The Underground Girls of Kabul (5 page)

Azita subscribes to the regular Afghan argument: When your time is up, it’s up. God decides when that may be. She cannot spend every morning ride to work thinking of whether the moment has arrived. Azita and her driver have missed explosions by seconds before. Each day, she takes a risk just by stepping out of her house. She logs about two anonymous death threats a week at her office or at home, when she is warned to quit parliament. Or else. To avoid the threats and the inconvenience, she regularly buys new SIM cards for her mobile phone to get a new number, but they keep calling. Her transgressions are clear: She is a woman who dares to serve in parliament and she is a prominent symbol of a controversial, Western-supported government. The threats have become routine. Sometimes she argues with the caller, lecturing him on how the Koran does not condone murder. And it is always a he. “We know you don’t care about your own life, but think of your children,” they once said. That time, the threat was accompanied by the sound of gunfire. The one time Azita attempted to report threats to the police, they advised her “not to worry.” After all, they added, there is little they can do.

There have been direct attempts on her life: A year earlier, two men on a motorbike attempted to throw a hand grenade into the yard of her Badghis house. It exploded against the outside stone wall. When Azita ran out from the kitchen, she found her daughters hiding in a corner of the small garden.

Wealthier politicians travel by armored car, surrounded by
gunmen with shortwave radios. Those with investments in the illegal yet flourishing poppy trade—
Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium—usually have a follow car as well, to better the odds in case of a kidnap attempt. Azita cannot afford much more than her Toyota Corolla with a driver, who has taped a small glass bottle onto the dashboard—holy water from Mecca. It helps him focus; not even those who make sudden U-turns or drive toward him in the wrong direction merit a honk of his horn.

Azita did employ a bodyguard when she first started, as several colleagues told her it would look unseemly to always arrive without a male escort. But the bodyguard had a tendency to fall asleep as soon as he sat down, so she fired him. Along with all the other members of parliament, Azita has been issued a handgun for her own protection. With no intention of ever using it, she hid it somewhere in her apartment. She often reminds herself that she must find it before the children do.

In the car, she takes out her phone and attempts to bring up CNN’s website on the small display, but she does not get far on the spotty Afghan networks.

She looks out the window instead, on the merchants who slowly push their carts toward the marketplace and the motorbikes with at least two and often three or four people clinging on, their faces protected against Kabul’s beige-colored air with wraparound scarves. Pairs of Afghan ladies, wearing sandals with socks, hold hands and jump over open sewers. Not much is really white here, and few things are crisp, except for brand-new Land Rovers shipped in for foreigners and rich Afghans. Sooner rather than later, most things turn a shade of mud or khaki. Khaki and cement are the primary colors of Kabul, the monotony broken only by the poppy-funded houses that are painted a cream-infused red, a warm pink, or even green, with glimpses of tasseled pastel curtains—the deceptively cheery narcotecture of Kabul.

Chlorophyll is in short supply here; most trees have either died from pollution or have been burned for fuel by the indigent. A splash
of matte red sometimes also filters through the Kabul gray, in an old mural or another Cold War–reminder of those who tried to control the capital before both the Taliban and the Americans.

T
O
A
ZITA
, “
THE
Russian time,” as she refers to it, was not the protracted and brutal struggle painted by English-language memoirs of what Afghans call “the Soviet war” of the 1980s. To her, it was the backdrop of a reasonably charmed childhood.

Her father had been a member of a large but not wealthy clan, and was the first man from Badghis said to have pursued a master’s degree in Kabul. He carried that distinction when he returned to his province to marry. He had first met Azita’s mother, Siddiqua, when she was only twelve, and according to family legend, had fallen in love with her at first sight. They waited seven years to marry, and in 1977, their first child arrived, a much-loved and longed-for daughter. They named her after the Persian word derived from fire, or
azar
. Soon after celebrating Azita’s first birthday the family returned to build a life in Kabul, arriving just in time for the
Saur Revolution, when the Communist People’s Democratic Party took over the Afghan government.

With ideological and financial backing from Moscow, the new leadership proclaimed aggressive reforms,
setting out to replace religious law with a more secular system, promoting state atheism, and forcefully trying to establish a more modern society. Each business sector and each official institution was to be overhauled, from agriculture and the legal system to health care and—most controversially—family law.

The Russians were not the first to try to effect gender parity in Afghanistan, nor would they be the last.

Amanollah Khan had tried to assert rights for women in the 1920s, together with his queen
Soraya, who famously cast off her veil in public. The royal couple also began promoting the education of girls, banned the selling of them for marriage, and put restrictions on
polygyny. The backlash was severe. To many Afghans, and particularly to the majority who did not live in Kabul, the reforms seemed outrageous: Tribal men would lose future income if daughters could no longer be sold or traded as wives. In 1929, under threat of a coup, the king was forced to abdicate.

Three decades later, King Mohammad Zahir Shah made another, more cautious push for educating and emancipating women, proposing to grant them
equal rights in the Constitution of 1964, and the right to vote. Privileged Afghan women were sent abroad for university studies, returning to become professionals and academics.

Arline Lederman, an American development professional who taught at Kabul University in the early 1970s, remembers “a thrilling time” when elite Afghan women were more sophisticated than most of their liberal American counterparts. Women of Kabul’s royal family who wore raincoats, sunglasses, and Hermès head scarves and gloves “could have passed for Jackie Kennedy’s friends on an autumn day in Boston,” she observed.

Those advances of a small group of elite women were significant, but they were exclusive to Kabul and a handful of other urban areas. In the rest of the country, women’s roles were largely stagnant.

When Communist-era reforms rolled out on a large scale in the 1980s, however, they did not settle for the small elite in Kabul. In this new era, women and girls would no longer live in seclusion—they would
receive mandatory educations, freely choose whom to marry, and be active participants in a new society. After the massive Soviet military force arrived to prop up the fragile Kabul Communist government, thousands of government-employed Russians also landed in Kabul to help execute Moscow’s idealized plan for a new Afghanistan.

Agrarians, engineers, aid workers, teachers, and architects began to set up large-scale foreign aid projects with Soviet expertise. The programs were targeted toward turning around the whole country, and quickly. The Soviet leadership, which prided itself on having built an ideal, superior society at home, initially did not place much
weight on historical references or failures by others who had come before them.

One clearly stated goal was to educate and introduce more women in the workforce. The idea was sound: Only by gaining real economic power would women have the chance to gain real rights and redress imbalances. The execution would eventually prove to be as misguided as in previous attempts, with only a gradual and late understanding of the deep-rooted economics of patriarchy in the countryside.

But in Kabul, a few female Afghan ministers and parliamentarians were appointed. Others took up work as doctors and journalists, police and army officers, and lawyers. Unions and associations were formed, and, occasionally, women led them. In the capital, segregation at restaurants and on public transportation was banned.

In that progressive environment, Azita’s family settled into an upper-middle-class existence, where her father taught geography and history at the university and eventually invested in a small neighborhood store, selling paper goods, dried fruit, nuts, and other household staples. When he realized his daughter had a knack for languages, he bought her a small television set, so she could watch state newscasts broadcast in Russian and eventually translate parts of them for her parents. When Azita’s skill became known to teachers, she was singled out as a particularly talented child.

With that, she had been chosen for a special purpose.

As in any long game of invasion and nation building, the Soviets wanted to train the next generation of Afghan leaders and secure their loyalty to Moscow. Little Azita, who possessed a quick mind and a willingness to study, was moved to a more demanding school, with foreign teachers and Russian as the official language. She and other handpicked students would ascend through the new system’s most elite institutions—the breeding facilities for Afghanistan’s future power cluster. Their education would be crowned by a year or two of higher studies at the best universities of Moscow or Leningrad.

Azita remembers this time being “like Europe,” in Kabul, where she would take an electric tram car to school, operated by a female
driver. The female school uniform was a brown dress, a white apron, and brown shoes with white kneesocks. On their heads, the girl students wore only brown velvet bows.

To the delight of her Russian teachers, teenage Azita was athletic, too, and she was made captain of the girls’ volleyball team. She planned to take her father’s academic legacy a step further, and make him even more proud of his firstborn. It did not matter that she had not been born a boy—this newly reformed country that promoted women was on her side. She would become a doctor. Failing that—which did not seem likely—she saw herself as a news anchor, inspired by the unveiled, modern women she saw on her television set. Azita was the Soviet plan for a new Afghanistan incarnate.

But tradition still ruled in the provinces, where the political manifesto mandating equality between the sexes directly contradicted much of Pashtun tradition around inheritance and ownership.
Rapid attempts at reforming society and culture were met with great resistance and fury aimed at the government for again issuing decrees to ban child marriage and the lucrative trading of women and girls, and for stating that no women should be sold for marriage, or married against her will. Once more tribal men saw the risk of losing both cash and influence. If women were to be educated and work outside the home, they would “dishonor” their families by being seen in public and potentially develop other, even more subversive ideas. And who would care for the children if women took over the tasks of men? Society would undoubtedly fall apart. Worst of all, another proposed decree would allow women to initiate divorce more easily. Clearly, foreign influence brought decadence and subverted Afghan traditions. The reforms were declared un-Islamic by many religious mullahs.

Meanwhile, armed resistance to the Soviet occupation built around the country. Parts of the mujahideen opposition to the Soviet occupation had found a sympathetic ally in the Pashtuns next door in Pakistan, who were eager to exert influence in Afghanistan. The Soviet-instituted reforms proved to be an efficient pretext for
recruiting followers: Women’s education as well as all women’s rights were despicable, pernicious poison-pill notions that stood to destroy the very fundament of Afghanistan’s culture and way of life.

Power has always been held by those who manage to control the origins of life by controlling women’s bodies. The old Afghan expression
zan, zar waa, zamin
summarizes the ever-present threat against men’s personal property, which was always the main reason for taking up arms: Women. Gold. And land. In that order.

Resistance against the Soviets was boosted by generous financing and logistical help from abroad: U.S. president Jimmy Carter had declared that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan constituted “
the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” As the fight against Communism was a battle between good and evil, Islamic fundamentalists made excellent partners in this mission as they, too, had clear views of good and evil, albeit from a slightly different perspective.

And so the gains of women in Afghanistan once again directly contributed to war, as their fate was mixed into the powder keg of tension between reformers and hardliners, between foreigners and Afghans, and between the urban centers and the countryside.

Yet, the outside world did not seem to notice the central controversy of Afghan women. The foreign powers instead seemed to agree that there were much bigger problems with Afghanistan than such a peripheral issue, which would have to be revisited at some other time, when the men had stopped fighting. The threat of Communism—and the need to contain it—ensured American dollars and arms kept flowing to the Soviet opposition, moderates and extremists alike.

A
ZITA
’
S FAMILY HELD
out in Kabul for a while, through violence and power struggles following the eventual Soviet troop withdrawal, when mujahideen groups fought for control of the capital. When the violence shut down schools and many areas of the city, a routine was established for the now seventeen-year-old’s rare outings with her father. Azita always carried a note with the phone numbers for relatives
in her pocket and a few bills in one of her shoes, in case an attack should separate them.

In the spring of 1992, Kabul erupted into full-blown civil war. Azita gradually trained herself not to panic when a first blast set off a series of explosions, or when she,
like most other children in Kabul at the time, saw body parts and corpses on the streets. Her memories from that time largely revolve around shock waves, vibrating buildings, and the fires that ensued: “It started from everywhere. Shooting, bombarding, blasting, killing. Everywhere, there was something. One day we had fifteen or sixteen rocket blasts in our neighborhood. The house was shaking all the time.”