or mayor, he typically goes to his bloodline elder.

Depending on the difficulty of the challenge or dispute, the elder may decide to elevate the issue to the bloodline village council (maraka, in Pashtun), the tribal council representing the local collection of related tribal clans of the same language group (qawmi jirga, in Pashtun), or even an ad hoc regional council (shura). If there is an issue of great national importance, either for a single ethnic group or across ethnic groups, the leading elders may call a grand national council hearing (loya jirga). Tajiks and others typically use the Arabic word, majlis, for similar councils.

Only if the traditional bloodline representatives, applying traditional or customary law (Pashtuns call theirs the narkh; and their sub-code for personal behavior, pashtunwali) with the aid of their Islamic advisor (most follow the Hanafi school, but the ultra-conservative Taliban follow a Salafist code), will the elders bring the issue to the state. Here’s a great introduction to the Pashtun traditional dispute resolution system, followed by a link to a list of Pashtun tribes:

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan017434.pdf  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtun_tribes

Tribal Alliances and Relations with Fighting Groups

Knowing how to quickly navigate the tribal network from the bottom-up has enabled the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and many mujahedin groups before them to secure the loyalties of, or some would say to blackmail, local leaders much faster and for longer periods than foreign armies and urban bureaucrats, who typically negotiate from the top-down, have been able to.

However, since 2003, the ruling government of Afghanistan has teamed up with NATO and aid agencies to carry out an enormous, hybrid civilian-military collaboration with tribal councils called the “National Solidarity Programme” (NSP). It is one of the largest efforts in history of an international force seeking to rapidly merge or interweave traditional, Islamic, and state representational and justice systems in a country. See more about the NSP, followed by how the Afghan government is structured, here:

http://www.nspafghanistan.org/
http://www.understandingwar.org/themenode/afghan-government

Many tribal leaders now get a chance to hear presentations not only from the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or unrelated aid agencies operating in the area. They now also get contrasting series of Powerpoint seminars from NSP aid workers as well as the Afghan government which hopes integrating the tribal with the state will enable Kabul to forge and secure alliances more successfully than the Taliban.

Difficult Choices for Local Leaders

It ain't as easy as choosing between liberal economic opportunity and an ultra-conservative Stone-Age poverty. Frontline village leaders along the Afghan-Pakistani and Afghan-Iranian border often face a harrowing choice which could lead to their community’s salvation or destruction.

Even if a village leader wishes to pursue peace or even join one side in a conflict, his first loyalty must typically be to his community’s tribal affiliation. Collectively, the tribal alliances then must choose whether to pick a side, remain neutral, or pretend to be on the side of whomever shows up that day.

The NSP/Government or Taliban delegations typically come as political or even as humanitarian missions. They park their cars by the hard top highway and hike up a narrow mountain path, lugging laptops, hand books, and rifles (though aid workers with the NSP usually do not and should not go armed) until they reach the outer line of farmers or herders.

The first local man to spot the delegation goes himself or sends his son up to the head of the maraka, a traditional bloodline council of elders, who either calls a militia to scare the delegation away or, more often, prepares a place for the council to host the group for tea.

The first group to query the local council before any major fighting erupts in the area is usually the Taliban. Sometimes there is rumored to be a representative from Al Qaeda. The Taliban delegation knows how the traditional law and decision-making process works and they are led from the battlefield; that is why they are the first to make their plea. They argue in their special way how the local tribal group, and its autonomous militia, should support the Taliban for God, country, etc, or face mysterious fate, x.

Then the combined NSP team arrives, a bit higher tech, a bit less armed, to make their case. Where the Taliban offers salvation, the NSP team offers economic integration and greater regional decision-making power.

At this point, if the tribal leaders choose to be neutral, they will continue to get approached from both sides who may return with greater motivational tools or more painful choices. If the tribal leaders pick one side, very likely the next months will bring some form of violence form the side which was rejected. To pretend to be on both sides would guarantee that the winner will remember their support, but to be discovered as a collaborator with the enemy could bring even greater destruction than choosing a side.

While the Afghan government and international forces are relying on the NSP and related civil-military efforts to sell the most attractive package to gain the trust and support of local tribal decision-makers, Pakistan, modeled on Iraq with US backing, is bolstering their offer by offering the tribal councils weapons with which to arm their local militias in exchange for their alliance. Here’s more on that:

http://in.reuters.com/article/southAsiaNews/idINIndia-36603220081120  

To best comprehend this campaign to win the trust of thousands of local tribal councils, imagine an election campaign in which your community has to vote in a block and whichever party you do not vote for may show up one day and arrest all of the male leaders or simply burn the village down.

If you have more information, preferred links, or would like to discuss this, please add your comments below.

With elections coming up, Afghanistan is buzzing with criticism of the past, but little talk of what to do next. I would focus on changing direction in three critical areas- security, infrastructure and education.