Afghan women's dilemma

It's been a decade since the intervention of the US and British forces in Afghanistan.

While a recent survey indicates that Afghan women are feeling safer, the vestiges of the Taliban regime are still strongly visible. According to Yalda Atif, 21, an Afghan woman studying international law at Brooklyn Community College in New York, “Many Afghan men consider that women have to stay home and don't need education. Women still face some difficulties when they want to go to school. This is still the mentality that prevails in the Afghan male mind.”

The Taliban, which ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, were infamous for their strict laws that deprived women of the right to work, study or move freely. Although Afghanistan's constitution now stipulates that men and women have equal rights, many independent agencies say women in the conservative country are still subject to widespread discrimination and oppression.

Yalda came to New York on an academic scholarship and lives with her grandmother in Queens. “As a young woman in Afghanistan, when you are done with school and your education, the community will force you to get married and I didn't want that,” she says. In a recent survey by ActionAid, 66 per cent of Afghan women said they feel safer than before the war and 72 per cent believe their lives are better. But 90 per cent of them are worried about a Taliban-style government returning.

Yalda says her family gave her an unusual amount of encouragement to pursue her education. “My family has been my biggest support. In the street that I was living on in Kabul, we were the only kids going to school and working outside, while the other children were at home. I used to see our neighbours stand behind their windows and look at us,” she recalls.

Her mother is a schoolteacher, one of her older sisters is a physician and the other an economist working for the US embassy in Kabul. Yalda recently became a case manager for Women for Afghan Women in New York. The advocacy group has been helping Afghan women since April 2001, seven months before the US-led attack on Afghanistan.

The organisation provides frontline programmes and services to women in crisis in Kabul, Kapisa, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kunduz, Badakhshan, Faryab, Sar-i-Pul and Nangarhar. It also serves Afghan women living in New York. It gives training and conducts workshops on women's rights. About 70 women each week also attend ESL (English as a Second Language) and computer classes offered by the group, says Naheed Bahram, New York's programme manager for Women for Afghan Women. The centre also takes civic education classes and helps Afghan women prepare for driving tests. “We help women with social services, domestic violence issues and our main mission is women empowerment,” says Naheed.

Women for Afghan Women helped 387 women in 2010, and took on 37 cases of domestic violence. “Domestic violence is a huge problem in the Afghan community, but it's hard to get the word out. Women do not usually come and talk about it,” she adds.

In Afghanistan, a woman who speaks out and seeks help is often seen as bringing shame to her family and cases of abuse go unreported. Yalda believes that the work done by this organisation can help reconstruct her country. Her philosophy is that developing or strengthening the skills and self-confidence of one Afghan woman would lead to a chain reaction that would ultimately help gender rights in Afghan society. For a few months, Yalda has been working on the case of an Afghan woman, who only wanted her first name to be used. Fakhia, 31, speaks only Farsi and can barely communicate in English. She emigrated a year ago after marrying an Afghan-American. “Due to security problems and the deterioration of life in Afghanistan, I got married to an American citizen and I was happy to come to the US, to live in a safer place,” Fakhia says.

But her husband died in a car crash last February, leaving her widowed. She has no family left in New York but she still wants to stay here, not wanting to lose the right to “circulate freely without being accompanied by a man” and the freedom she has.

Fakhia speaks well of the current Afghan government for “providing facilities to improve the daily life of women, by giving them better access to education and political opportunities.” But she says security problems prevent women from going outside the home. Yalda backs that up with recollections of the many times her university education was disrupted due to safety concerns. “Most of the time, we heard news of a suicide bomber on our way to school or that a suicide bomber will enter the school. Then we got scared and had to leave the university,” she says.

Amid daily violence and frequent terrorist attacks in her country, Yalda worries about the Taliban seizing power again. “They still have the power to come back anytime,” she says. However, she assumes that as long as the US has a presence there, this won't happen.

The Afghan war is widely criticised, particularly by several Muslim countries. Pressure for troop withdrawal is rising. But nearly 40 per cent of Afghan women think Afghanistan will become a worse place if international troops leave, says the ActionAid survey.

Fakhia agrees. “When the Taliban were in power, women were badly treated. But now women have been gaining a little bit more freedom. If they come back, the Taliban will never tolerate women's freedom.”

When asked about the destruction caused by the 10-year war, Yalda has a different viewpoint.

“We should also see the positive points of the American deployment in Afghanistan. The girls now dress differently and go to school. Lots of buildings have been constructed in Kabul. I saw a lot of development in my country. Americans came to our universities and offered us a lot of professional opportunities and provided computers and different kinds of help. We are all grateful for that.”

Programme manager Naheed agrees. “We do not want them forever in Afghanistan; we want them to leave but only at the right time. I don't think that Afghanistan is ready yet to stand on its own feet,” she says.

While Yalda loves her country, she sees her future in the US.

“When I first came here, somebody asked me, how do I feel. I said ‘I feel like a bird who is flying.' When I walked around here, I wasn't scared, I was totally satisfied. And now I know who I am and what I can do for myself, for my family and how I can build my personality,” she said. “But in Afghanistan I was a very simple-minded girl who only knew the way from my house to school, that was all.”

By arrangement with Women's eNews.Women's Feature Service

(Hajer Naili has worked for several radio stations and publications in France and North Africa.)

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