by Barbara Bick
Published in 2009 by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
www.feministpress.org
Copyright © 2009 by Barbara Bick
Foreword copyright © 2009 by Eden Naby
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bick, Barbara.
Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban / Barbara Bick; Foreword by Eden Naby. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55861-919-7
1. Afghanistan—History—1990-2003. 2. Afghanistan—History—1990-2003. Taliban. 4. Bick, Barbara. I. Title.
DS371.3.B53 2009
958.104’6—dc22
2008009274
13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1
For the two most important women in my life
My mother, Moma Lil
LILLIAN COLODNY LICHTENSTEIN: a wise, beautiful woman whose activist life was circumscribed by societal parameters
My daughter, Kathy
KATHRINE BICK: brilliant, insatiable reader, loving woman whose life was tragically distorted by mental illness
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
1. Kabul, 1990
2. Against the Taliban, 1992–2000
3. Journey to the Land of the Mujahidin, 2001
4. Khoja Bahauddin
5. Faizabad
6. The Assassins
7. Kabul Redux, 2003
Chronology Timeline
Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women
NEGAR Petition: Statement of Support for the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
Western women who venture into Afghanistan with the expectation of conducting research, interviews, or otherwise investigating political or social situations, must inevitably negotiate the gender issue. As a young United States Peace Corps volunteer in Mazar-i-Sharif during the 1960s, my concession to the near total social segregation of women was a headscarf and modest clothing. But the true toll of a segregated society was the feelings of boredom, isolation, and loneliness that I, along with my Western and Afghan friends, experienced. The social and intellectual lives of Afghan women, even in a major city like Mazar, were meager, entwined mainly with household chores, children, husbands, and other wives.
Not much has improved for Afghan women until very recently. The three trips that Barbara Bick documents here in a personal and highly engaging way contain significant indicators that change is coming about for all Afghan women during the post-9/11 era. Although the security situation remains fragile, and women’s education, employment, and basic human rights are threatened with each success of the resurgent Taliban, the determination of so many Afghan women to reconceive the future for their children, their country, and themselves offers hope for several reasons.
Now that they have tasted relative emancipation after five years of Taliban control, women will not easily be shoved back into the oblivion of the burqa again. Nor will Afghan women take for granted the rights they have won, claimed especially through widely circulated declarations of women’s rights and the mobilization for the Loya Jirga in 2003. These rights expand upon those previously granted during the 1960s by a liberalizing monarchy and, as Bick witnessed during her 1990 visit, by the Communist government of Najibullah. They build upon a history of women’s rights in Afghanistan that the Taliban and other fundamentalists have historically ignored.
Even more important, women in Afghanistan’s cities recognize the necessity of bridging the chasm that exists between urban elites and their sisters in the countryside. We will have to wait to see how far into eastern and southern Afghanistan this women’s awakening has reached, but it is possible to measure it through statistics on women’s literacy programs, girl’s schooling facilities, and the evidence that some of the strictures imposed by Pashtun tradition—which weighs heavily upon most of Afghanistan’s nearly thirty-two million people, women and men alike—are being lifted. Afghan women’s organizations that were created in refugee situations and in Western diaspora are now an established fact of Afghan life, even if their existence in all parts of the home country may at times appear tenuous.
The current erosion of political stability in Afghanistan began in the 1970s with the simultaneous end of the monarchial system, the rise of ethnic politics, the coalescing of communist movements, and the emergence of Islamist politics. Ten odd years of mujahidin resistance to the Soviet invasion, the subsequent imposition in Kabul of rural gender attitudes by the quarreling mujahidin parties that replaced the Soviet-backed regime, and the ensuing misogynistic rule of the Taliban sent the cause of women’s rights and human rights back into medieval times.
Barbara Bick’s memoirs cover a substantial part of this period of great change. She opens windows on Afghan women negotiating the shifting political scene in 1990, 2001, and 2003. The span of these thirteen years represents a time of extended civil war that was complicated by ethnic and sectarian animosity. Bick saw the Kabul-based end of Soviet-style social engineering, with its tableaus of women’s progress. During her trip to northern Afghanistan in August 2001 she witnessed the efforts of the opposition to create an antidote to the gendered cruelty of the Taliban regime. And finally, in 2003, she was an observer at a conference organized by Afghan women to build support for incorporating women’s rights into the country’s constitution, a document that spells policy in Afghanistan today although implementation is another matter. But, as Bick’s descriptions of her 2001 visit to the Northern Alliance-controlled region show, a defeat on the battlefield could easily mean a political reversal that drives all women under the burqa. Women’s rights are fragile in Afghanistan, shallowly rooted in society, and progress is susceptible to setback with an assassin’s bullet.
Bick was witness to the recent impact of Islamists who dream of transforming Afghanistan into a Caliphate that will re-create the glory of Islam’s eighth century dominance. This dream was first expressed in the twentieth century when the rise of Soviet communism sent Muslim refugees out of Central Asia into Afghanistan, the Indian sub-continent, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. It remains alive among fundamentalist Muslims living in the mountains that spill between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Pashtun tribes (and their Al Qaeda guests) remain virtually immune to central government rule. The key to this dream has been, and is again, control of Afghanistan. The country has come to symbolize the one place in the Muslim world that has not been colonized, whose customs have not been tainted by Tsarist Russian, British, French, or other forms of nineteenth century imperialist rule.
Today the struggle in Afghanistan attracts ethnic fighters from Chechnya to Xinjiang. A major symbol of the dream of reestablishing the Caliphate revolves around the suppression of women, or, as these Muslim fighters and their strategists would regard it, upholding the honor of Muslim men.
Much has been written about the role of the United States in supporting the mujahidin factions that spawned the Taliban. Some ten years before Bick’s first visit to Afghanistan, in late February 1980, I arranged for a CBS 60 Minutes production team, with anchor Dan Rather, to enter Afghanistan guided by a
group of mujahidin. I accompanied the team, serving as a translator. That trip marked the first successful Western TV attempt to enter Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. It was a scene from the resulting 60 Minutes episode, aired in March 1980, that apparently inspired Congressman Charlie Wilson (D–Tex.) to offer US aid to the mujahidin.
In the course of making the documentary, we interviewed the major mujahidin groups who were then headquartered or represented in Pakistan. Roughly speaking, these groups divided along ethnic and political lines. Pashtuns formed the majority of the resistance parties not only because their ethnic group straddles the Afghan-Pakistani border and their flight to refuge was shorter than for others, but also because as the rulers of Afghanistan since its establishment in the eighteenth century, they were eager to renew their political power.
We also met with Tajiks, who represent the second largest group in Afghanistan. The Tajiks’ position north of the Hindu Kush mountains allowed them to harass the Soviet military supply lines during the period of Soviet invasion. Several smaller Dari-Persian speaking ethnic groups and some Turkic ones were allied with them, and still are today. All these groups are Sunni, leaving the Shia Hazara quite isolated and without allies in the country, and only Shiite Iran concerned about their interests outside the country. The Tajiks and their allies, though politically powerful, were confined to one party, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was the president of a truncated Afghanistan at the time Barbara Bick made her second visit in 2001.
Crosscutting this ethnic divide were Islamist elements, more radical among the Pashtuns than among the Tajiks. The fieriest among these was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a man whose following included many Pashtuns living on the Pakistani side of the border. The Pashtun political parties also included that of Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, a more tolerant Sufi religious leader and one of the urban elite. His faction, secular in nature, was most concerned with modernizing Afghanistan along a constitutional track, but it was estranged from the Pashtun and Tajik countryside.
The natural course of political sympathies might have led the US to back Pir Gailani, but there were tactical reasons for not choosing that path: Gailani had hardly any fighters in Afghanistan, and his demand for the restoration of an independent Afghanistan meant his group had no friends among the Pakistani elite advising the US. Ironically, the US and NATO have been trying desperately to build alliances with liberal groups such as his since 2003. It is in this context that the US and its allies, the United Nations, and independent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have come to support an expanded role for women, while the Taliban, in its southern stronghold, seeks to restrict women’s opportunities by bombing schools and killing teachers.
Dependent on Pakistan for access to land-locked Afghanistan, and convinced that successful resistance to the Soviet military lay in supporting Islamist groups, the US made alliances with mujahidin linked to deeply conservative Wahhabi forces in the Gulf, who were also supporting fundamentalists in Pakistan. As the US became more drawn into supporting radical Muslims as a bulwark against communism, it found itself arming and financing radical parties that despised the West as intensely as they hated the “godless” Soviet Union.
In the refugee camps sheltering four to five million Afghans, run by Pashtun fundamentalist groups, the suppression of women grew alarmingly throughout the 1980s. The elites and the educated escaped the stifling political atmosphere of Peshawar for other urban centers in India and Pakistan, and eventually made their way to the US, Australia, and Europe. President Hamid Karzai and many of the Afghans who made Barbara Bick’s third visit to Kabul in 2003 so interesting and hospitable, come from this secularized, mainly Pashtun urban group that has endeavored to re-introduce constitutional democratic values into Afghan society.1 The majority of Pashtuns, like other isolated and rural tribal people, continued to hold to their customs with tenacity.
Among Pashtuns, the basis for law lies in the Koran, the Hadith (traditions recounted by the companions of the prophet), local custom, and analogy. Local custom is the unforgiving Pashtunwali, tribal code that trumps the Sunni school of law followed officially in Afghanistan, the relatively liberal Hanafi Shari’a. The pro-Soviet Kabul regime led by President Najibullah, whom Barbara Bick’s delegation met in 1990, did not succeed in enforcing laws that countered the Pashtunwali, nor did previous liberal Afghan governments, and the Taliban made significant aspects of this code the law of the land, especially with regard to its harsh dictates on women.
As a woman interpreting Afghan culture to male representatives of the Western media in 1980, I felt the weight of Pashtun rural attitudes toward me as a female. I was the first non-Soviet foreign woman to enter Afghanistan after the invasion. With women such a rarity among those writing about the situation, even the KGB assumed that Eden was the name of a man. In fact, Western women often have difficulty functioning in rural Pashtun settings. In 2008, women aid workers are killed in Pashtun areas not only because the resurgent Taliban have allies there but because Pashtun men in the villages have no scale by which to assess women’s position except that of their customary codes, which circumscribe women’s role within the strict physical confines of the family home.
Several times in this narrative, Barbara Bick reiterates that her age (sixty-five on her first trip) allowed her more freedom of movement, within limits, than would have been permitted to a younger woman. I, on the other hand, was a young woman traveling in the company of four Western men and half a dozen Pashtun mujahidin. For the Afghans with whom I had to interact, my presence was problematic.
Thrown off by having to deal through a woman with media representatives whom they hoped to engage in their struggle, the mujahidin we traveled with adopted two tactics. Some of them, once over their reluctance to address a foreign unveiled woman, treated me like a sister, climbing trails without waiting for me, giving me privacy, asking for advice about contraception to reduce the responsibility of having more mouths to feed, and attempting to convert me to Islam in the course of long hikes along goat paths. But some Afghan men, especially those whose language I did not know, attempted crude physical insults.
I refused to wear the burqa, even though Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s assistants insisted I do so for an interview. Hekmatyar, an ally of the Taliban, lived to see that oppressive, pleated bag become mandatory for all women under the Taliban. To protect my hair from dust, and as a concession to Afghan custom, I sometimes wore a white scarf, although because it was easy to spot from Soviet helicopters, I would often remove it quickly. The burqa is not only a symbol of women’s suppression; many Afghan men fleeing from one or another conflict have been willing to use it to escape through lines where women are allowed to pass untouched. But for women forced to view the world through its embroidered web, it is akin to a shroud.
Among Bick’s most vivid descriptions are the scenes of women’s gatherings, whether for political discussions or for dinner in private homes. She notes the various ways in which women in different age categories deal with unveiling: some throw back the burqa to reveal their face and hair, others lift it over their face but keep their hair covered, while many younger women simply wear white or colorful scarves. Others make a point of not covering their hair, sporting nail polish, and wearing Western suits. It is clear that individual women operate at their specific comfort level, which has notably increased in recent years, allowing greater self-expression in terms of segregation and veiling.
What is this obsession with covering women in Afghan society? In place of a satisfactory answer, I recall the tormented elderly Afghan man running toward our CBS crew, shouting in Pashtu-accented Dari. We were searching through a teeming camp outside Peshawar for images to convey the terrible life of the refugees who had fled their villages in advance of the Soviet army during the winter of 1980. The producer wanted poignant images, which should include women and children. With tents pitched within five or six feet of each other, the camp we visited offered little privacy for families. Women were confined even mo
re than at home since they did not have a family compound in which to move around.
The gaunt elderly man, running frantically, was pleading and threatening at the same time: “They have taken everything from us! Do not take away our honor! Do not take pictures of our women!” According to the Pashtunwali, honor lies in the seclusion of women, and in punishing those whose chastity has been infringed upon, no matter what the cause.
We retreated. And that first electrifying visual account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that propelled Congressman Charlie Wilson to crusade for Afghan aid became almost exclusively a political and military documentary. As a woman, I had been invited into the stifling refugee tents to sit with the thin and unkempt women and children. I offered them sympathy and candy. But no men were allowed in, and we were not allowed to film the women.
As the bravery and dedication of women like Mary MacMakin and her Afghan colleagues demonstrates in this book, the expansion of girls’ schools and adult literacy into the countryside promises to enliven and expand Afghan women’s lives. But very little can change without efforts to promote reproductive rights. Afghanistan has the seventh highest fertility rate in the world, which is linked to the enormous effect of confining women; under Taliban control, the country’s birth rate grew even more.
Women are often the touchstone for efforts to move many world cultures away from old patterns of social behavior. As such, Afghan women have been the ideological battleground for the better part of the twentieth century: How should they dress? Where can they work? When and whom can they marry? Who can they speak to or be with? Afghan society has insisted on determining the answers to such questions, more often than not, without consultation with women, just as similar questions have been answered throughout the world until recent centuries. Under Taliban rule the condition of women became particularly difficult. As with tribal societies like the Kurds of Turkey and Iraq, the Pashtuns adapted Islam as a mantle covering local tribal customs in which woman are indicators of wealth and position and, of course, the vessel for continuity of a male line of descent.
