Afghan women fear loss of hard-won progress

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By Karin Brulliard
Tuesday, March 16, 2010; A01

LAGHMAN, AFGHANISTAN -- The head-to-toe burqas that made women a faceless symbol of the Taliban's violently repressive rule are no longer required here. But many Afghan women say they still feel voiceless eight years into a war-torn democracy, and they point to government plans to forge peace with the Taliban as a prime example.

Gender activists say they have been pressing the administration of President Hamid Karzai for a part in any deal-making with Taliban fighters and leaders, which is scheduled to be finalized at a summit in April. Instead, they said, they have been met with a silence that they see as a dispiriting reminder of the limits of progress Afghan women have made since 2001.

"We have not been approached by the government -- they never do," said Samira Hamidi, country director of the Afghan Women's Network, an umbrella group. "The belief is that women are not important,'' she said, describing a mind-set that she said "has not been changed in the past eight years."

The Taliban's repressive treatment of women helped galvanize international opposition in the 1990s, and by some measures democracy has revolutionized Afghan women's lives. Their worry now is not about a Taliban takeover, Hamidi said, but that male leaders, behind closed doors and desperate for peace, might not force Taliban leaders to accept, however grudgingly, that women's roles have changed.

Those concerns share roots with the misgivings voiced by many observers, including some U.S. officials, about Afghan efforts to forge a settlement with the Taliban, whose leaders promote an Islamist ideology that seems wholly at odds with rights the Afghan constitution guarantees.

The unease about such a settlement stretches from Kabul to the mountain-ringed valleys of Laghman, a scrappy town in a province still stalked at night by Taliban fighters. As a young girl here, Malalay Jan studied in a private home, hidden from the Taliban regime that forbade her education. Four years ago, her girls' school was torched in a rash of suspected Taliban attacks. Now, she said, she is sure of one thing: Afghan women should have a spot at the negotiating table.

"We don't want them to stop us from getting an education or working in an office," said Jan, 18, wearing a rhinestone-studded head scarf at her rebuilt school. Women, she said, should be "the first priority."

Karzai, the Afghan president, has endorsed the idea of talking with all levels of the Taliban, and his aides insist that women need not worry about the equal rights the Afghan constitution guarantees them. But they also say they are performing a difficult balancing act, and suggest that making bold statements about the sanctity of such topics as women's rights might kill talks before they start.

"We will act from a position of principle. And that principle is that half the public wants these rights to be protected," said Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, who is drafting Karzai's reconciliation plan. "It is not the authority of a group of people in government or a group of people in the insurgency to decide the fate of a whole nation."

In today's Afghanistan, females make up one-quarter of parliament, fill one-third of the nation's classrooms and even compete on "Afghan Idol."

But violence against women remains "endemic," according to the State Department. The percentage of female civil servants is steadily dropping. Just one of 25 cabinet members is a woman, and female lawmakers say their opinions are often ignored.

That point was underscored in January, many observers said, when the women's affairs minister was not invited to an international conference in London on reconciliation and reintegration.

Bringing the Taliban into the government could make things worse, Hamidi said.

"They think women should stay at home," she said. "And all of them have the same perception and same beliefs, from the lowest to the top level."

The Taliban itself, led by Mohammad Omar, has tried to dispute that. As part of what analysts call a public relations campaign to soften the movement's image, Omar, though still in hiding, released a statement last fall that said the Taliban did not oppose women's rights and favored education for all.

Arsala Rahmani, a lawmaker and former Taliban government official, said he thought women's activists were being close-minded, defying what he called "a mother's duty to always try to unite their sons." He said that the Taliban restricted women to protect them from conflict -- not out of ideological misogyny -- and that Omar and his fighters would accept any ideas the Afghan public favors.

To human rights activists, those Taliban messages are ploys to dim support for U.S.-led military efforts in Afghanistan. They point to Taliban-dominated Kandahar province, where militants have closed two-thirds of schools, and Helmand, where tribal leaders say female teachers are threatened with death.

It is a worrisome prospect to women such as Khujesta Elham, an aspiring politician who on a recent day was chatting with friends between classes at Kabul University. She said she thought Taliban fighters should be shunned, though she did not expect that to happen.

"Whatever decision Karzai makes will be his alone," said Elham, 22. "The government does not care about women's rights."

The depth of the Taliban's control varies across Afghanistan, as was the case during its rule, and so do views on the movement. In the 1990s, the Taliban viewed Kabul as a den of depravity, and it was there that its notorious Vice and Virtue police most brutally wielded batons against women who exposed their faces or wore high heels.

In Laghman, a rural Pashtun province in the shadow of snow-capped mountains, patriarchal traditions meant many of those rules were already in force. The area's Taliban officials mostly ignored unauthorized girls' schools, said Qamer Khujazada, who ran one until the Taliban was ousted in 2001. Khujazada became principal of Haider Khani high school, but militants burned down its administrative offices four years ago.

Hanifa Safia, the women's affairs representative for the province, said she thinks a settlement is the only way to peace. The Taliban fighters who throw acid on schoolgirls' faces or threaten professional women do so just to antagonize the government, she said. "I have talked to so many Taliban. They are not against women," Safia said. "Once they have been given positions in government, they will definitely change."

Khujazada, the principal, tentatively agrees. She walks confidently through the halls of her fraying school, overseeing a staff that she boasts is exactly half female.

But many of the girls slip into blue burqas before they leave the concrete-walled schoolyard, and Khujazada acknowledged that most will be married off before they ever set foot in a university. What is important, she said, is that they have the right to continue their schooling.

"Education has a lot of friends," Khujazada said cautiously. "But it has some enemies, too."

With pressures high, South Korean women put off marriage and childbirth

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 1, 2010; A10

SEOUL -- In a full-page newspaper advertisement headlined "I Am a Bad Woman," Hwang Myoung-eun explained the trauma of being a working mom in South Korea.

"I may be a good employee, but to my family I am a failure," wrote Hwang, a marketing executive and mother of a 6-year-old son. "In their eyes, I am a bad daughter-in-law, bad wife and bad mother."

The highly unusual ad gave voice to the resentment and repressed anger that are common to working women across South Korea.

In a country where people work more and sleep less than anywhere else in the developed world, women are often elbowed away from rewards in their professional lives. If they have a job, they make 38 percent less money than men, the largest gender gap in the developed world. If they become pregnant, they are pressured at work not to take legally guaranteed maternity leave.

Thanks to gender equality in education, the professional skills and career aspirations of women in South Korea have soared over the past two decades. But those gains are colliding with a corporate culture that often marginalizes mothers at the workplace -- or ejects them altogether.

Women who do combine work and family find themselves squeezed between too little time and too much guilt: for neglecting the education of children in a nation obsessed with education, for shirking family obligations as dictated by assertive mothers-in-law, and for failing to attend to the care and feeding of overworked and resentful husbands.

As Hwang complained in two mournful newspaper advertisements she bought last fall in Seoul newspapers: "We work harder than anyone to manage housekeeping and earn wages, so why are we branded as selfish, irresponsible women?"

When the ads were published in September, Hwang's name did not appear in them. But she has since acknowledged buying them and has gone on television to draw attention to the pressures endured by working women.

Most South Korean corporations do little to accommodate working mothers -- or working fathers, experts say. South Korean law allows a full year of subsidized parental leave, but intense peer pressure at work means that working mothers usually take little time off, according to government surveys. Only about 35,000 parents in this country of 49 million people took advantage of child-care leave subsidies last year.

"The longer leave they take, the less the likelihood of getting their old job back, even though that is illegal," said Yoo Gye-sook, an associate professor of family studies at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. "Flextime is frowned on by human-resources managers. They feel that company discipline might erode."

To lower stress as they climb corporate ladders, women in South Korea are postponing marriage and motherhood. The number of unmarried women in their 20s and 30s is surging. For three years running, South Korea has had the world's lowest birthrate, according to the U.N. World Health Organization.

The no-husband, no-baby trend has become a demographic epidemic in East Asia. Among the 10 countries or territories with the world's lowest fertility rates, six are in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a 2008 CIA ranking. From Japan to Singapore, the percentage of women who remain single into their mid-30s is rising at historically unprecedented rates. In South Korea, the percentage of unmarried women ages 30 to 34 nearly doubled in the past five years, rising to 19 percent from 10.5 percent.

"Women in their late 20s are just not willing to make the sacrifice of having children, juggling family responsibilities and working," Yoo said.

Collapsing birthrates are alarming East Asian governments, which in coming years will face a demographic crunch as the proportion of pensioners rises and the number of working-age adults declines. South Korea, which has projected a population decline beginning in 2018, is scrambling to encourage childbirth with incentives including low-interest home loans for families with three or more children.

But for South Korean women, choosing to have children usually means falling off the career track. There is a 30 percent employment gap here between men and women, the fourth-largest gap in the world, after Turkey, Mexico and Greece. Even if women choose to stay on the job, they have no guarantees of career advancement.

U.N. statistics show that gender empowerment, as measured by women holding management and professional jobs, is falling.

"This means that despite Korean women having good health and excellent education, they still have a much greater chance of becoming a politician or even a middle manager or computer programmer in countries like Kyrgyzstan, the Dominican Republic, Botswana or Nicaragua," said James Turnbull, whose blog, "The Grand Narrative," tracks sex discrimination and the role of women in South Korea.

Hwang, the working mom who says she spent about $8,600 last fall buying newspaper ads to vent her frustrations, works 10 to 12 hours a day as a chief strategic officer in charge of product promotions for a Seoul marketing company. She said her salary is about double what her husband makes -- a rare and delicate equation in a South Korean family.

"When you make more than the husband, you have to be careful not to hurt his pride," said Hwang, 38, who makes about $86,000 a year. "I make a point of getting a suggestion from him, when I buy my own clothes or a new aquarium for my son's fish."

Even more problematic, Hwang said, is her husband's mother.

In the "I Am a Bad Woman" advertisement that she placed in the newspaper, Hwang gives this account of telephoning her mother-in-law to ask for help with child care:

"Her sharp scolding returns from the other side of the phone: 'Have you forgotten today is the day of your father-in-law's memorial service? Your other family members are already here. I understand you are talented and all, but do you ever fulfill your family obligations?' "

Hwang said her husband is more sympathetic and "does more at home than other husbands in South Korea." She said she understands that it is not easy for him to have a working wife.

"The husbands here expect a warm home and a pat on the shoulder, but sometimes my husband may not get that," she said.

Hwang's husband declined to comment.

Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.

Keeping Focus on Fighting Genital Mutilation - Nation

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For a couple of decades, a small, underfunded nonprofit organization in New York called Equality Now has bolstered community groups in Africa that are making steady progress against the painful and destructive practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). But there is concern that an Equality Now-led campaign that has cost an unknown number of advocates their lives is meeting new resistance not only in traditional societies but also among Western anthropologists and other cultural apologists who put a higher value on a harmful practice than on the well-being of girls. Taina Bien-Aimé, Equality Now's executive director, calls it a "rites or rights" dilemma.

The United Nations has taken a surprising lead in publicly advocating for an end to the practice, in which a girl or woman's clitoris and sometimes surrounding vaginal areas are cut away to make her "more marriageable." The World Health Organization estimates that about 100 million to 140 million women worldwide have been subjected to FGM. The practice is most prevalent in Africa but also occurs among immigrants in Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Genital cutting is also reported in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. According to Unicef, about 3 million girls are at risk of being mutilated each year, some in infancy, in countries where the prevalence of the practice can be as high as 90 percent. In August the Population Fund, UNFPA, published a technical report on the scope of the practice.

There is often more action internationally than in the United States to curb the practice, although 17 American states have passed laws against the procedure since it began to appear in immigrant communities. In the United States, an analysis of census data by the African Women's Health Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston shows that (based on families' countries of origin) more than nearly 228,000 females have been or are at risk of being subjected to FGM, with more than 38,000 of them in California and nearly 26,000 in New York State. Only one person in the United States, an Ethiopian-born resident of Georgia, has gone to jail, charged with cruelty after he cut off his 2-year-old daughter's clitoris with scissors.

On November 3 Equality Now will kick off a campaign in the United States to refocus attention on FGM, with Meryl Streep appearing as a spokeswoman for the cause at the first screening of the documentary Africa Rising. That screening, at NYU, sold out weeks in advance, but it will be followed by programs on the West Coast and in Boston.

By early next year a distribution agreement with Women Make Movies, a multicultural feminist nonprofit, should make the documentary, featuring activists from Africa and international rights organizations, widely available to any group interested in presenting a program on the issue.

Bien-Aimé said that from the beginning in the early 1990s, Equality Now, which also campaigns against sex tourism and trafficking in the United States, followed the lead of grassroots activists against FGM in Africa at a time when the subject was taboo in the United States. "We met with and were actually fascinated by the work of individuals who were literally risking their lives to talk about female genital mutilation, to break the silence and raise awareness," Bien-Aimé observes.

Equality Now stepped in to help forge a network and give it an international platform, but the programs and pace were always left to the people on the scene, men as well as women. In 2000 a fund was created to funnel support to the local groups. A newsletter, Awaken, is published in English, French and Arabic.

Many of the women who have been helped in their advocacy were survivors of the practice. "They were indigenous to their communities," Bien-Aimeé said. "They know best how to address the issue."

"Just the fact that FGM is now a household word is an enormous success," she said. "Fifteen of twenty-eight African countries have laws; an African protocol on the rights of women is the first legal instrument mandating governments to legislate against FGM."

But the practice goes on, and resistance to the prohibition of FGM has led to increasingly younger girls being cut on the apparent theory that this will pass unnoticed. During the political upheaval in Kenya in 2008, while police forces were overstretched or in disarray, mass cuttings were reported. Equality Now heard of the forcible cutting of about 600 girls in the Kenyan city of Eldoret during the school Christmas break.

Bien-Aimé said that last year in Burkina Faso, where there is a hot line to report cases, about 200 infants were rushed to hospitals after being subjected to the practice. FGM, apart from causing girls to bleed to death and eliminating sexual pleasure from the lives of survivors, can lead to high levels of infection and disease, later difficult births and maternal deaths.

The resistance to ending FGM or creating less harmful rites of passage for girls is not confined to developing countries. "For reasons that I don't understand, there's this resurgence of debate around 'rites or rights' in this country," Bien-Aimé said. "It's extremely disturbing." Campaigns against the practice are being challenged on cultural sensitivity by anthropologist and other academics. Some leading American anthropologists, including Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago and Bettina Shell-Duncan, a specialist in biocultural and medical anthropology at the University of Washington, argue that activists who advocate against genital cutting tend to overemphasize the most harmful versions of the practice and fail to appreciate the importance of this rite in many families and communities, where damage to a girl or young woman may be slight.

FGM has fallen off the radar of many health officials. "What is the CDC doing, what is Health and Human Services doing?" Bien-Aimé asked. By comparison, Britain, Sweden and France have special programs in immigrant communities.

"It is critically important for voices from the ground to be heard now," she said.

About Barbara Crossette

Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.

She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and in paperback by Random House/Vintage Destinations in 1996, and a collection of travel essays about colonial resort towns that are still attracting visitors more than a century after their creation, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, published by Westview Press in 1998 and in paperback by Basic Books in 1999. In 2000, she wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century, published by Indiana University Press in 1993.

The Chosun Ilbo - Korea Lags Behind in Closing Gender Gap

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Many countries are making great strides toward gender equality, but women still lag behind men in political and economic empowerment. This was revealed in Global Gender Gap Index 2009 released on Tuesday by the World Economic Forum of Switzerland.

The index was based on a survey of 134 nations in four categories -- economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. "The Index's scores can be interpreted as the percentage of the gap that has been closed between women and men," the report said.

Nordic countries had the smallest equality gaps. On a scale of 100, Iceland topped the list with 82.8 points, followed by Finland (82.5 points), Norway (82.3) and Sweden (81.4). Women there find it easy to work outside their home and find a balance between home and work as they benefit from traditionally generous welfare, the report said.

At the bottom, Qatar ranked 125th, followed by other Islamic countries such as Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Yemen came last with 46.1 points.

Korea ranked 115th, very close to the bottom. The country slid since its already low ranking of 92nd in 2006 when this survey was started, dropping to 97th in 2007 and 108th in 2008.

Korea received 61.6 points in 2006, but improved in 2007 with 64.1. Its points dropped to 61.5 in 2008 and received 61.5 again this year. But it was pushed behind by other countries which improved faster. Korea performed relatively better in the health and survival category (80th) than the economic and political categories (113th and 104th). The country came first in terms of life expectancy but ranked as low as 116th in sex ratio at birth. It ranked 114th in legislators, senior officials and managers and 124th in women in ministerial positions.

Out of 115 countries that were first rated in 2006, more than two-thirds improved their performance over the last four years, the report said. But women still had a low rate of participation in parliament, government and corporate boards.

Countries have closed almost 93 percent of the gap in education but only 60 percent of the gap in economic activity and 17 percent in politics, the report added.

Remember the Women of Aghanistan? - Nation

Women are made for homes or graves. --Afghan saying

Gen. Stanley McChrystal says he needs more American troops to salvage something like winning in Afghanistan and restore the country to "normal life." Influential senators want to increase spending to train more soldiers for the Afghan National Army and Police. The Feminist Majority recently backed off a call for more troops, but it continues to warn against US withdrawal as an abandonment of Afghan women and girls. Nearly everyone assumes troops bring greater security; and whether your touchstone is military victory, national interest or the welfare of women and girls, "security" seems a good thing.

I confess that I agonize over competing proposals now commanding President Obama's attention because I've spent years in Afghanistan working with women, and I'm on their side. When the Feminist Majority argues that withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan will return the Taliban to power and women to house arrest, I see in my mind's eye the faces of women I know and care about. Yet an unsentimental look at the record reveals that for all the fine talk of women's rights since the US invasion, equal rights for Afghan women have been illusory all along, a polite feel-good fiction that helped to sell the American enterprise at home and cloak in respectability the misbegotten government we installed in Kabul. That it is a fiction is borne out by recent developments in Afghanistan--President Karzai's approving a new family law worthy of the Taliban, and American acquiescence in Karzai's new law and, initially, his theft of the presidential election--and by the systematic intimidation, murder or exile of one Afghan woman after another who behaves as if her rights were real and worth fighting for.

Last summer in Kabul, where "security" already suffocates anything remotely suggesting normal life, I asked an Afghan colleague at an international NGO if she was ever afraid. I had learned of threatening phone calls and night letters posted on the gates of the compound, targeting Afghan women who work within. Three of our colleagues in another city had been kidnapped by the militia of a warlord, formerly a member of the Karzai government, and at the time, as we learned after their release, were being beaten, tortured and threatened with death if they continued to work.

"Fear?" my colleague said. "Yes. We live with fear. In our work here with women we are always under threat. Personally, I work every day in fear, hoping to return safely at the end of the day to my home. To my child and my husband."

"And the future?" I said. "What do you worry about?"

"I think about the upcoming election," she said. "I fear that nothing will change. I fear that everything will stay the same."

Then Karzai gazetted the Shiite Personal Status Law, and it was suddenly clear that even as we were hoping for the best, everything had actually grown much worse for women.

Why is this important? At this critical moment, as Obama tries to weigh options against our national security interests, his advisers can't be bothered with--as one US military officer put it to me--"the trivial fate of women." As for some hypothetical moral duty to protect the women of Afghanistan--that's off the table. Yet it is precisely that dismissive attitude, shared by Afghan and many American men alike, that may have put America's whole Afghan enterprise wrong in the first place. Early on, Kofi Annan, then United Nations secretary general, noted that the condition of Afghan women was "an affront to all standards of dignity, equality and humanity."

Annan took the position, set forth in 2000 in the landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325, that real conflict resolution, reconstruction and lasting peace cannot be achieved without the full participation of women every step of the way. Karzai gave lip service to the idea, saying in 2002, "We are determined to work to improve the lot of women after all their suffering under the narrow-minded and oppressive rule of the Taliban." But he has done no such thing. And the die had already been cast: of the twenty-three Afghan notables invited to take part in the Bonn Conference in December 2001, only two were women. Among ministers appointed to the new Karzai government, there were only two; one, the minister for women's affairs, was warned not to do "too much."

The Bonn agreement expressed "appreciation to the Afghan mujahidin who...have defended the independence, territorial integrity and national unity of the country and have played a major role in the struggle against terrorism and oppression, and whose sacrifice has now made them both heroes of jihad and champions of peace, stability and reconstruction of their beloved homeland, Afghanistan." On the other hand, their American- and Saudi-sponsored "sacrifice" had also made many of them war criminals in the eyes of their countrymen. Most Afghans surveyed between 2002 and 2004 by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission thought the leaders of the mujahedeen were war criminals who should be brought to justice (75 percent) and removed from public office (90 percent). The mujahedeen, after all, were Islamist extremists just like the Taliban, though less disciplined than the Taliban, who had risen up to curb the violent excesses of the mujahedeen and then imposed excesses of their own. That's the part American officials seem unwilling to admit: that the mujahedeen warlords of the Karzai government and the oppressive Taliban are brothers under the skin. From the point of view of women today, America's friends and America's enemies in Afghanistan are the same kind of guys.

Though women were excluded from the Bonn process, they did seem to make strides in the first years after the fall of the Taliban. In 2004 a new constitution declared, "The citizens of Afghanistan--whether man or woman--have equal rights and duties before the law." Westerners greeted that language as a confirmation of gender equality, and to this day women's "equal rights" are routinely cited in Western media as evidence of great progress. Yet not surprisingly, Afghan officials often interpret the article differently. To them, having "equal rights and duties" is nothing like being equal. The first chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court, formerly a mullah in a Pakistani madrassa, once explained to me that men have a right to work while women have a right to obey their husbands. The judiciary--an ultraconservative, inadequate, incompetent and notoriously corrupt branch of government--interprets the constitution by its own lights. And the great majority of women across the country, knowing little or nothing of rights, live now much as they did under the Taliban--except back then there were no bombs.

In any case, the constitution provides that no law may contravene the principles of Sharia law. In effect, mullahs and judges have always retained the power to decide at any moment what "rights" women may enjoy, or not; and being poorly educated, they're likely to factor into the judgment their own idiosyncratic notions of Sharia, plus tribal customary laws and the size of proffered bribes. Thus, although some women still bravely exercise liberty and work with some success to improve women's condition, it should have been clear from the get-go that Afghan women possess no inalienable rights at all. Western legal experts who train Afghan judges and lawyers in "the law" as we conceive it often express frustration that Afghans just don't get it; Afghan judges think the same of them.

The paper foundations of Afghan women's rights go beyond national law to include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Treaty of Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). All these international agreements that delineate and establish human rights around the world were quickly ratified by the Karzai government. CEDAW, however, requires ratifying governments to submit periodic reports on their progress in eliminating discrimination; Afghanistan's first report, due in 2004, hasn't appeared yet. That's one more clue to the Karzai government's real attitude toward women--like Karzai's sequestration of his own wife, a doctor with much-needed skills who is kept locked up at home.

Given this background, there should have been no surprise when President Karzai first signed off in March on the Shiite Personal Status Law or, as it became known in the Western press, the Marital Rape Law. The bill had been percolating in the ultraconservative Ministry of Justice ever since the Iranian-backed Ayatollah Asif Mohseni submitted it in 2007. Then last February Karzai apparently saw the chance to swap passage of the SPSL for the votes of the Shiites--that is, the Hazara minority, 15-20 percent of the population. It was just one of many deals Karzai consolidated as he kept to the palace while rival presidential candidates stomped the countryside. The SPSL passed without alteration through the Parliamentary Judicial Committee, another little bunch of ultraconservative men. When it reached the floor of Parliament, it was too late to object. Some women members succeeded in getting the marriageable age for girls--age 9--revised to 16. Calling it victory, they settled for that. The Supreme Court reviewed the bill and pronounced it constitutionally correct on grounds the justices did not disclose.

The rights Afghan women stood to lose on paper and in real life were set forth in the SPSL. Parliamentarian Shinkai Karokhail alerted a reporter at the Guardian, and the law was denounced around the world for legalizing marital rape by authorizing a husband to withhold food from a wife who fails to provide sexual service at least once every four days. (The interval assumes the husband has four wives, a practice permitted by Islam and legalized by this legislation.) But that's not all the law does. It also denies or severely limits women's rights to inherit, divorce or have guardianship of their own children. It forbids women to marry without permission and legalizes forced marriage. It legalizes marriage to and rape of minors. It gives men control of all their female relatives. It denies women the right to leave home except for "legitimate purposes"--in effect giving men the power to deny women access to work, education, healthcare, voting and whatever they please. It generally treats women as property, and it considers rape of women or minors outside marriage as a property crime, requiring restitution to be made to the owner, usually the father or husband, rather than a crime against the victim. All these provisions are contained in twenty-six articles of the original bill that have been rendered into English and analyzed by Western legal experts. No doubt other regressive rules will be discovered if the 223 additional articles of the law ever appear in English.

In April a few women parliamentarians spoke out against the law. A group of women, estimated to number about 300, staged a peaceful protest in the street, protected by Kabul's police officers from an angry mob of hundreds of men who pelted them with obscenities and stones, shouting, "Death to the enemies of Islam!" Under pressure from international diplomats--President Obama called the law "abhorrent"--Karzai withdrew it for review. The international press reported the women's victory. In June, when a large group of women MPs and activists met with Karzai, he assured them the bill had been amended and would be submitted to Parliament again after the elections.

Instead, on July 27, without public announcement, Karzai entered the SPSL, slightly revised but with principal provisions intact, into the official gazette, thereby making it law. Apparently he was betting that with the presidential election only three weeks away, the United States and its allies would not complain again. After all, they had about $500 million (at least half of that American money) riding on a "credible" outcome; and they couldn't afford the cost of a runoff or the political limbo of an interregnum. In August, Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, observed that such "barbaric laws were supposed to have been relegated to the past with the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, yet Karzai has revived them and given them his official stamp of approval." No American official said a word.

But what about all the women parliamentarians so often cited as evidence of the progress of Afghan women? With 17 percent of the upper house and 27 percent of the lower--eighty-five women in all--you'd think they could have blocked the SPSL. But that didn't happen, for many reasons. Many women parliamentarians are mere extensions of the warlords who financed their campaigns and tell them how to vote: always in opposition to women's rights. Most non-Shiite women took little interest in the bill, believing that it applied only to the Shiite minority. Although Hazara women have long been the freest in the country and the most active in public life, some of them argued that it is better to have a bad law than none at all because, as one Hazara MP told me, "without a written law, men can do whatever they want."

The human rights division of the UN's Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) published a report in early July, before the SPSL became law, documenting the worsening position of Afghan women, the rising violence against them and the silence of international and Afghan officials who could defend them. The researchers' most surprising finding is this: considering the risks of life outside the home and the support women receive within it, "there is no clear distinction between rural and urban women." Commentators on Afghanistan, myself included, have assumed--somewhat snobbishly, it now appears--that while illiterate women in the countryside might be treated no better than animals, educated urban Afghan women blaze a higher trail. The debacle of the Shiite Personal Status Law explodes that myth.

The UNAMA report attributes women's worsening position in Afghan society to the violence the war engenders on two domestic fronts: the public stage and the home. The report is dedicated to the memory of Sitara Achakzai, a member of the Kandahar Provincial Council and outspoken advocate of women's rights, who was shot to death on April 12, soon after being interviewed by the UNAMA researchers. She "knew her life was in danger," they report. "But like many other Afghan women such as Malalai Kakar, the highest-ranking female police officer in Kandahar killed in September 2008, Sitara Achakzai had consciously decided to keep fighting to end the abuse of Afghan women." Malalai Kakar, 40, mother of six, had headed a team of ten policewomen handling cases of domestic violence.

In 2005 Kim Sengupta, a reporter with the London Independent, interviewed five Afghan women activists; by October 2008 three of them had been murdered. A fourth, Zarghuna Kakar (no relation to Malalai), a member of the Kandahar Provincial Council, had left the country after she and her family were attacked and her husband was killed. She said she had pleaded with Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar Provincial Council, for protection; but he told her she "should have thought about what may happen" before she stood for election. Kakar told the reporter, "It was his brother [President Karzai], the Americans, and the British who told us that we women should get involved in political life. Of course, now I wish I hadn't."

Women learn to pull their punches. MPs in Kabul confessed that they are afraid of the fundamentalist warlords who control the Parliament; so they censor themselves and keep silent. One said, "Most of the time women don't dare even say a word about sensitive Islamic issues, because they are afraid of being labeled as blasphemous." Many women MPs have publicly declared their intention to quit at the end of the term. Women journalists also told UNAMA that they "refrain from criticizing warlords and other power brokers, or covering topics that are deemed contentious such as women's rights."

Other women targeted for attack are civil servants, employees of international and national organizations, including the UN, healthcare workers and women in "immoral" professions--which include acting, singing, appearing on television and journalism. When popular Tolo TV presenter Shaima Rezayee, 24, was forced out of her job in 2005, she said "things are not getting better.... We have made some gains, but there are a lot of people who want to take it all back. They are not even Taliban, they are here in Kabul." Soon after, she was shot and killed. Zakia Zaki, 35, a teacher and radio journalist who produced programs on women's rights, was shot to death in her home in Parwan Province on June 6, 2007. Actress Parwin Mushtakhel fled the country last spring after her husband was gunned down outside their house, punished for his failure to keep her confined. When the Taliban fell, she thought things were getting better, but "the atmosphere has changed; day by day women can work less and less." Setara Hussainzada, the singer from Herat who appeared on the Afghan version of American Idol (and in the documentary Afghan Star) also fled for her life.

Threats against women in public life are intended to make them go home--to "unliberate" themselves through voluntary house arrest. But if public life is dangerous, so is life at home. Most Afghan women--87 percent, according to Unifem--are beaten on a regular basis. The UNAMA researchers looked into the unmentionable subject of rape and found it to be "an everyday occurrence in all parts of the country" and "a human rights problem of profound proportions." Outside marriage, the rapists are often members or friends of the family. Young girls forced to marry old men are raped by the old man's brothers and sons. Women and children--young boys are also targets--are raped by people who have charge of them: police, prison guards, soldiers, orphanage or hospital staff members. The female victims of rape are mostly between the ages of 7 and 30; many are between 10 and 20, but some are as young as 3; and most women are dead by 42.

Women rarely tell anyone because the blame and shame of rape falls on them. Customary law permits an accused rapist to make restitution to the victim's father, but because the question of consent does not figure in the law of sexual relations, the victim is guilty of zina, or adultery, and can be punished accordingly: sent to jail or murdered by family members to preserve family honor. The great majority of women and girls in prison at any time are charged with zina; most have been raped and/or have run away from home to escape violence. It's probably safe to say, in the absence of statistics, that police--who, incidentally, are trained by the American for-profit contractor DynCorp--spend more time tracking down runaway women and girls than real criminals. Rapists, on the other hand, as UNAMA investigators found, are often "directly linked to power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation." Last year Karzai pardoned political thugs who had gang-raped a woman before witnesses, using a bayonet, and who had somehow been convicted despite their good connections. UNAMA researchers conclude: "The current reality is that...women are denied their most fundamental human rights and risk further violence in the course of seeking justice for crimes perpetrated against them." For women, "human rights are values, standards, and entitlements that exist only in theory and at times, not even on paper."

Caught in the maelstrom of personal, political and military violence, Afghan women worry less about rights than security. But they complain that the men who plan the country's future define "security" in ways that have nothing to do with them. The conventional wisdom, which I have voiced myself, holds that without security, development cannot take place. Hence, our troops must be fielded in greater numbers, and Afghan troops trained faster, and private for-profit military contractors hired at fabulous expense, all to bring security. But the rule doesn't hold in Afghanistan precisely because of that equation of "security" with the presence of armed men. Wherever troops advance in Afghanistan, women are caught in the cross-fire, killed, wounded, forced to flee or locked up once again, just as they were in the time of the Taliban. Suggesting an alternative to the "major misery" of warfare, Sweden's former Defense Minister Thage Peterson calls for Swedish soldiers to leave the "military adventure" in Afghanistan while civilians stay to help rebuild the country. But Sweden's soldiers are few, and its aid organizations among the best in the world. For the United States even to lean toward such a plan would mean reasserting civilian control of the military and restoring the American aid program (USAID), hijacked by private for-profit contractors: two goals worth fighting for.

Today, most American so-called development aid is delivered not by USAID, but by the military itself through a system of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), another faulty idea of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Soldiers, unqualified as aid workers and already busy soldiering, now shmooze with village "elders" (often the wrong ones) and bring "development," usually a costly road convenient to the PRT base, impossible for Afghans to maintain and inaccessible to women locked up at home. Recent research conducted by respected Afghanistan hands found that this aid actually fuels "massive corruption"; it fails to win hearts and minds not because we spend too little but because we spend too much, too fast, without a clue. Meanwhile, the Taliban bring the things Afghans say they need--better security, better governance and quick, hard-edged justice. US government investigators are looking into allegations that aid funds appropriated for women's projects have been diverted to PRTs for this more important work of winning hearts and minds with tarmac. But the greatest problem with routing aid through the military is this: what passes for development is delivered from men to men, affirming in the strongest possible terms the misogynist conviction that women do not matter. You'll recognize it as the same belief that, in the Obama administration's strategic reappraisal of Afghanistan, pushed women off the table.

So there's no point talking about how women and girls might be affected by the strategic military options remaining on Obama's plate. None of them bode well for women. To send more troops is to send more violence. To withdraw is to invite the Taliban. To stay the same is not possible, now that Karzai has stolen the election in plain sight and made a mockery of American pretensions to an interest in anything but our own skin and our own pocketbook. But while men plan the onslaught of more men, it's worth remembering what "normal life" once looked like in Afghanistan, well before the soldiers came. In the 1960s and '70s, before the Soviet invasion--when half the country's doctors, more than half the civil servants and three-quarters of the teachers were women--a peaceful Afghanistan advanced slowly into the modern world through the efforts of all its people. What changed all that was not only the violence of war but the accession to power of the most backward men in the country: first the Taliban, now the mullahs and mujahedeen of the fraudulent, corrupt, Western-designed government that stands in opposition to "normal life" as it is lived in the developed world and was once lived in their own country. What happens to women is not merely a "women's issue"; it is the central issue of stability, development and durable peace. No nation can advance without women, and no enterprise that takes women off the table can come to much good.

About Ann Jones

Ann Jones, author of Kabul in Winter, does humanitarian work in postconflict zones with NGOs and the United Nations

Hillary Clinton Signals That She Intends to Make Women's Rights a Signature Issue

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 18, 2009

She talked chickens with female farmers in Kenya. She listened to the excruciating stories of rape victims in war-torn eastern Congo. And in South Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited a housing project built by poor women, where she danced with a choir singing "Heel-a-ree! Heel-a-ree!"

Clinton's just-concluded 11-day trip to Africa has sent the clearest signal yet that she intends to make women's rights one of her signature issues and a higher priority than ever before in American diplomacy.

She plans to press governments on abuses of women's rights and make women more central in U.S. aid programs.

But her efforts go beyond the marble halls of government and show how she is redefining the role of secretary of state. Her trips are packed with town hall meetings and visits to micro-credit projects and women's dinners. Ever the politician, she is using her star power to boost women who could be her allies.

"It's just a constant effort to elevate people who, in their societies, may not even be known by their own leaders," Clinton said in an interview. "My coming gives them a platform, which then gives us the chance to try and change the priorities of the governments."

Clinton's agenda faces numerous obstacles. The U.S. aid system is a dysfunctional jumble of programs. Some critics may question why she is focusing on women's rights instead of terrorism or nuclear proliferation. And improving the lot of women in such places as Congo is complicated by deeply rooted social problems.

"It's great she's mentioning the issue," said Brett Schaefer, an Africa scholar at the Heritage Foundation. "As to whether her bringing it up will substantially improve the situation or treatment of women in Africa, frankly I doubt it."

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, said that Clinton has to tread carefully in socially conservative regions, particularly those where the U.S. military is at war. "You might be right, in the narrow sense of women in that country or region need to be empowered, but you're saying something inimical to other U.S. interests," he said.

Despite Clinton's efforts to spotlight women's issues, it was her own angry response to what she perceived as a sexist question at a town hall meeting in Congo that dominated American television coverage of her Africa trip. A student had asked for former president Bill Clinton's opinion on a local political issue -- "through the mouth of Mrs. Clinton." Snapped Hillary Clinton: "My husband is not the secretary of state. I am."

Clinton is not the first female secretary of state, but neither of her predecessors had her impact abroad as a pop feminist icon. On nearly every foreign trip, she has met with women -- South Korean students, Israeli entrepreneurs, Iraqi war widows, Chinese civic activists. Clinton mentioned "women" or "woman" at least 450 times in public comments in her first five months in the position, twice as often as her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice.

Clinton's interest in global women's issues is deeply personal, a mission she adopted as first lady after the stinging defeat of her health-care reform effort in 1994. For months, she kept a low profile. Then, in September 1995, she addressed the U.N. women's conference in Beijing, strongly denouncing abuses of women's rights. Delegates jumped to their feet in applause.

"It was a transformational moment for her," said Melanne Verveer, who has worked closely with Clinton since her White House days.

Clinton began traveling the world, highlighting women's issues. She gradually built a network of female activists, politicians and entrepreneurs, especially through a group she helped found, Vital Voices, that has trained more than 7,000 emerging leaders worldwide. She developed a following among middle-class women in male-dominated countries who devoured her autobiography and eagerly watched her presidential run.

"She might not be having the same restrictions as we have, but she has had restrictions -- and she's moving on. That's a symbol to us," said Tara Fela-Durotoye, a businesswoman in Abuja, Nigeria.

Clinton's legacy is evident in such places as the Victoria Mxenge housing development outside Cape Town, South Africa, a dusty sprawl of small, pastel-colored homes she championed as first lady. When her bus rolled into the female-run project during her trip, a joyful commotion broke out. Women in purple and yellow gowns lined the streets, waving wildly.

A youth choir swayed outside a community center decorated with photos of Clinton on her previous visits to the project, which has grown to 50,000 houses. Clinton vowed in a major policy address last month to make women the focus of U.S. assistance programs. The idea is applauded by development experts, who have found that investing in girls' education, maternal health and women's micro-finance provides a powerful boost to Third World families.

Ritu Sharma, president of the anti-poverty group Women Thrive Worldwide, said she already sees the results of Clinton's efforts in the bureaucracy. When Sharma's staff recently attended a meeting about a new agricultural aid program, she said, one State Department official joked, "We have to integrate women -- or we're going to be fired."

Still, Sharma questioned whether the program would succeed in reaching poor women, especially given the weaknesses in U.S. foreign assistance.

"There's a lot of healthy skepticism about 'Will it really happen?' " she said.

In a sign of the priority she gives to the issue, Clinton has appointed her close friend Verveer as the State Department's first global ambassador for women's affairs.

"She will permeate the State Department, as I want her to, with what we should be doing about empowering and focusing on women across the board," Clinton said.

One issue Verveer has been concerned about is violence against women, particularly the stunningly high number of rapes in eastern Congo. Last week, Clinton, Verveer and the delegation boarded U.N. planes to visit the remote, impoverished region and meet with rape victims. Clinton pressed the Congolese president to prosecute offenders and offered $17 million in new assistance for victims.

"Raising issues like the ones I've been raising on this trip to get governments to focus on them, to see they're not sidelined or subsidiary issues, but that the U.S. government at the highest levels cares about them, is important," she said. "It changes the dynamic within governments."

Clinton's efforts are being reinforced by a White House women's council and a Congress with a growing number of powerful female members. One sign of that: Aid dedicated to programs for Afghan women and girls increased about threefold this year, to $250 million, because of lawmakers such as Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who was recently named head of the first Senate subcommittee on global women's issues, and Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations.

It is striking how much time Clinton dedicates to women's events on her trips, even ones that receive little public attention. In South Africa, a clearly delighted Clinton spent 90 minutes at the housing project, twice as long as she met with South Africa's president. "It feeds my heart," she explained. "Which is really critical to me personally since a lot of what I do as secretary of state is very formalistic. It's meetings with other officials."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.