The Underground Girls of Kabul (46 page)

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If an Afghan woman wants to divorce
See “I Had to Run Away, The Imprisonment of Women and Girls for ‘Moral Crimes’ in Afghanistan,” A Human Rights Watch Report, 2012,
hrw.​org
, which explains: “Laws governing divorce in Afghanistan are discriminatory against women. The Afghan Civil Code of 1977, the key source of statutory family law in Afghanistan, allows men to divorce women very easily. Article 139 of the Afghan Civil Code states that: (1) A husband can divorce his wife orally or in writing. When a husband lacks these two means, divorce can happen by usual gestures which clearly implies divorce. (2) Divorce happens with clear wordings which, in customs, convey the meaning of divorce without intention. Women, however, face far greater obstacles in obtaining a divorce. Absent consent from their husband, women can only obtain a divorce through a court and must show cause on the grounds of (1) defect, for example because of illness; (2) harm; (3) non-payment of alimony; or (4) absence. Obtaining a ‘for cause’ divorce for women in Afghanistan is not easy, legally or practically.… Compounding these problems, many judges do not even apply the provisions of the Civil Code, but instead invoke their own interpretation of Islamic law, with some judges not even admitting that women are entitled to seek divorce.”

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close to the bottom of the Human Development Index
A yearly report by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, measures “development by combining indicators of life expectancy, educational attainment and income into a composite human development index, the HDI” and can be found at
undp.​org
. See also
The Forgotten Front: Water Security and the Crisis in Sanitation
, Afghanistan Human Development Report 2011, Centre for Policy and Human Development, Kabul University,
cphd.​af
. The report analyzes Afghanistan after almost a decade of foreign aid: “[T]here has been progress in recent years, but the progress has been uneven and far too slow. According to the Human Development Index for 2010, Afghanistan is ranked 155th among 169 United Nations member states … 84 percent of Afghan households are multi dimensionally poor.”

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more than $30 billion
The figures regarding Afghanistan’s aid are according to “Investments to End Poverty: Real Money, Real Choices,
Real Lives,” a report by British research group Development Initiatives, London 2013, which collects global data on development aid from both donor and recipient countries; see
devinit.​org
.

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a scathing review
Astri Suhrke,
When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Dr. Astri Suhrke is a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway. Her work focuses on “the social, political and humanitarian consequences of violent conflict, and strategies of response.” She is a member of a committee of experts serving the Norwegian Nobel Committee; see
http://​www.​cmi.​no/​staff/​?astri-​suhrke
. What Dr. Suhkre in her book calls “the liberal project” in Afghanistan began already in 2002, with sixty government donors in the country. She describes in detail the aid community’s planning and implementation stages, and the mismanagement that ensued. For instance, she writes: “There were parallel structures of administration on virtually all levels of government. International advisers, contractors and NGOs were ubiquitous. About two-thirds of all aid was channelled through an ‘external budget’ administered directly by foreign donors.”

Suhrke’s book is just one of several evaluations of how the foreign aid to Afghanistan has not only been questionably effective but may also have brought long-term negative consequences for the country and its economy. See also: “Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan: A majority staff report prepared for the use of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee” of June 8, 2011, U.S. Government Printing Office. The report cautions that Afghanistan may suffer a severe economic depression when foreign troops leave in 2014 due to the almost complete foreign aid dependency: “Foreign aid, when misspent, can fuel corruption, distort labor and goods markets, undermine the host government’s ability to exert control over resources, and contribute to insecurity. According to the World Bank, an estimated 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) is derived from spending related to the international military and donor community presence.”

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an auditor at the Office of the Special Inspector General
James R. Petersen served as senior auditor for the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction. In his
Politico
story “Was $73B of Afghan Aid Wasted?” January 11, 2012,
politico.​com
, he offers an idea of how much of the foreign aid funds actually go to helping anyone at all due to high overheads and corruption: “But a mere 30 cents out of every dollar for Afghanistan goes to aid. It gets worse. Of that 30 cents, frequently only half reaches the intended recipient. The remainder
is lost, stolen or misappropriated by Afghan workers and officials. Many projects don’t even attain their own internal goals, according to reports from inspectors general and the Commission on War-Time Contracting. The June 2011, Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded that few, if any, of these aid programs are sustainable in the long term. Add in the cost of the USAID’s bureaucratic superstructure—including $500,000 annually for each U.S. employee in Kabul, and the supporting staffs in Washington—and sometimes less than 10 cents of every dollar actually goes to aiding Afghans.” For more details, see
sigar.​mil
for quarterly reports on Afghanistan reconstruction.

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close to ten million students registered
Rod Nordland, “Despite Education Advances, a Host of Afghan School Woes,”
New York Times
, July 20, 2013,
nytimes.​com
, goes behind the numbers to reveal that only about 10 percent of students make it through to graduation and that graduation rates are even worse for girls.

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more than seven hundred “projects”
Again, information on 2011 foreign aid projects and numbers relating to “gender” were provided for this book by the British research group Development Initiatives; see
devinit.​org
.

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“gains are on the whole modest and reversible”
Torunn Wimpelmann’s 2012 report for NOREF, Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, is called “Promoting Women’s Rights in Afghanistan: A Call for Less Aid and More Politics,”
cmi.​no
. Norway is a large donor of foreign aid globally, and one of the largest to Afghanistan. Wimpelmann’s research, based on extensive fieldwork in the country, explains the discrepancy between the foreign aid bubble of Kabul and the actual needs of Afghan women: “The polarised and politicised situation regarding women’s issues in Afghanistan clearly demonstrates that women’s rights can never be secured, at least not in a sustainable manner, in isolation from broader political developments. Yet this is exactly what Western governments often have attempted. High-profile-declarations of commitments to and funding for women’s rights have been occurring in parallel with other policies that have undermined the very institutions and conditions on which such gains depend, such as a formal justice system, a functioning parliament and a non-militarised political landscape.”

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the relationship between gender and violence
Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett,
Sex and World Peace
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). These authors’ research clearly shows what Afghanistan has seen many times over—that the treatment of women and girls is at the center of war and conflict, and never a side “issue.” In fact, they are the very best measure of the level of conflict both internally and externally, as “the treatment of women—what is happening in intimate interpersonal relationships between men and women—creates a context in which violence and exploitation seem natural” (p. 15).

Their book also proposes the involvement of men to a greater degree, in redefining honor and advocating for women, maintaining that “societies that are more gender-equal are less likely to go to war” (p. 3). We would do well to remember this important conclusion: “We have found in conventional aggregate empirical testing that the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, or its level of democracy, or whether it is Islamic or not. The very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is its level of violence against women.… And the less willing a country is to enforce laws protecting women within its own borders, the less likely it is to comply with international treaty obligations. These empirical findings, we believe, are only the tip of the iceberg” (p. 205).