An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (29 page)

Western feminists and journalists, both men and women, continue to cry out against the savage mistreatment of Afghan women—outraged by the chopped-off noses and ears, the acid-disfigured faces, the torture and murders in the name of honor. Paradoxically this signals that, despite years of being taught that everything is culturally relative, Westerners still understand that women’s rights should be universal. People everywhere are offended, perhaps even threatened, by how women are being treated in Afghanistan.

Afghan (like Pakistani) girls are given in marriage to violent older men who already have a wife or two. In protest and in despair young girls are setting themselves on fire. Unlike the self-immolation of the Tunisian vendor, which presumably set off the wintry Arab Spring, the drastic and terrible actions of these young girls have had no ripple effect.

In Afghanistan in-laws confined a daughter-in-law to the basement, where they tortured her for months in order to force her into prostitution. Recently an Afghan mother-in-law beheaded her daughter-in-law for refusing to become a prostitute.

In 2010
Time
magazine put beautiful but noseless eighteen-year-old Bibi Aisha on its cover—a poster girl for atrocities against Afghan women. With the help of the Taliban her husband, father-in-law, and other family members had chopped off her nose and ears. Women for Afghan Women sprang into action. They offered this young woman asylum, surgical repairs, and psychiatric treatment. The do-gooders soon ran into posttraumatic stress symptoms that are somewhat off our Western charts.

But she is only one of millions of Afghan, and other central and east Asian, Indian, and Arab women in similar distress. Can we relocate them all? Or fund a Marshall Plan to educate Islamists about human rights—really?

While I praise the courage that has led so many Westerners to try to help Afghans survive day by day, I am also frustrated beyond measure
that so many of these humanitarians continue to blame America and the West, and refuse to understand the realities of indigenous gender and religious apartheid and the totalitarian evil we are facing.

In my opinion America should not have stayed on in Afghanistan. I also thought that America should have cut into the enormous Saudi funding of worldwide propaganda and terrorism by either refusing to buy Saudi oil, taking over their oilfields, or investing in other sources of energy. I have been saying this for nearly a decade. The West has funded the war against itself by buying Arab oil. It is as simple and as tragic as that.

Still, I am also shaken by the inability of many people to understand that evil and injustice truly exist and that one cannot win every single battle against them. I am even more shaken by the refusal of educated and progressive Americans to understand that the concept of a global caliphate is fueling thousands of Islamist terrorists, all of whom have explosives and some of whom have nuclear weapons.

We are infidels, and as such our help is feared and despised. The author Rajiv Chandrasekaran tells the story of a farmer who observed American do-gooders at work back in the 1950s, when Afghans and Americans were optimistically engaged in the Helmand River Project. The farmer had a “strange expression on his face.” When Dr. Abdul Kayeum, the head of the project, questioned him, here is what he said: “‘As I looked at the Americans the thought came to [me] that the land upon which they were standing was cursed because the infidel had touched the land’ . . . the farmer predicted that within twenty years, the entire Helmand Valley would be a wasteland because of the tinkering of the infidels.”

I
n the context of this anti-infidel history, can Americans save the women and girls of Afghanistan?

No, I fear we cannot. This pains me but passion must yield to reason. Yes, we can and should rescue girls and women one by one and relocate them either within Afghanistan or externally; some groups are doing this. But we cannot rescue every woman in Afghanistan—or stem the tide of Islamist violence against civilians everywhere, not only in Afghanistan, without first defeating the Islamists ideologically, politically, economically, and militarily.

Are we our sisters’ keepers? Yes, we are—theoretically, morally. But we cannot keep trying to do something that cannot be done. As outsiders
we cannot save anyone so far away; indeed we cannot seem to save girls from honor-related violence right here in the West.

There are many things we must and are beginning to do—in the
West.
Honor killings are being prosecuted here and long or life sentences are being handed down. However, America lags behind Canada and Europe in terms of arresting collaborators or accomplices, who are often women as well as men. We have not yet committed the resources necessary to rescue women who are at risk of being slain in an honor killing in America or who seek asylum here for this reason.

Honor-related violence and gender apartheid are human rights violations and cannot be justified in the name of cultural relativism, tolerance, antiracism, diversity, religious custom, or political correctness.

The battle for women’s rights is central to the battle for a Judeo-Christian, post-Enlightenment civilization. It is a necessary part of Western democracy, along with gay and lesbian rights, and freedom of speech, religion, and dissent. Here, then, is exactly where the greatest battle of the twenty-first century is joined.

In 2002 Rory Stewart, an author and member of the British Parliament, walked on foot from Herat to Kabul; he wrote a wonderful book about his travels,
The Places in Between.
Stewart has said, many times, “Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons—doing ‘whatever it takes’ and ‘whatever it costs’—we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don’t have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.” In 2012 Stewart wrote, “Foreigners have not forged a political solution, and now can’t.”

Formerly progressive cities like Teheran, Beirut, Istanbul, Damascus, and Cairo (Kabul too, from 1964 to 1980) have fallen into Islamist hands. Everywhere women are veiled, men are wearing beards, the press is censored, propaganda rules the airwaves, torture is rampant, Islamist Muslims are killing both infidels and, mainly, other Muslims; the body count remains fearfully high.

What, if anything, do I owe Afghanistan, a country where I once lived and where I nearly died? I was there. It remains a part of me. I am now a tiny part of the country’s history. I remember Kabul, Istalif, Paghman, and the Pamir mountains with love. I remember my Afghan family. I will never forget my time there, the people I met, the natural splendor that I at least glimpsed.

This is an accounting of sorts. A young Jewish American woman once came to this wondrous Asiatic country and fled harem life. She
finally uncovered the history of what happened to the Jews of Afghanistan, and she has told their story in order to redeem her soul. A young Jewish American woman once loved a Muslim Afghan man, and although it could never work out, they continued talking to each other down through the decades of their lives.

Each time I see him I vow to never do so again. Then, whenever he calls, we make a plan to meet.

I
t is more than fifty years since we first met, and Abdul-Kareem and I are sitting in a Jewish delicatessen on the Upper West Side, near one of the many summer or winter break sublets we once lived in so long ago. We are there because Abdul-Kareem said he was “just dying for a good Jewish pastrami on rye” and suggested we go to Fine and Schapiro’s.

Like his father before him, he cuts a rather dapper figure. His hair is still thick, but it is now entirely white, he sports a fashionable moustache, wears an expensive watch, and carries a polished wood-topped cane. He still wears dark glasses that match his black turtleneck sweater, black suit, black cashmere coat.

I ask, “So how are you today?”

He answers, “I’m glad you asked me that question. Do you remember Minister A? You know, the one who flew me to Cumballa Hill in Bombay—the view was fantastic, divine—to consult on that cultural project? Anyway I recently got a call from one of his nephews.”

Abdul-Kareem takes the long road toward every subject because along the way he must tell me about the ambassadors, presidents, film stars, prime ministers, royalty, and film directors he has met in his world travels, all of whom have shown him the greatest courtesy, sent embassy cars, arranged sumptuous dinners, seated him next to the most important people at every banquet.

Oh, the villas, palaces, hotels, fountains, gardens, feasts, and parties he has known! He never speaks without making sure his listener knows that he has moved in circles of power, among celebrities, heads of states, great artists, and beautiful women. He is a man of many peak moments.

What he says may be true. He says he knows all the major filmmakers. Perhaps he does. Perhaps this is how he manages to endure being in exile: by hugging all his former glories close. He has no country, no summer and winter villas, no working farms, no chauffeur, no gardener, no houseboys—no Ministry post left.

To hear Abdul-Kareem tell it, only he has the solution for Afghanistan. If America-which-funded-the-Taliban gets out, stops supporting Karzai-the-damn-drug-lord; if America forces Pakistan-which-also-funded-and-trained-the-Taliban to also get out and forces Pakistan to close the permeable border across which fresh Arab- and Pakistani-trained terrorists enter; if the Chinese are allowed to invest in Afghan gas and minerals (Afghanistan may have as much or even more oil than Saudi Arabia, if it can be mined and transported), then Afghanistan can climb up out of the Middle Ages and take its rightful place among the nations of wealth and so on.

Abdul-Kareem loves America, but he has high standards for us. I think he expected his adopted country to rescue, not abandon, his country of origin and then not just pile on for its own purposes.

I listen. I keep listening. I finally say, as I always do, “If you have a solution, why not write an op-ed piece, write a long article? I will help you in any way I can.”

He resists. He says he is not a writer. He says that he has too much to say. He says that were his views known, he might get in trouble. We have had this same conversation for more than thirty years now. Perhaps he is right. I suggest he publish anonymously. I tell him that Muslim and ex-Muslim friends of mine do just that. He asks me whether we can share a byline. As usual I agree. But nothing ever comes of it.

“Why not at least write up your family and personal memories for your grown children so that they will know their ancestry, their heritage?” I suggest.

“Well,” he softens. “Maybe for them, I might do it for them.”

Abdul-Kareem does not need me to speak. He needs me only to listen, and he allows his much-relished sandwich to just sit there, uneaten, for nearly an hour. I finally break into the monologue.

For the first time I ask him why he thought that someone like me could ever have adjusted to life in Afghanistan. He responds by telling me what a great life Kamile, his second wife had, the ambassadors, prime ministers, royalty, and film stars that she too met—“and she also worked.” He then says something new and astounding.

“I had hoped that you would be as ambitious as I was, that you would see the promise, the hope, the challenge involved in helping this small country progress, become modern, independent.”

“Are you saying that I am not ambitious?”

“Yes. I am. You were young, you did not yet know what you wanted to do, and you turned tail and ran home. So you did end up writing a
few books for a small circle of people. But that does not compare to what I had envisioned for us.”

He still views his dream of modernizing one small country as more noble than my dream of freedom for women. I am stunned that he still views me as the wife who failed him—not as the feminist who got away. I was meant to help him realize his dreams. Poor man: He cannot acknowledge that I would have sacrificed myself in vain for a dream not my own—one that even he was unable to accomplish.

Perhaps another kind of woman might have flourished as the wife of an Afghan deputy minister and theater director. I am not that kind of woman. He is blind to—perhaps he despises—who I am and what I have accomplished.

I have not been able to achieve my dream of freedom for all women; but that vision is fully underway in the world. It is a work in process. Also, it was not my destiny to remain in Kabul, to set down roots only to see them destroyed by the Soviets and by the Taliban.

Yes, he is both larger and smaller than I imagined him to be. He is stubborn, selfish, and given to monologues, but he is also courtly, gracious, and strong. Through him I gained an unsentimental education, the kind that cannot be acquired through books.

As I’ve said, my fiery American feminism was really forged in Afghanistan.

Abdul-Kareem turned out to be one of my muses, as did Afghanistan itself. I have turned my brief sojourn—and my subsequent lifelong interest in the Islamic world—into a writer’s treasure.

I experienced what it was like to live with people who were permanently afraid of what other people might think—even more so than in Small Mind Town, USA. I knew there were political prisoners and torture chambers in Afghanistan. I knew that Afghans who wanted any progress were arrested and punished in medieval ways.

Therefore I became an intellectual who views conformity and censorship as dangerous; one who deeply appreciates the importance of dissent, a free press, the First Amendment, and the separation of religion and state as crucial to any democracy and to woman’s freedom.

D
id I ever love him? How would I know? I was a virgin in this matter as well. But writing this book has put me in touch with the long-buried tenderness that I still feel for him—especially now that he has become a character in these pages.

I could not live with him. But what’s that got to do with love?

It is a privilege to know someone this long, a man who comes from a far-distant country and culture, someone who still regularly calls me to see how I am and to tell me his family news.