The Lovers (41 page)

“When
is
a good time?” Ms. Koofi retorted. “When will the Afghan parliament become full of intellectuals? This parliament [2010 to 2015] is weaker than the last one. We have to build momentum. Karzai could have supported this. This next president we hope will.”

This is what they are up against in parliament: men like Qazi Nazir Ahmad Hanafi, an MP from Herat, a former jihadi commander who lost his right leg fighting the Soviets and is now a prominent mullah and the head of the legislative committee in parliament—the committee that is the gatekeeper for the introduction of legislation. He is clear on what he lost that leg for, not just defeating Communism but defeating the Communists’ initiatives on women’s rights, initiatives he is angry to see the Americans trying to bring back today. Qazi Hanafi beat back Fawzia Koofi’s 2013 attempt to push the EVAW law through parliament, smothering it in amendments that no one could countenance (one allowed girls as young as nine to be married). In 2015 he said he plans to enact a substitute law regulating violence against women that would be based on what he considers to be principles of shariah law. He has made destroying the EVAW law the defining issue in his life, issuing a fifty-four-page pamphlet about the law, featuring what his critics call an incomprehensible blend of theological ravings.

Qazi
⁵⁴
Hanafi is unapologetically antifeminist. Women’s shelters are brothels, he insisted when I went to see him in 2014. “If it was up to me, I would declare jihad against these shelters.” The women who run them “have not helped women in Afghanistan.
They have destroyed families. They have imprisoned brothers and fathers of the women whom they claim to be helping.” Women’s-rights activists? “Even a donkey is better than these women. At least the donkey has a tail.” Shelter guards “should be over twenty-five. Before that is when a man is most horny and he cannot be trusted.” Women who are abused by husbands need only go to their brothers or fathers for support; there is no point in advocacy groups to look after them or policewomen to take care of them.

“Yes, I was the person who blocked the EVAW law from being passed, but first let me ask you a question,” he said. “How many die of HIV and AIDS in your country, I ask you?”

Not many any longer.

“That’s not true. Thousands of people in America die of HIV. This does not happen here, and why? Because in our religion, punishment of those who commit sexual abuse is stoning, and when you stone one person who commits a crime, it establishes an example: kill one and save millions.”

He has lots of problems with the EVAW law, beginning with what he claims is its authorship by the international community, not by Afghans. His biggest problem with it seems to be the prohibition on wife-beating. “Under the EVAW law, a man can get two years in prison for beating his wife. Is that just? He doesn’t even have to mark her. Simply if she said he beat her, without even leaving a mark, he can go to jail. Is that just? This law is worse than those laws during the Communist time, far worse.”

His version of a new EVAW law would revise or eliminate such clauses. His view is that it is okay to beat your wife, as long as you do so with moderation. “You can train her, you can punish her, but you can’t mark or torture her. If you have a problem with your wife’s behavior, first use advice,” he said. “Second, make your bed elsewhere—this is a strong punishment and usually works. If that doesn’t work, then third, beat her, but with things that don’t cause damage or break bones. Like sticks, say, with a small stick or whatever—no torture. For example, if a husband breaks his wife’s arm or leg, then he could and should be summoned by a judge and punished.”

Having a discussion with Qazi Hanafi about gender equality is like trying to debate vegetarianism with a hyena. Like many such Afghan men, he seems obsessed with sex, and particularly with adultery. Adulterers should be killed on the spot when they’re caught in the act, according to Islam according to Qazi Hanafi. (Actually, most authorities maintain that Islamic law requires four witnesses to the sexual act or a thrice-repeated confession, and a legal process, before the death penalty of stoning can be imposed for adultery.) He also seems to have a knack for catching people in the act. He cautions that you have to be sure they’re adulterers and not just an innocent husband and wife. For instance, he said, he and his men during the days of jihad came across a couple copulating in the woods by a stream. Qazi and company were ready to kill them on the spot, but fortunately for the couple, “They told us they were married, so it was okay.” Another time, he said, he walked into a room in the parliament building to find a female MP having sex on a desk—but it was with her husband, so he wasn’t obliged to kill them either.

Qazi Hanafi is proud of his powers of persuasion, and he boasted that hardly anyone ever leaves his presence without having been converted to his way of thinking. He asked me if, having heard him out for a couple of hours, I wasn’t persuaded of his rightness, and I said no, I wasn’t. He had trouble believing that. The Australian ambassador had come to visit him, he said, and brought his young wife along, and after a couple hours of Qazi Hanafi, the young woman was not only ready to convert to Islam but probably would have become his second wife if she could have done so, he said. He was so proud of that imaginary conquest that he told the story twice.

Before we left, he handed a copy of his EVAW-law pamphlet to our translator. “Be sure to wash your hands and do your ablutions before you read that,” Qazi warned him, quite in earnest.

Qazi Hanafi is not just some nutcase. He is widely respected by Afghan men as an Islamic scholar, however dubious some of his theological assertions, and he is powerful as a legislator. He is a man who practices what he preaches; he married off his own
daughter at age fourteen, a violation of both EVAW and civil law. (He confirmed that with no apology, saying it was sufficient that she was past the age of puberty, in his interpretation of Islamic law.)

In the face of opposition in parliament from men like that, the Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), the major coalition of women’s groups in Afghanistan, has a simple strategy: delay bringing a permanent EVAW law to a vote for as long as possible. “We cannot take it off the agenda, but we can get it moved to the back of the agenda, and they argue over everything in parliament for so long that this parliament [2010–15] will finish before they get to it,”
⁵⁵
said Hassina Safi, the AWN’s executive director. “And the next parliament, we see many young people interested in running.” In other words, the EVAW law’s only long-term hope is a future parliament in a country that had only recently, in 2014’s protracted electoral debacle, demonstrated that it was not capable of staging a fair, honest, and democratic national election and instead staggered through a half-billion-dollar exercise that was corrupted, on both sides, by warlords and former jihadis, with war criminals and un-apologetic misogynists playing key roles.

Women’s advocates are hoping that what will ultimately save and preserve the EVAW law will be the international community’s insistence on it; changing it drastically or repealing it would lead to major cutbacks in international aid, and some donor countries might pull out of the country altogether—the Europeans in particular have been strong about that possibility. Or at least they have talked a strong game.

That, however, is betting on something that many Afghan women’s leaders are beginning to disbelieve: the steadfastness of the international commitment to them. Afghanistan’s women are no longer the cause célèbre that they were a few years ago, when Hillary Clinton was the American secretary of state, famously vowing in 2010 never to let the women of Afghanistan down. “We will not abandon you. We will stand with you always,” Mrs. Clinton said then.
⁵⁶
Now she rarely meets with Afghan women, even in her private capacity—for one thing, few of them can get visas to America any longer, for fear they will not return to their country.
Alissa J. Rubin of the
New York Times,
who has written extensively on Afghan women’s issues,
⁵⁷
said that Melanne Verveer, who was Hillary Clinton’s ambassador for global women’s issues in the first Obama administration, could not find time to discuss the issue with her in 2014. Before Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush famously became a stalwart of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council, started by her husband, George Bush, and President Karzai to great fanfare in 2002.
⁵⁸
Now the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council is all but defunct, although Georgetown University keeps a Facebook page for it alive, mostly with posts on the activities of other groups.
⁵⁹
The council’s presence in public life has become more virtual than real.

“I worked with the women of the West so intensely during the Taliban and up until a couple of years after the American engagement, but now I have been seeing the waning of Western women’s interests in Afghan women’s rights,” said Nasrine Gross, the sociologist and women’s activist. “I don’t hear the Feminist Majority
⁶⁰
shouting, I don’t see the French women so much; the Scandinavian women, who used to be so present; women who are so vocal in New York, Women in Black and these people, saying, ‘We want the rights of Afghan women upheld.’ That is gone now. I don’t get so many e-mails any longer from women abroad.”

“Women are just not on anybody’s agenda now,” said Huma Safi, a former country director at Women for Afghan Women, who now works at Equality for Peace and Democracy, an advocacy group in Kabul.
⁶¹

“We have come a long way if we look at the situation at the beginning of 2001,” said Samira Hamidi, advocacy director of the Empowerment Center for Women.
⁶²
“In major cities, in girls’ education, higher education, the women’s movement today is very strong. But will this be maintained? We need to make sure Afghanistan is not left alone. And where is the international community in terms of the Afghan government’s commitments?”

In its haste for the exits toward the end of 2014, the international community proved itself ready to excuse every failure of the Afghan government, even on the so-called hard deliverables of the Tokyo Framework. One of those was a “credible and democratic”
presidential election in 2014. The United States, the European Union, and the United Nations all pronounced it credible and democratic, even though the EU’s own independent election monitors—the most experienced in the business—found that as many as 3 million out of the 8 million votes recorded were suspect
⁶³
and in the end the results came after a backroom negotiation between the contenders moderated by the United States.
⁶⁴
When President Karzai in 2013 replaced some members of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission with warlords, women haters, and a former Taliban official,
⁶⁵
the international community tut-tutted but did not threaten any cutbacks, although the independence of that body was also a hard deliverable under the Tokyo Framework. When it came to condemning the abusive treatment of women that continued in spite of the EVAW law, there was only silence on specific cases, aside from buried and usually anonymized references in reports and briefing papers.
⁶⁶

As Shmuley Boteach was quick to point out, not once did any Western official, diplomat, or United Nations official raise a voice in public in support of Zakia and Ali, either before or after their criminal case was resolved. No one publicly condemned the rape of ten-year-old Breshna by her mullah, nor the reports of an honor killing planned against her, nor her return to the parents who had publicly vowed to kill her in 2014, nor the vocal support by other mullahs for her rapist.
⁶⁷
Similarly, no diplomat or Western official ever spoke out about the intervention by mullahs of the Ulema Council in support of stoning alleged adulterers to death,
⁶⁸
nor the battering of MP Atmar by her husband.
⁶⁹
When WAW resolved the protracted and precedent-setting case of Soheila, sold in
baad
before she was born,
⁷⁰
so she could marry the man of her choice rather than an elderly relative, no Western embassy issued a congratulatory statement, let alone any statements of support during the process. When Western officials in Afghanistan do undertake something worthwhile to help women, it is nearly always done in secret, as if they were terrified that Afghan conservatives might find out. USAID’s major contractor for gender equality and rule-of-law programming in Afghanistan is the International Development
Law Organization (IDLO),
⁷¹
which receives tens of millions of dollars in American government money for its Afghan programs. IDLO was assigned by the American embassy to follow the case of Zakia and Ali and report on it to the embassy; its officials refused my request to discuss their case and ones similar to it.
⁷²
Western and United Nations public diplomacy on behalf of the women of Afghanistan has been reduced to congratulatory messages on the occasion of International Women’s Day and similar concocted and uncontroversial events.

Wazhma Frogh remembers the good years, when she traveled five times to the United States, meeting with Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama. Secretary Clinton awarded her the State Department’s International Women of Courage Award in 2009.
⁷³
Hanging on Ms. Frogh’s wall at her NGO are both that medal and a framed letter from General John R. Allen, the onetime commander of the American-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF),
⁷⁴
thanking her for her help in bringing to the military’s attention the depredations of an Afghan Local Police commander in Kunduz who had led his men on a rape spree in the local community. (General Allen admitted that ISAF special-operations troops had trained the offending unit, but he added that only 4 percent of such Afghan Local Police units were involved in human-rights abuses.)
⁷⁵
Since then another warlord whom Wazhma Frogh tangled with, an old jihadi who worked closely with Australian and American special-forces troops in Uruzgan Province, has threatened her life repeatedly, and she no longer feels heroic. Instead she said she feels abandoned by the Americans.