Afghanistan: As Bad as Its Reputation? (by Michael Rubin)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   Afghanistan: As Bad as Its Reputation?

By Michael Rubin, visiting fellow
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Middle East Quarterly 7, no. 3 (September 2000)

... The Taliban (Arabic for "religious students") have now ruled 
southern Afghanistan for almost six years and have been in Kabul for 
nearly four.  So how goes life in the Islamic Emirate?  Are Hollywood 
entertainers [1] and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright [2] 
accurate when they declare the Taliban have driven the country back 
into the thirteenth century?

To find out, I went to Afghanistan in March 2000.  Three months 
earlier I had met the Taliban's representative in New York, Abdul 
Hakeem Mujahid, at a Middle East Forum event.  I expected him to 
rebuff my request for a visit, and so was pleasantly surprised by his 
invitation to visit Afghanistan and see the situation for myself. 
The Taliban permitted me to travel unescorted and without a 
translator in their territory during a two-week period.  I had the 
opportunity to speak to government officials and the man on the 
street.  I visited major towns and cities: Jalalabad, Kabul, Ghazni, 
and Kandahar (the last being the seat of the Taliban leadership). 
This was my second trip to the country, having been there in May 
1997, when I guest lectured at Balkh University in Mazar-i Sharif, 
one of Afghanistan's last coeducational institutions, and was forced 
to leave when the Taliban attacked the city....

...The Feminist Majority exaggerates the pre-Taliban progress of 
Afghan women by using pre-Taliban Kabul as an example of women's 
progress throughout Afghanistan.  Using pre-civil war Afghan numbers 
to describe the demise of women's rights by nature is inaccurate, 
since the former communist regime massaged statistics to demonstrate 
its progressive achievements.  Furthermore, Kabul was always more 
progressive and cosmopolitan than the rest of Afghanistan.  For 
example, the Feminist Majority's "Stop Gender Apartheid" campaign 
still reports that women cannot leave their house unless accompanied 
by a close male relative.  However, women in every city I visited 
walked around in pairs.  While the Feminist Majority claims that 
women have been banished from the work force, this is only partially 
accurate.  Even in the countryside, I saw rural women working in the 
fields and with livestock.  The situation is bad, perhaps worse than 
anywhere else in the Muslim world, but it should be addressed with 
precision.

While the Taliban have prevented vast numbers of girls and women from 
receiving an education, a token Taliban-funded medical school class 
for women has opened in Kabul.  The question then should become why 
classes have not opened in other towns and cities.  Restrictions 
continue to occur, but NGO-operated girls' schools are not truly 
clandestine, as they are often described.  Some foreign employees 
helping to coordinate girls' schools both in and outside of Kabul 
told me not only of obstacles placed in their way by specific Taliban 
authorities, but also of assistance they have received from other 
Taliban government officials.  The problem is that there are not 
enough schools (for men and women) to satisfy demand while Taliban 
government money continues to be wasted on a war effort.  However, 
while the Taliban regime as a whole must be held accountable for its 
actions, it would be a mistake to portray the movement as monolithic. 
Rather, the Taliban include uncompromising radicals, more pragmatic 
radicals, and bureaucrats whose adherence to the movement's beliefs 
extends not far beyond the ends of their beards.

It is also untrue that all women wear burkas all the time to cover 
themselves from head to foot.  They do so largely in urban areas but, 
even in cities, older women and girls up to young teens show their 
faces and, sometimes, a bit of hair.  (The more religious among the 
Taliban men also cover their face, clutching their cloaks in their 
teeth like religious women in Iran.)  During my previous trip to 
areas in Afghanistan not yet controlled by the Taliban, many women 
dressed the same way, although in the university, women did not cover 
their heads or faces.  The problem should not be reduced to the fact 
that in Afghanistan the women wear the burka, for many would choose 
to anyway; the problem is that they are forced to do so.  The 
situation of women in Afghanistan is perhaps worse than it is 
anyplace in the Middle East (though Saudi Arabia and Yemen are 
close), and the Taliban should be confronted, but exaggeration allows 
the Taliban regime to dismiss all Western complaints as based on 
propaganda.  And the Taliban do have a point when they ask why few 
Western governments or celebrity wives went out of their way to 
condemn the rapes and assaults which characterized the streets and 
checkpoints before the Taliban disarmed gangs and warlords, including 
those affiliated with the government then in power.

The same holds true for executions. Human Rights Watch, for example, 
commented in their 1999 World Report that, "Every Friday, thousands 
were pressured to witness public executions and punitive amputations 
in Kabul's stadium." [6]  Afghans (including self-described opponents 
of the regime) said that while the Taliban does carry out public 
executions, sometimes with shocking cruelty, they are not conducted 
regularly and probably occur less frequently than in Iran and Saudi 
Arabia.  Massacres which mandate further investigation did occur in 
1997 when the United Front took Mazar-i Sharif after a brief 
occupation by the Taliban and in 1998, when the Taliban took and held 
the northern city.  However, they by no means occur regularly.  And 
while the frontline mirrors an ethnic divide between primarily Tajik, 
United Front-held areas, and the Pushtun-dominated south, Afghanistan 
has not become polarized to the extent that Kosovo has.  Even in the 
south, Tajiks and Shi'i Hazaras live and work among Afghans of other 
ethnicities.

In general, life has relaxed a bit since the initial onslaught of the 
Taliban.  One NGO worker explained that the Taliban officer in charge 
of "Prevention of Vice" forces and responsible for the worst excesses 
of the Taliban's restrictions in Kabul had been sacked for watching 
pornographic videos in his office.  In contrast to just a few years 
ago, young boys and girls play together in playgrounds, boys fly 
kites, and men play volleyball and soccer in parks.  I watched 
teenage and younger girls march around a city block in Ghazni playing 
drums, something not imaginable in countries like Saudi Arabia, 
Qatar, and Yemen.  One Afghan man explained, "Girls are children, 
too."  I heard banned music, even in Kandahar (though I was in a taxi 
that had its cassettes confiscated and destroyed days later): in 
Ghazni, I learned how to buy an illegal television.  While men have 
to wear beards, many do illegally trim them, albeit extremely 
carefully....

<http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/rubinafghn.htm>   *****