by Barbara Bick
Nasrine tells me that she had avoided politics most of her adult life until the Taliban took power. She became increasingly unhappy about what was happening to her country, but did not know what to do until she heard about a conference that would be held in the summer of 2000, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. She was determined to go, and it changed her life. The gathering was the culmination of years of organizing inside Afghanistan, in refugee camps, and in European countries by Shoukria Haidar, a French Afghan physical education teacher in a private girls’ school outside Paris. Shoukria, a whirlwind of a woman and a magnetic speaker, founded NEGAR—Support of Women of Afghanistan (in Dari, NEGAR’s meaning is closest to “good companion”) to educate the public about the situation of Afghan women under the Taliban militias and “to unveil the role played by Pakistan.”
Beginning in 1997, NEGAR began to finance schools for girls in the north, starting with ten and quickly expanding to twenty-six. The schools were in regions not controlled by the Taliban militias, but under constant attack from them, and thus forced to abandon support for girls’ education. School buildings in these areas had deteriorated or ceased to exist; courses took place in tents or village mosques without desks, chairs or school supplies; and teachers—98 percent of them women—were paid irregularly and inadequately. NEGAR began by paying teachers’ salaries.
By 2000, NEGAR’s primary goal was to work for a political solution to end the war and reestablish the rights of women in Afghanistan. Shoukria decided to organize a conference that would bring together women from Afghanistan as well as the diaspora, to write a Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women, and to begin an international campaign. Despite the dangers and difficulties of moving clandestinely through Taliban-occupied country and mullah-dominated refugee camps, some two hundred to three hundred Afghan women arrived in Dushanbe on June 28, 2000. They far outnumbered the women, like Nasrine, from the Afghan diaspora and the few Europeans. The declaration produced at the conference is a powerful statement, affirming that “the fundamental right of Afghan women, as for all human beings, is life with dignity.” (The full text of the declaration appears at the end of this book.)
Nasrine was called upon to read the final document at the closing session. “I was trembling. It was hot and muggy but I was shivering—with apprehension and hope,” she later wrote. “As I finished the last word, I was afraid to look up and see the reaction. But then I saw a colleague with tears in her eyes standing up and cheering and dancing. So powerful was this message of inalienable rights and so great the sense of promise that even those who did not understand Dari cried and clapped and hugged.”
After returning to the United States from the Dushanbe conference, Nasrine abruptly closed her business and became a full-time activist as the US representative of NEGAR. Nasrine was born in Kabul in 1945 to a prominent Tajik/Pashtun family. Her mother, Roqia Habibi, had participated in the women’s emancipation movement during the 1950s, and two of her uncles were among the seven men who drafted Afghanistan’s progressive 1964 constitution. Roqia was a member of the 1965 Loya Jirga that endorsed the new constitution, and she was one of four women elected to parliament the following year.
Nasrine’s father, Abou Bakre, was a distinguished scholar. A student of physics at France’s University of Montpelier in the late 1930s, he was stranded there by World War II, and returned to Kabul as Afghanistan’s first European Ph.D. He founded Kabul University’s physics department and eventually became university president. Like so many other democrats in the tumultuous 1960s, Dr. Abou Bakre spent time in prison. When he was unable to continue his academic career, he became a businessman and contractor.
Nasrine had come to the United States in 1971, not as an exile but with her American husband, Max Gross, a Korean War veteran from Iowa, whom she had met when both were students at the American University in Beirut. He converted to Islam in order to marry her, since Muslim women are allowed to marry only Muslims, although Muslim men may marry another monotheist such as a Jew or a Christian. They moved to Washington, D.C., where Nasrine developed a computer programming business and raised a son. She researched and wrote two books in Dari. The first was a volume of interviews with former students and their families from the pathbreaking Malalay High School, Afghanistan’s first secondary school for girls, which both Nasrine and her mother had attended. The other book was about traditional conflict resolution practiced in Afghanistan.
I am drawn to Nasrine and NEGAR as soon as I meet her; I want to work directly with Afghan women and I agree with NEGAR’s program, which is simply about the equality of women. I also agree with NEGAR’s political goal of peace and the restoration of a constitutional government in Afghanistan, and like the fact that it is not attached to any political party. Shoukria’s French group has developed a petition to the UN, calling for a meeting of Afghanistan’s immediate neighbors, Pakistan, Iran, China, and Russia, as well as the United States, to negotiate a constitutional government that will recognize women’s rights. They seek a million signatures, worldwide, to be presented by a group of prominent international personalities backed by a mass gathering.
During the winter of 2000/2001, a group of us, led by Nasrine, struggle to translate the French petition into English, using language that will be politically acceptable to a broad spectrum of Americans, who are not as knowledgeable as the French about the situation in Afghanistan, and in particular, about the role of Pakistan in providing support and a base for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. In addition to endorsing the declaration, signers are asked to lobby their political leaders on three points: to prevent our government from recognizing the Taliban, to pressure Pakistan to end its intervention in Afghanistan, and to work with the UN to begin a peace process in Afghanistan.
We want signatures from national and local political leaders, well-known personalities in feminist, civil rights, and human rights communities, as well as average Americans whom we reach out to at meetings and on the streets. Nasrine is tireless, speaking everywhere, picking up allies and always distributing copies of the petition. She meets frequently with State Department officers for Afghanistan and for women’s affairs; she works the halls of Congress, successfully getting signatures from Republicans and Democrats alike. In New York, I introduce her to the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), founded by Bella Abzug, and to Judy Lerner, a longtime friend from Women Strike for Peace, who works with peace-related groups at the UN. Judy introduces Nasrine around the UN, and the response to her talks is so enthusiastic that Nasrine calls Shoukria and tells her to come to New York.
One morning in February 2001, our group learns that a roving ambassador of the Taliban, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, has arrived in the United States to speak to important foreign policy groups. Under the UN sanctions, high-level Taliban officials are barred from traveling abroad, but the Taliban foreign ministry has been able to arrange meetings at the State Department and to book several speaking engagements for him. His only public appearance in Washington will be at the Atlantic Council, a club for foreign policy mavens and diplomats. Admission is by invitation only, but I am able to get one, representing the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, where I am a longtime board member.
On the day of the talk, dressed professionally and carrying a briefcase, I walk past NEGAR’s demonstration outside the Atlantic Council’s Connecticut Avenue building and into the walnut-paneled boardroom of the club. Camera crews are set up in the back, and men—mostly white and mostly white haired—sit in the armchairs that circle the podium. Rahmatullah, elegantly attired in a silk version of traditional Afghan dress, gets up to speak. He insists that the West is misinformed about the Taliban’s programs and methods, which, he says, are only part of an effort to restore peace and order. When he finishes speaking, the audience begins to ask questions, but before he can answer, I stand up, pull a burqa from my briefcase, and fling it over my head. Then I loudly confront him with statements about the true nature of the Taliban. The cameras tu
rn on me, while the men nearby pull away in horror. The meeting ends in a state of confusion as I walk out. That kind of dramatic confrontation has never come easily to me, but I know how important the media attention is for our cause and, years later, even enjoy a brief moment of fame as friends around the world see that confrontation in Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.
But most of my work with NEGAR is not so dramatic. During the many hours I spend working with Nasrine, I develop enormous respect for her. However, I am growing uneasy about differences between my world outlook and that of the Afghan women. Nasrine and Shoukria greatly admire and respect the mujahidin commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who played a major role in defeating the Soviets and is now battling the Taliban.
During my 1990 trip to Kabul, my sympathies were with the women who considered the mujahidin counterrevolutionaries. At the same time, I understood that the people I was meeting were primarily echoing the Communist position, and that both the Soviet troops and the mujahidin had committed atrocities. Nevertheless, the mujahidin’s beliefs are inimical to my own tenets. It feels contradictory to me that my new Afghan comrades, liberal and feminist, view the mujahidin as heroes because they fought the Russians. They appear to be willing to ignore the fact that the mujahidin are religious fundamentalists and that their position on civil rights and the equality of women is in opposition to our own. Now that mujahidin are allied with Massoud and fighting the Pakistan-Taliban alliance, support for them among my Afghan friends continues to grow even stronger. I do not know or understand the traditional loyalties and conflicts of Afghanistan that certainly play a role in Nasrine and Shoukria’s thinking, and I do not want to be involved in even the slightest way with their internal politics and parties. I share my unease with old friends and, finally, have an intense debate with myself: Can I continue working with Nasrine and Shoukria and NEGAR?
I decide that my overriding issue is the Taliban’s imminent threat to take over the whole of Afghanistan and impose its brutal interpretation of sharia law upon the people. NEGAR, a dynamic organization of women with an important petition campaign seems the best group to work with. I’m in.
I now want to learn more about this man Massoud, the military leader of the Northern Alliance, whom all my friends respect so much, and who is considered a brilliant strategist and a charismatic leader. His mythic reputation stems from the fact that he is said to have fought off seven major Soviet offensives in the Panjshir Valley. Russian generals called him unbeatable, a master of guerrilla warfare. His forces were the first to enter Kabul when the Najibullah government was overthrown. He barely survived the ensuing civil war and the Taliban conquests, and now, with his back to the wall, he continues to fight as commander of the Northern Alliance against the Pakistan-supported Taliban militias.
Massoud’s appearance adds to his charisma. He has the looks of a poet, with his thin, hawklike face; dark, brooding eyes, which even in photographs seem to smolder; and thick black hair topped by his traditional pakol cap. Born in 1953 to a Tajik family from the Panjshir Valley, Massoud was educated at the French lycée in Kabul. He reads French literature and is a lover of poetry. During interludes in the fighting, he has built a home for his family in the Valley, where he keeps a library of some three thousand volumes. A religious Muslim, he was a fundamentalist in his youth and is the military leader of the Islamist party led by Rabbani, although, I am told, he became disillusioned with his early mentor after the civil war debacle.
By the time I meet the women of NEGAR, Massoud has brought together opponents of the Taliban from every major Afghan ethnic group to transform the largely Tajik Northern Alliance into a United Front of mujahidin leaders, each with his own militias but with an agreement that has essentially made Massoud commander-in-chief. The most important and well known of the allied leaders include the Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum, based in Mazar-i-Sharif; Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat; Karim Khalili, the Hazara Shiite leader; and Haji Qador, the Pashtun warlord-politician.
Massoud is receiving limited support from the bordering countries of Russia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, all of which fear Taliban inroads among their own Muslim citizens. Shiite Iran, concerned about the Taliban Sunnis, also provides some aid. Even the CIA is belatedly giving Massoud direct funds. However, the total of this aid is insignificant compared with the war planes and heavy armaments that Pakistan is supplying to the Taliban along with thousands of young Pakistani fighters. Plus the Taliban have bin Laden’s Arab jihad warriors.
One afternoon, a small group of us meet at Nasrine’s home to hear a report from a Northern Alliance lobbyist just returned from Afghanistan. Otilie English is something of a surprise, a tall, blond, strapping North American who looks, in her khakis and boots, as though she has just returned from safari. Her brother, Phil English, is a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. During the 1980s, she became a devoted supporter of the mujahidin fighting against the Soviets and a lobbyist for the anti-communist Committee for a Free Afghanistan. Obviously, her politics are far to the right of mine, but I am getting used to working in a “united front” against a common enemy, the Taliban.
As we gather around a coffee table, Otilie tears a leaf from her notebook and draws a sketchy map of Afghanistan to show us the area governed by Massoud’s forces—a large territory, although not nearly as vast as the part-desert areas in the south populated by Pashtun clans that support the Taliban. What the Northern Alliance area lacks in size, she tells us, it makes up for in population density. Otilie points to the areas where she has recently trekked with Alliance forces. They nearly surround Kabul. If Otilie’s information is accurate, it means that the situation is more complicated than we have understood. While Massoud and the Front may not have enough funds and weapons to go into full-scale battle against the military might of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Pakistan, they control a large area with great strategic value.
“Oh, how I long to go back,” Nasrine cries, as she listens to Otilie’s description of moving through the countryside.
“O.K., let’s go,” I say, surprising myself. Knowing she cannot afford it, I add, “I’ll take care of it.”
Once I have said it aloud, I know that going back is what I most want to do. And so, once again, I begin preparations to go to Afghanistan, this time starting with intense planning sessions. We will put together an American women’s investigatory trip to the part of the country that has not been overrun by the Taliban. The Pakistan lobby has cast Massoud and the Northern Alliance as America’s enemy, and they are generally seen here in the United States in the worst possible light. Our plan is to review, on the ground, the condition of women living in the area controlled by the Northern Alliance and then report back to women’s groups, Congress, and the media.
Nasrine has to contact the Northern Alliance to get their agreement for us to travel through their region. She also arranges our complicated travel details, which include getting visas from the Afghan embassy in Munich and from Tajikistan, through which we will travel. Most travelers to Afghanistan get their visas from the Taliban and Pakistan, which, of course, we cannot do.
We hope to take with us at least one journalist with good media connections, a photographer, and several independent women who will join us in posttrip public speaking and lobbying. However, it is hard to garner much interest in Afghanistan. The trip is seen as problematic, expensive, and dangerous by the women we contact. I go over, again and again, with Nasrine, the probability of danger and the detailed costs. We are convinced that our on-site fact-finding and analysis will be effective with American feminists, will find outlets in the press, and will catch the attention of some political figures. In any case, the determining factor is that we want to go, and I can provide the means while Nasrine can provide the contacts.
Nasrine is worried that the Pakistan lobby in Washington, as well as our own government, may block our trip, so we keep a low profile and decide not to recruit women with organizational affiliations. A California filmm
aker, Cindy Spies, who is producing a documentary on Mary MacMakin, an American who has lived in Afghanistan off and on for twenty-four years, agrees to send a camerawoman who will work with us and interview Mary. There is a limited time frame for our trip because of weather. Fog and heavy snow make helicopter travel perilous in the winter, and the intense heat and sandstorms of summer are also bad. The milder weather of early fall is best for travel—but also for battle. Since we have little choice, we make the final decision to go in late August of 2001, even though we have been unable to pull together the delegation we would have wanted. After some anxious weeks securing visas, getting shots, buying sleeping bags and hiking boots, and assuring my family and friends that I’ll be safe, and back in less than two weeks, we head off.
This time I know so much more about the country than I did eleven years ago. This time I do not go for the joy of an interesting trip before I grow old. I am old. I want to see and do something important with the rest of my life. For me, the Taliban has come to represent everything I have always fought against. With disbelief, I see the fundamentalist groups of all religions growing in numbers and strength in this new century. I continue to fear that the radical Muslim fundamentalists have the potential to become the same kind of threat to civil societies that the Nazis were fifty years earlier. I keep coming back to the parallels between the 1936 invasion of Spain by the Fascists under General Franco and the 1994 invasion of Afghanistan by the Taliban under Mullah Omar. Franco’s invasion was heavily armed and supported by neighboring Germany and Italy. The Afghan Taliban invasion is abetted by neighboring Pakistan, with support from Saudi Arabia. In the 1930s, the democratic world turned its back on Spain. Now, the United States is withholding support from the Northern Alliance in favor of the “stable” military government of the Taliban. Fifty years earlier, Franco’s fascist forces prevailed, and the war in Spain served as a prelude to the Nazi sweep through Europe, sparking a world war. Would the same thing happen now, I worried, with the Taliban and their supporters ruling much of the Middle East? Would our decision not to become involved prove as misguidedly wrong in Afghanistan as it had been in Spain?
