I thought day one was as interesting as a day could get. But day two was more so. We went to the office of the NGO, Cooperation for Peace and Unity. It’s program director, Mirwas Wardak, talked for over an hour but it seemed like 5 minutes. Have you ever thought about “donor harm”? Sounds like an oxymoron but the US made it a reality. One particularly interesting example is what happened when the US donated money to the Muhajadeen to publish schoolbooks. Great idea! The only problem was that the books were a compendium of violent acts. “If there are five Russian soldiers and you kill two of them, how many are left?” Elementary school math. A little gore makes the brain work better?

CPAU is researching the sources of radicalism and, guess what? We are part of the problem! Bad governance with no accountability (eg, Karzai) and the presence of international forces (eg, US) create radical Afghans. (Go to www.cpau.org and get an eyeful) This is not to say that Afghans love the Taliban. They don’t. They just hate their government and foreign occupation—the way we have been doing it—more so!

We keep hearing about security, justice, education and economic development, mostly in that order. In every case, though, security is the overarching concern. The Taliban, oddly, offers a perverse kind of justice and therefore enjoys a loyalty that is otherwise hard to comprehend. Though more often than not the justice they deliver is itself unjust, it is swift.

People see the Karzai government as a huge engine of corruption where the wealthy and powerful get away with whatever they want, often at the expense of the people. Here’s the rub: people KNOW that the occupiers are going to leave before the Karzai government can make them secure. As a result, many maintain “good” relations with the Taliban in anticipation of the time when the Taliban inevitably will be resurgent.

To say this country and its problems are complex is to define understatement. Most of the people with whom we have met believe that civil war will follow a withdrawal of foreign troops if their own military is not effectively trained. They want us here–but don’t.

Mirwas is convinced that Pakistan is at the core of our dysfunctional policy. The sanctuary that Pakistan provides the Taliban on its borders, he insists, serves to empower the Taliban. They believe that the US will not risk endangering its relationship with nuclear-loaded Pakistan. And Pakistan keeps the Taliban fat and happy, essentially flipping the US the middle finger.

That said, nothing can really change for the good if the government continues to be controlled by dishonest, corrupt people, especially when those people are being supported by the country’s biggest donor—the United States.

On that cheerful note, we left for a meeting at a UN compound where the women who work there regularly get death threats. As a feminist, I am often frustrated by the shallowness of my country’s commitment to women’s rights. By comparison, the UN’s commitment is deeply shallow! Yet these intrepid UN representatives in Kabul are pushing forward on their investigation into how women are being used—and abused—in the enduring conflict that is Afghanistan.

It is a myth that women voted in any appreciable numbers in the last “election”, seen by everyone with whom we spoke as a total fraud. In fact, there was a massive failure around the participation of women in the election. The civic education necessary to bring them into the process was virtually absent. One in ten women’s voting places, which are separate from men’s, were not even staffed. There were voting stations that never even opened which nonetheless had huge tallies. Fraudulent elections do not define democracy—or, sadly, maybe that’s exactly what they do.

The UN spokespeople, with whom we met, have the daunting task of trying to build civic and professional options for women in a country where women are not even perceived as a real constituency. One of the most blatant examples of that reality is the Shia Personal Status Law. Signed into law by Karzai in the spring, it infamously legalized marital rape. The law also made it illegal for a female to exit her home without the company of a male family member. Illegal for a woman to speak in public with a male not related to her. And it even created an official Vice and Virtue Police.

Enraged, an astonishing group of 300 women did the unheard of, risking their lives and mounting a protest outside one of the mosques built by Mullah Ayatollah Mosheni, a warlord whose puppet in the Parliament, Mohammad Taj, is the principle backer of the law. Many more women tried to join the protest but were blocked by Mosheni supporters from getting there. Over 1,000 angry men poured out of the mosque and started throwing stones at the women. Fortunately, the police had the sense to intervene before the demonstration turned tragic.

Karzai agreed to listen to the women and form a commission to revise the law. No woman was on the commission and no woman has been allowed to see the results. Karzai is not alone, Richard Holbrook routinely holds meetings in the region without so much as one woman participant. Apparently he never read the UN Security Resolution #1325 which states that “all parties to a conflict” must be represented in political negotiations. Your tax dollars at work! We have to start demanding, “Where are the women?”

Women in Afghanistan who assume roles outside the home run a serious risk of being assassinated. They are being killed simply because they are women and the rising acceptance of this phenomenon should horrify any civilized person. Afghan culture virtually dictates the abuse of women. Physical and economic security is an Afghan woman’s main concern. And the US is only pouring bucket-loads of money into too many wrong places.

The entrance to our next stop was surreal. In front was an open sewer—ubiquitous in Kabul—with rubble and garbage strewn in every direction—also ubiquitous in Kabul. The street was badly rutted and unpaved—the norm in Kabul. We entered the battered looking building to find a tiny dark room that lead to some rather odd, old stone steps that took us down into a beautiful garden. The backside of the building was almost Victorian. We reentered another part of the building to find ourselves in a conference room dominated by a huge table with 14 very cushy leather chairs around it. In came Mirahmad Joyenda, a Member of Parliament who doubles as the head of The Foundation for Civil Society and Culture. Did he ever have an agenda!

He thinks Afghanistan needs more troops but only in consultation with the Afghans. He believes that any additional troops should be dispatched to the borders—especially the one with Pakistan. Security is his main priority. The only way real way for the country to become secure is through building the nation’s military and police. And that is not going to happen unless the government offers more pay than the Taliban offers. Even with that, the cost of one US soldier in Afghanistan equals the cost of 60-70 Afghan soldiers. He said Pakistan is a major source of support for the Taliban.

He wonders how we could get 400,000 troops trained in Iraq in less time than it has taken to train 60,000 Afghan troops, many of whom are lured away by the Taliban for higher pay. In a country where 60% of it people live on less than a dollar a day and the illiteracy rate approaches 75%, is it any wonder that the Taliban can be so attractive?

There are 42 countries doing “work” in Afghanistan. He said none shares information or intelligence with the others. Many are there purportedly to alleviate women’s status. Yet he thinks women outside Kabul are worse off now than they were in 2000. The former head of the Afghan Women’s Network in Kandahar was murdered last month for implementing a music program in the girls’ school where she taught.

Our next stop was the Afghan Civil Society Forum where its director, Aziz Rafee, a very gentle, soft-spoken highly intelligent man, gave us a tidy list of crises facing Afghanistan today. Afghans do not trust their government or each other. They live in deep poverty where a family of five needs at least $200 a month to get just their basic nutritional needs met. Yet they can expect to earn no more than $50 a month. Seventy-five percent of families have only one worker. Think what our economy would look like if 50% of the population—women—were out of the work force. Dependent on outside countries for much of what is supplied in the country, the government cannot provide even a small percentage of the country’s technical or industrial demands. Afghanistan cannot even pay for its own elections.

Echoing what the MP told us, there is no coordination among the dozens of countries plying their forms of good will in Afghanistan, a victim of conflicting, uncoordinated agendas. There needs to be some entity coordinating all the aid aimed at Afghanistan that rarely hits its mark.

The Taliban, whose core mandate is to prevent effective government, is represented in Parliament but I was unable to find out the exact number. But they do form a critical mass. Aziz told us that 100% of the Taliban in Parliament is Pashto, a tribe from the south. Karzai and 85% of the Ministers are Pashto as well. Eighty percent of the money spent by government goes to the south and only 20% goes to the north. One ethnic group with so much control makes a unified country nearly impossible.

As a victim of war—he lost his wife to the Northern Alliance and his 18 year-old son was paralyzed in an attack—he spoke movingly about the need for justice, a concept sorely lacking in his country. To have justice Afghans need security. To have peace, they need justice, education and nutrition. With Karzai, he says, justice is not even on the horizon.

From Jodie Evans:

I am just returning from my 10-day trip to Afghanistan. As we left, a farm was bombed and eight members of a family were killed. Eight U.S. soldiers also lost their lives in an insurgent raid on their outpost. And today marks the 8th anniversary of the US Invasion of that war torn country.

We have spent a quarter of a trillion dollars in those 8 years and what have we got for all that time, money, and suffering? Most of the country is in worse condition, the Taliban have been growing in strength and number, the bordering countries are more unstable and death fills the air.

We went to hear what the women of Afghanistan thought about the push for more troops. We spoke with journalists, doctors, activists, NGOs, members of government, and average Afghan women. Most of the women do not want more troops. Instead, they need support to sustain their lives. They want that money spent on what we really need to bring peace: investment in the people of Afghanistan.

Everything we have done in eight years has no plan – just short-term solutions with long-term catastrophic effects. Afghans want education, jobs, healthcare, infrastructure. They want us to send troops of doctors, teachers, engineers and business leaders – not more soldiers. Yet we have continued to support a situation that fuels insurgency instead of a sustainable culture. Ninety percent of the funding to Afghanistan is used for military spending and only 10 percent has been used for development. Obama already authorized an additional 21,000 troops this year and Gen. McChrystal is expected to ask for an additional 40,000 troops.

Member of Parliament and gynecologist Dr. Roshnak Wardak speaks about the situation in her province. We have to do all we can to stop another surge. As Americans, we need to stand with the women of Afghanistan and fight for development, not troops.

October 7, 2009

With the eighth anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan nearing and a leaked letter from our general in Afghanistan that he wants another 40,000 troops before the funding for the last request of 21,000 has really been fully voted on, we felt it was time to go to Afghanistan and speak to the women. What do they want to say to President Obama?

Nine of us arrived September 27 in the midst of an election scandal and reports of kidnapped Americans being held for a ransom of Taliban prisoners. A journalist, photographer, gynecologist, teacher, attorney, retired colonel and State Department member who opened the Afghan Embassy for the United States in 2001, we CODEPINK co-founders and our token male from a partner organization, Peace Action, made up our delegation. As the plane lowered through the clouds, we entered the dusty and broken city of Kabul. We wouldn’t take a clean breath until our return eight days later to Dubai. Rumor has it that more feces pollute the air of Kabul than anywhere in the world.

Women were to be our window into this broken world, but you cannot avoid the men. At our first meeting, the deputy director assigned to speak with us from Women to Women International was a man. In shock I asked why he had such a role, the woman who was program director for the last seven years smiling at the question. “Because so much of our work is too dangerous and can’t be done by a woman.”

Of course Nader, the deputy director, was needed in his role. Just to talk to the women they must first win over the Mullah, showing him how their work comes from the teachings of the Prophet. (The United States hasn’t been that smart in their communications with the Afghans.) At least Zainab and Sweeta, Nader’s bosses, have created an intelligent, highly functioning program that works. My western prejudices were constantly being uprooted.

I left the states with a judgment about some of the women who were members of the Parliament: So many are sisters and wives of warlords or tribal leaders chosen merely to fill the required quota of women. But Member of Parliament Shinkai Karokhal, a radical feminist from Kabul, reminded me that just their existence, that they constitute 25 percent of the body, is inspiring to women throughout the country. I told her she was right, it is a big step. We didn’t have such a thing in our country. She still managed to complain that it is a ceiling and not a floor: “Many of the women have received the majority vote for their election but were stuck in a quota slot.”

One such woman is Dr. Roshanak Wardak, gynecologist and MP from the Province of Wardak. She didn’t want to be an MP, but her community came to her and begged. She had been there through the Tali (as she call them). She did nothing, spent nothing and yet was elected over 29 other candidates. She is about five feet tall and can talk for hours passionately, intelligently and forcefully without stopping, repeating herself or tiring.

“The women in the provinces are suffering. Obama sent 3,000 troops to Wardak for security, and daily there is bombardment, and deaths,” she told us. “They kill these boys I helped into the world.” She asked the military the other day about a boy and his father who were not connected to the Taliban. “Why did you kill them?” “Because they had relations with the Taliban.” “I have relations with Taliban daily, Tali are Afghans. I have to go to their weddings and funerals.” She told of a harvest, with peaceful farmers collecting potatoes, helping each other. They finish one plot and move to another. A rocket kills them. She asked the soldiers, the governor, the chief of police and none of them know why. They asked officials at the base in Kabul and are told they thought there was a rocket there. But it was a shovel. All these innocent farmers leave wives and children with no means of support.

Dr. Wardak said Obama sent soldiers to her province so they could vote, but those who went to vote were killed. “How is that protecting us?” she asked. “Take care of your people and keep them home and keep us safe. So if you want to ask me this, ‘should we send more troops or not?’ I want to ask you, with 84,000 American troops what did you do? Please compare 2009 with 2008, and compare 2008 with 2007, and 2007 with 2006. Year by year, the condition became more worse.

“With no troops our condition was much better and we were safe. The only ones suffering are the women.” Answering another question from an NGO she said, “spend the money on education for women, which is very necessary for peace.”

One afternoon we met with the women who led a protest against a law justifying marital rape that Karzai signed. These few hundred women and very few men demonstrated outside the Mosque of the Ayatollah who pushed through the law, and an angry mob poured out, screaming and throwing rocks. All these women were frightened for their lives and yet have not backed down. Some were never political before but are now creating new organizations to be stronger for the next fight.

All the women who speak out—from the MPs, to members of NGOs to those in the streets—fear for their lives, but it is not stopping them. The only women I met who told me they hadn’t received threats or felt afraid where five women journalists from the ROSE, a magazine for women on politics, culture and women’s lives. This is just weeks after they did an article about how much more women suffer from AIDS than men. Why aren’t they afraid? “We are just telling the truth, it is not political,” they told me.

When asked if they wanted more troops or the money invested in jobs, police training and infrastructure support most women choose the investment in their country. They know “military is not the answer,” which is a quote not just from them but from the director of the USAID office in Kabul. Everywhere we heard the recurrent theme, “Money for jobs, and make the Taliban obsolete with better alternatives.” And the recurrent question, “the United States is the power in this country, they pay for everything. Why can’t they do something about the corrupt government? Why can’t they hold these people responsible?”

In the last days of our trip, we joined a trialogue of women from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan discussing peace, which cannot occur without cooperation among their countries. We decided to offer a letter to Obama to bring him their voices. Members of Parliament, professors, NGO leaders, ex-ministers, and even the sister in law of Karzai signed the petition to Obama [see sidebar, “A Letter to President Obama”].

Won’t you join with them? It will take the women of the world to rise up and say militarism is not working. It will take the women of the world to force Obama and Congress to do the right thing and invest in the women instead. Militarism is a fire that is spreading across borders, and we need to find a new language. We need to meet not in rooms without windows but in the majesty of the mountains of this once beautiful country. Everyone has to be at the table. As the minister of women told us, “We have a mouth and a brain, we should talk.” Transparency, justice and real investment in the women of Afghanistan will bring peace and we need to start now.

We returned after that to the conference on peace and security between Afghan, Pakistani and Indian women. We videoed several women about their views on the U.S. call for 40,000 more troops. Some women said yes, we need more troops, but most said no—instead train the Afghan military, hold reconciliation talks and put more money into social needs and job problems. We hope the post the responses as youtubes when we get home. We also wrote up a letter to President Obama saying no more troops, and asked the women to sign. The organizer of the conference must get US government money because she freaked out and wouldn’t let us circulate the letter! Instead, we talked to some of the women during the breaks, and many of them signed. (In the evening, Jodie got the wife of Karzai’s brother to sign on!)

Since we are returning tomorrow, we took time to do some shopping along Chicken Street—buying jewelry, shawls, dresses, bedspreads, purses… The shopping break was a nice diversion from all the sitting and talking.

In the afternoon we spent time with two amazing women who were among the main organizers of the protest against the Shia law that would have legalized marital rape and codified the unequal status of women. This was the first protest these women had ever participated in, and they were terrified to face to mullahs and fundamentalists who accused the women of being anti-Muslim. Some were beaten on the day of the march, but they remain strong and determined to keep improving the status of women.

Tonight we had a terrific meal at the home of Karzai’s businessman brother, Mahmoud Karzai, and his wife. The guests included businessmen who had security companies, the president’s first deputy chief of staff (a woman), the president’s economic advisor, journalists, a UN rep and more. We all had great conversations and realized how lucky we were to have, once again, such great access to so many different opinions (at the dinner, someone from our group remarked that back home, it would be like having dinner at the home of Jeb Bush!).

Tomorrow is our last day and we will back it in with more meetings, including university students—something we are all looking forward to.

This was another crazy day in this wild city.  The morning began with meeting Professor Aram Mir Ahzar, director of the National Independent Commission for Peace and Reconciliation. The Commission was established about 5 years ago and in that time saw 8,300 join with them (including 21 of the big guys from the UN Black List) and the success of their efforts to get 963 people released from Baghram Prison.  Unfortunately, since they were not able to protect the released prisoners, many were killed and they are totally discredited, with no funds or support from either the US or the Karzai Government.

He showed us all the forms that the ex-combatants put their ink print on saying they would join the peace process and quit fighting.  They turned in their guns before signing and received an identity card saying they were good guys, only to go home and be killed. They guaranteed not to fight again in exchange for the promise of protection but they were essentially suckers. Not surprisingly, there is a serious lack of new people signing up.  The problem, it seems, is that there is no “wise” government.  A few months before Karzai came to power, the Northern Alliance (which no longer exists as they are now all part of the Karzai’s Government) appointed most of the Governors and Police Chiefs in the provinces.  This has created a disconnect between Karzai’s Government and the local officials as they have differing ideas on many crucial issues and there is no real unified governing body throughout the country.

Still, despite the fractured government’s inability to protect them, some have survived. One was the Minister of Higher education and he is now in the Senate—appointed by Karzai.  The Taliban’s Ambassador to Pakistan was appointed Governor of his province but he declined. One even came to meet us.  He was the Minister of Communications under the Taliban and seems to have been a good guy as far as anyone can tell.  He saved the Archives which has made him kind of a hero. He is propped up as the poster child survivor of the Commissions efforts and we got to interview him.

We heard for the one-hundredth time that the Government is corrupt and that the country desperately needs a unified governing body with intelligent people instead of a coalition Government of War Lords. Rather than given the power in Afghanistan, the War Lords need to be sent to the International Criminal Courts.

We kept asking questions and so he told us a story to illustrate what has to happen in Afghanistan in order to start to end the conflict there:

He pointed to the window and said, “This is the border of Pakistan, over there is Pakistan and in Pakistan there is a dead body.  It is from all over the world like, Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so on. Flies are all around it.  Those flies are eating from the body and putting its eggs there and the children fly to England and the US.  The US bombs a village where they see a fly, but they miss the fly and the village is dead. The fly has moved to the next village.” Basically, that we must quit trying to kill the fly and take out the dead body.

He felt he could bring peace in 6 months if he had a unified government who could stand behind the reconciliation process.  He said 5% of the Taliban are ideological, 30% want revenge for what the US has done to their women, villages, family, country, and the rest just need a job.  If the current administration continues as it has since its installment by the US, this pattern will last another 100 years even if Americans send 10 million troops.

He continued:

“The government is sick—it has a sick body and lots of ways for germs to come in.  Let’s see how to treat the body, make it healthy and we can create peace—make the body whole.  The body has been made from different parts, Iran, Chechnya, Pakistan—infections came with the body parts from these different countries.  How do we get rid of difficulties and germs? The Government of Karzai is not educated, we need someone who has knowledge and skill with capability and intelligence, not someone with connections to the war lords. There will be little difficulty but it will stop forever, instead of the constantly erupting from an unintegrated body.

Then the Minister entered and welcomed us, saying, “By the name of almighty God, welcome to all of you.  You came here for good work.” He continued, “From the point of view of Muslims, saying if there is not peace in any area and war is going on, then humans living in peaceful area, they have responsibility to go to war area and do something for peace.  Afghanistan is member of the whole world, as a body, if there is pain then whole body feels the pain. Then you should feel pain.”

He then gave us his thoughts on how to achieve peace:

“During Prophet Suleiman, there was a small bird called a Seka, he would jump from one tree to another very fast. That small bird loved the Nightingale and tried always to reach it.  He fell in love with the Nightingale.  One day he got close enough and kissed her.  He escaped into a small hole in the wall or in the tree, as he had many to hid in.  The nightingale went to the king and complained, so the King sent out eagles and groups of big birds to arrest the small bird in the hole, they couldn’t enter the hole.  Then the same small bird says send us and we can go into the hole we can bring him to you.

If we make a bigger and bigger attack, it will not be good. Listen to Afghans, even though weak and powerless, they know the ways—there are Mullahs and if we respect them then we can make power for the peace process.”

I liked that at the peace center it was all about stories.  We did ask him why he joined the Taliban and he said the civil war was hell and the Taliban promised security and justice and so he joined.  But then he is a male so he fundamentally missed the atrocities that happened to the women.  We asked if women could be at the negotiating table in peace efforts and, in a long round about way, he finally said yes.

We went from the Minister’s office to a girls’ school where Najib is on the board.  It is a school for girls who missed their education because of the Taliban, so there were 16 year-olds in the 2nd grade class and adult women in the 7th grade class.  A beautiful place and the girls were wonderful to be with and quite vocal—especially about their near-unanimous desire to be peace activists.

We had lunch with a Canadian who works on drug policy issues—but I will save that for it’s own blog. She was amazing.  Afterwards we met with a female member of the Parliament, Shinkai Karokhal.  Both these meetings were humbling because of the enormous courage of both these women.  Shinkai is a feminist and works daily to increase the rights of women.  Her climb towards her goals is incredibly steep and seemingly endless but she feels she has made advances.  We met at her house just as her sons were coming home from school and it was a delight to see their affection and playfulness with her.  She managed to be upbeat and hopeful even while telling us about how hard things are and how many of her suggestions go unheeded.  She said that no man in Afghanistan takes it seriously that she is in Parliament.  Not even the cop on the corner—the men in Parliament are fawned over and she is ignored.

She says the quota system is a ceiling not a floor and it needs to be changed as many of the women candidates get the most votes. She is not sure she will be there long as she is pushing daily for things that have no support.  She also works to incorporate peace and conflict resolution into the school curriculum and told us stories of how much violence used to be in the text books. She gave us a sample math problem: there are 40 Russians—how many do you have to kill to have only 5 left?

She also said something new that I hadn’t heard: namely, that there is a difference between Afghan culture and Islam and that Afghanistan can’t even really be considered Muslim.  Most Afghan traditions which contribute to the terrible, perpetuated custom of female oppression violate Islam. She said as a result of the deeply patriarchal Afghan culture, about 90% of the women suffer from domestic abuse and that in most areas it has gotten worse since the US arrived.  The 25% of the population that resides in cities has seen an improvement, but the rest who are in the war zone has seen further deterioration. 60% of the girls marry before they turn sixteen and the mortality rate in child birth is 8%–the second highest in the world—mostly because of their young age when they give birth and the lack of medical facilities.

She also feels that Taliban dialogue is necessary—that without it the future is more than bleak. She said No to more troops as they totally disrupt the lives of Afghans.  She told a story about Eid when thousands of family members were going south to see their families. US Soldiers were out on patrol and it took eleven hours to cover what was about 2 hours under normal circumstances.  Conditions like this do not win hearts and minds and there are literally thousands of these stories.

The day finished at a meeting with the Deputy Minister of Defense who we grilled about training the troops and what was really possible. He says they need more police than troops, which is the opposite of what McChrystal proposes and he is for going back to mandatory service which made Medea happy.  We learned about the ex-pat bars and ended our night at a French one which was quite the scene. Hundreds of Westerners drinking and flirting, roughly twenty men to each women so we were mobbed.  We met men from every country doing about everything in Kabul—including delivering the mail. We passed armed guards, went through three security doors and were searched in order to reach the party area.  And what a party it was—only just beginning at 11pm.

Life in Kabul is far from boring….