Afghanistan: Study on Indirect Consequences of 40+ Years of Warfare : Norah Niland / Niloufar Pourzand

Dear friends,
fyi and possible interest.

Norah Niland, as some of you know and remember, was our UN colleague in Afghanistan and the Human Rights Advisor. in the late 1990s. As some of you also remember, Sippi was in Peshawar in the late 1990s when we were based there. At that time, she was working for the NRC. Both Norah and Sippi, like most of us, have remained engaged with Afghanistan in one way or another.

Warm regards, Niloufar

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
As you may know, about a year ago, UAI, working jointly with the Costs of War project at BU initiated a major multi-stakeholder research study geared to determining the indirect consequences of 40+ years of warfare on Afghans and their society. Initial outputs included an annotated Bibliography and a paper on the impact of the different phases of the war on education.

This major undertaking had to be put on hold given events leading up to the return of Taliban to Kabul last August. UAI focused instead on a dedicated campaign that challenges the decision by the US and its allies to freeze the country’s external reserves that belong to the Afghan people under the authority of the DAB – the central bank of Afghanistan. This move has been described as collective punishment and economic warfare. It has crippled the economy and deepened poverty and food insecurity. Details of the campaign including various statements issued by UAI can be found at https://www.against-inhumanity.org/

In this “one-year anniversary” period of the Taliban return to Kabul we are pleased to advise that we remain engaged in the “indirect consequences” study. A paper commissioned by UAI on Gender has been prepared by the well known Afghan expert, Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam – see attached!

This, in our view, is an exciting read which provides a thought-provoking lens on this important topic. We would greatly appreciate hearing your views!

With warm regards, norah

The following article is very long.  You may prefer to download a copy by clicking here

Afghan Women in the Wonderland of the International Community’s (Mis)Adventures in Afghanistan

Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam1

Introduction2

Afghan society and, with it, gender norms, expectations and roles have been profoundly shaped by four decades of war, displacement, and foreign intervention through processes such as radicalization and foreign assistance. The situation of women and girls has been discussed at length through a variety of lenses, none more compelling than that of the impact of the Taliban Movement. The status of women has been linked to the legitimation efforts of a succession of ruling regimes, repressing women when seeking to improve their Islamic credentials, and ‘modernizing’ women, for those wishing to loosen the grip of Islamic elements (Le Duc 1996, Azarbaijani-Moghaddam 2009). In the interim of wars and unrest, women were disappeared from the public sphere. Historically, ideations, around what the repression or emancipation cum modernization of women would look like, came from Afghan men, under foreign influence. Women, had little choice but to comply, signalling their lack of social and political power. However, a gradual shift in attitudes to, and the agency of, women and girls, was discernible in recent years in a newly emerging elite urban environment and some media circles.

The search for a ‘women’s movement’ in the Afghan context is challenging. A series of outstanding elite women scattered across history are routinely held up as evidence of a movement. Overall, the discourse around women in Afghanistan has been obfuscated by false advertising and overselling fantasies rather than strategizing based on a sober observation of reality. In relation to this many questions need to be asked. Why is there a need to prove the existence of a movement? What if Afghan history is one of war and social unrest rather than peace? What if the long, relatively quiet reign of Zahir Shah was an anomaly rather than a gold standard to be aspired to? The following analysis touches on the impact of armed conflict and some obstacles to advancing women’s rights and the creation of a cohesive movement of women. The aim is to provide alternative angles and perspectives for viewing the situation of women in Afghanistan.

Women as Emblems

Afghanistan is routinely referred to as a rentier state. Afghan history is a succession of elites reliant on militaries subsidized by foreign powers, until replacement occurs. Since ancient times, access to funds and arms has always been the main source of authority – both of these have been the domain of Afghan men who formed feudal or patrimonial networks. The only factor that changes is identity markers which legitimize those men to pass their authority on to successors and form dynasties or, lately, politico

military groupings. Obtaining foreign support for armies has been the perennial path to power for Afghan rulers. Individual women, seeking a share of the power game, have more recently become active on the periphery of this process.

In a process of war and lawlessness, punctuated by peaceful periods, Afghan rulers have at times attempted to make changes to women’s status but the results have been erratic and taken time to filter

1 Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam is an international consultant and social scientist with 29 years’ experience in conflict and post-conflict settings, notably Afghanistan (1995 to present). She has published and presented extensively on Afghanistan. She specializes on a range of topics, providing a unique combination of strategic analysis and extensive field experience.

2 This paper was commissioned by United Against Inhumanity (UAI). It is part of a larger research project on the indirect consequences of 40+ years of war in Afghan society jointly undertaken by UAI and the Costs of War Project at Boston University. (For more details on UAI see: http://www.against-inhumanity.org; for details on the CoW project see: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/). The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of UAI and CoW.

down to the masses and become assimilated. Amir Abdurrahman Khan (1880-1901), for example, changed the legal status of women as part of his administrative and legal reforms (Nemat 2011), challenging tribal customary law, at a time when he was crushing tribal resistance to his reign. The struggle against customary practice such as denying women inheritance, however, still continues. Therefore, it can be said that his reforms were largely rejected.

After the fall of the Ottoman and Qajar empires, two ambitious men, Reza Shah the Great and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk sought to carve out legitimacy and break the power of religious classes in their countries. Amanullah Khan (1919-1929) emulated these men. He was heavily influenced by his father-in-law, Mahmud Tarzi, who had spent time in Turkey (Olesen 1995). The question of the veil and secular education for children was critical in Turkey, Iran (Centlivres 1994), as well as Central Asia, where the Bolsheviks were trying to advance Communism (Olesen 1995). The gradual revival of Islamism, together with war and social unrest, eventually halted and reversed this tide in the region.

In Afghanistan’s modern history, as in Iran and Turkey, from the 1920s onwards, women became the focus and symbol of modernization and linked legitimation agendas. These agendas were linked to new leaders and regimes emerging from the ashes of outdated Muslim empires and proving wrong European orientalist notions about backward Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries. The indicators of modernization largely emerged from two issues, veiling, coupled with overall dress, and girls’ education. Evidently this only played out in affluent urban areas. After all, clothes, in general, including burqas, were expensive and there were no formal girls’ schools in rural areas.3 Also, modern dress was not practical or acceptable for the lives led by rural women given the terrain they had to cover and the level of physical activity they were engaged in.4 Rural development and urbanization progressed at a very slow pace as did women and girls’ access to these historic modernization processes.

Rhetoric around reform to alter the status of women was instrumentalized by each successive regime in times of peace (Olesen 1995, Dupree 1998). The women involved were offered no share of power but were emblematic of male powerholders’ efforts to gain legitimacy. There was no enduring commitment to women’s rights. Longitudinally, through the socioeconomic layers, change was limited, with a tendency to create a thin veneer of highly visible women in the urban public sphere, especially after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, when this visibility increasingly came to symbolize the success of foreigners wanting to emancipate women through funding change (Abu-Lughod 2002).

Women, who became visible as a result of elite capture by specific families or groups, disappeared once a particular regime was toppled. For example, Queen Soraya, king Amanullah’s wife, was no longer relevant in exile. Neither did Anahita Ratebzad and other women prominent in Communist circles impact Afghan affairs once they went into exile. There has been no continuity and no unity. The longitudinal connection from elite level down to the grassroots is non-existent, except for occasions when elites can showcase largesse. Employees of NGOs and UN agencies are sent to work with women selected to enter project spaces for very limited timeframes. After that, low level staff are fired and intended beneficiaries forgotten. Like Afghan society as a whole, women’s groupings are also very fragmented and cannot be considered a unified movement. They have not yet put aside differences in the pursuit of common ground. Afghan women who are continuing to represent women’s issues abroad are doing so in carefully curated spaces provided by the international community, as discussed below.

3Interestingly, based on numerous interviews conducted by this author with male professionals on personal childhood experiences, the rollout of boys’ primary education met with resistance in some parts of Afghanistan until the 1950s. One man recounted the village women weeping for him as if it was his funeral when he was leaving for his first day at school.

4 Observations garnered while working with women for over 25 years in different regions and locales, following their daily tasks and watching the amount of physical labour they do, coupled with their concerns around modesty, as well as cost of clothes and shoes, make it evident that the economy and practical needs of most rural and poorer urban women does not go beyond smocks and loose pants. These must be comfortable enough for sitting on the floor (as many people still use floor cushions) and squatting for relieving oneself.

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Even as they claim to stand for women’s rights they are being denounced by some groups of women remaining in Afghanistan5.

It has been argued that the role of foreign governments has been to further instrumentalize the status of women for political and military ends in the various proxy wars and regime changes which they facilitated in the region (ibid), most notably after the rise of the Taliban movement. It may be more realistic to say that the status of women is artificially raised as a form of compensation after they have become ‘collateral damage’ in these proxy wars. This was certainly the tone of the text in the 2001 Bonn Agreement6 which stated that a ministry would be set up for women.

The Soviet occupation (1979-1989) and ensuing Mujahideen resistance movement, for example, disrupted old criteria for legitimacy and introduced disruptive levels of socio-political mobility, using guns and violence. Women and children paid the highest price for this war; throughout, they were excluded from any decision-making. Large numbers were victimized, killed, maimed, raped, abducted, forced into prostitution, forced into marriage or suffered psychological pressure watching their loved ones being victimized (Ellis 2000). Those who funded the violence of the jihad against the Soviets (primarily the United States (US) and Europe) did not give any thought to impacts on women (Berry 2003). Women’s rights were not a popular, funded category at that stage. Keeping in line with the ‘Muslim warrior fighting a holy war’ trope, women were kept out of publicity posters.

In the initial period of mass displacement to refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran, there was no burning insistence to reach women with specific assistance. The refugee context was where boys were bred and trained to fight (Bhutta 2002). Families were provided with food and medical assistance. The focus was on women as mothers and caretakers.7 Access to Afghan women, even by foreign women, was not easy. Those NGOs that wanted to provide education for girls, health services and access to income generation in some communities, faced barriers and had to negotiate intensively for minor gains.

The war created unprecedented levels of displacement which indirectly led to a lot of socioeconomic changes for women (Azarbaijani-Moghaddam 2010). As the war dragged on and exposure to new forms of life in Pakistan, Iran and beyond continued, some families began to relax conservative attitudes. In this period, and subsequently, the exposure to and penetration of radio, television and lately social media also shifted some traditional notions (Munazza Ebtikar 2020). Large numbers of widows had to take on men’s assigned roles as protectors, decision-makers, and providers. Demand for girls’ education, healthcare (especially perinatal) and even income generation grew. By this stage, and especially after the Soviet withdrawal, funding levels declined dramatically and there were not enough projects to meet demand.8

During the jihad against the Soviets and beyond, Wahhabism and Deobandism also provided routes for male upward social mobility and gave religious groups authority and powers they had not enjoyed previously (Olesen 1995, Edwards 2002). Once again, women were excluded and became victims, as the freedoms of the previous decades were removed and their dress, mobility and access to education and work was questioned (Dupree 1998). This mostly impacted elite urban minorities who had enjoyed

5 There are a large number of Tweets, Tiktok clips, Facebook comments, etc. denouncing specific elite women as not representative of women who are in Afghanistan. Certain women have had to withdraw from the public sphere as they have been branded Taliban sympathizers for attempting to negotiate with the Taliban. 6 

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl nat/a24d1cf3344e99934125673e00508142/4ef7a08878a00fe5c12571140032e471/$FILE/BONN%20AGREEM ENT.pdf

7 Based on informal discussions and interviews with men and women (1991 to 2021), international and Afghan, who provided assistance to refugee communities and those in Afghanistan. For example, in the 1980s some NGOs used women’s role as water carriers to enter refugee camps, by providing wells for clean water. From here, after gaining community confidence and reaching women, discussions could eventually move to encouraging men to allow the establishment of a sewing project.

8 Based on personal interactions with communities around Afghanistan juxtaposed with the struggle to procure funding from donor agencies as Afghanistan was ‘not a priority’. (1995 to 2001)

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freedoms in the previous decades (Knabe 1977, Azarbaijani-Moghaddam 2010, 2014 (b)). Their response was often to join a growing exodus to Europe, North America and beyond.

Women as a Cause Celebre

The rise of a neoliberal agenda9in the West saw funding being channelled towards human rights, especially women’s rights in the developing world. This was a convenient way to delegitimise regimes and movements not supported by the US and its allies. From the late nineties, Afghan women became a focus of US media, lobbying and support (Stabile & Kumar 2005) as the US establishment began to distance itself from Jihadi proxies and demonized offshoots, such as the Taliban, for their track record on human and women’s rights. Starting as a trickle, English-speaking Afghan women were sought to be displayed as “poster girls” for this process.10

Much has been written on the instrumentalization of Afghan women’s rights11 to justify the invasion of Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11 2001 (Berry 2003). This was a first in Afghan history. The liberation of Afghan women was used as one of the key reasons for the aerial bombardment which led to the removal of the Taliban regime. Vocalizing the importance of respect for the rights of women and girls, and supporting initiatives in this regard, was a process based on a rationale fraught with inaccurate analysis. It was used as a veneer to legitimize the US invasion and the promise of a new political order across the region and the world. Once the international military-political complex realized that the Taliban were not universally loathed and, actually, had pockets of grassroots support, interventions became more complex and entrenched. Improving women’s status was complicated, fraught and buffeted by societal forces which required a deep and long-term commitment and investment. The arrival of the international military brought with it large amounts of funding attracting additional NGOs, a new civil society ecology, and for-profit contractors. These formed a socioeconomic layer, which inserted itself to benefit from the funding bonanza and media hype (e.g. Nemat 2011). These organizations posed as indispensable allies and became the engine to push the neoliberal agenda forward and to provide a benign façade to an occupation force waging the Global War on Terror. Afghan women casualties of the military operations did not receive publicity or prizes (Anand 2021).

The removal of the Taliban had not automatically led to the shedding of burqas and overnight emancipation, and, therefore, there was no easy public relations victory for the military. The aid/media complex stepped in and, using Afghan women as mascots, began the process of creating a troupe of high profile ‘activists’ who would be trained, publicized and feted with provision of public arenas, unprecedented media coverage, funding and prizes. There was intense rivalry within this specific arena. Accountability was to benefactors rather than any broader grouping of women. A public relations victory was manufactured by creating a unique niche. Once the last vestiges of the military-aid complex was removed in August 2021, the scaffolding supporting this production collapsed. It was swiftly relocated abroad, where the promotion of ‘empowered Afghan women changing history’ continues.

A History of Inequality

Modernization should not be confused with development in the sense of sustainable empowerment. Development projects do not automatically lead to poverty reduction. The majority of Afghan women saw little benefit from the sporadic efflorescence of modernization which would bloom with funding and fade in the heat of religious backlash. Large swathes of Afghanistan were neglected by governments for decades, even more so during the years of armed conflict; they suffered the reality of grinding poverty and underdevelopment and continue to do so (Azarbaijani-Moghaddam 2008). The women and girls in these areas had no access to schools and health clinics, and even if the infrastructure was eventually provided, mostly after 2001 for some areas, this did not guarantee qualified staff or services

9 See, for example, Ozsu (2018). There is a burgeoning literature on neoliberalism in this context. 10 From the late nineties onwards, the author and other UN and NGO colleagues began receiving increasing requests to find Afghan women who spoke English to go abroad to receive prizes for courage, etc. in special ceremonies.

11 See literature on ‘embedded feminism’.

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which could be afforded by the local population (Chaudhuri 2018). The end result is some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world.12

Some inroads were made under the Communists, and, later, after the fall of the first Taliban Emirate, with the rollout of programmes to improve rural life. Emblematic advances for small groups of women were made under the watchful eyes of foreigners, elites, and urban populations. However, even in urban areas the ‘advances’ rarely trickled down to women in the lowest socioeconomic groups. As noted , war and subsequent displacement to cities and countries of refuge meant that some families encountered education and were exposed to the benefits of healthcare for women for the first time in their lives. This led to a growing demand for education and healthcare in recent decades, as more and more families understood its benefits and the fact that a government actually has an obligation to provide such services. The government response was, in part, to misappropriate much of the funding for these sectors resulting in patchy, low-quality services while, simultaneously, trumpeting success in educating girls and saving women from death in childbirth.

Poverty Reduction

Millions of Afghan women have lived and died in poverty, while regimes changed, elites benefitted and their fate was tossed back and forth in a male-dominated world. Throughout Afghan history, the poster women of various initiatives and, later, atomized activists anchored in the latest regime, usually acting solo, rarely spoke up on issues affecting larger cohorts of women in Afghanistan. There was no solidarity or finding of common ground. There was always a hierarchy in place. Women in the public sphere were mostly accountable to their patrons and international funders, publicising themselves with those agendas in mind. The focus of some internationals was on showcase projects demonstrating westernization (e.g. orchestras, martial arts, skateboarders, footballers, musicians etc.) or projects which would look impressive on paper but would never in reality change the status of all but a handful of females. These included expensive processes for passing laws in a society where law enforcement was extremely problematic and the legal sector notoriously corrupt and misogynistic. In recent years, it included the ‘women, peace and security agenda’ which involved many meetings and action plans. Critical issues for the broader base of non-literate, vulnerable women remained un-championed. Such issues included basic health issues impacting all women, such as multiples pregnancies at a young age, breast or ovarian cancer, the impact of environmental degradation and drought, impacting those living in marginal areas reliant on rainfed agriculture, or impacted by yearly flash floods or periodic drought. These issues were rarely discussed because they had not been placed by donors on the radar of the women’s activities they funded. They were dull subjects which would not be picked up on by the media, unlike fashion shows or avant-garde film making.

Regular health emergencies,13 among a range of other factors, for example, have pushed families into debt for decades, with protracted armed conflict and insecurity exacerbating the situation as resilience was eroded (Pain 2022). Crippling rural debt has been a feature of the Afghan economy for generations; almost invariably, it impacts female family members disproportionately. Families are locked into generational cycles of deprivation as a result of debt, landlessness, lack of assets and many different types of illiteracy, including financial. Foreign and Afghan governments have consistently pushed for agricultural projects as an economic panacea, even though land ownership has always been concentrated in the hands of a small number of farmers and evidence of trickle down is inconclusive. Even for the landed, inheritance for women has been discouraged leaving widowed women in vulnerable positions (Norwegian Refugee Council 2020). Most activists did not tackle such issues.

Additionally, many NGOs, civil society and contractors, some local including those headed by female ‘activists’, presented project designs which were repeatedly replicated with little useful impact. The project would end and the staff would move on to the next job. Employment generation for millions of

12 The Ministry of Public Health claimed a massive drop in mortality but see Maruf et al. (2021) on complications on recording accurate maternal mortality figures in Afghanistan.

13 The political economy of health, which is very complex, is not addressed here. It is unclear how much the rolling out of national healthcare packages impacts health-related debt because of entrenched and well documented corruption at all levels of government and in all sectors in Afghanistan.

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non-literate, unskilled Afghans, especially women who face more restrictions, has been a perennial challenge which was never solved. The answer was sought in three-month trainings as part of small income generating projects. Against a backdrop of chronic poverty and underdevelopment, women were expected to break free of generations of structural discrimination and exploitation with a few years of education or a sewing machine coupled with some training. The training and small-project economy kept small NGOs, which were frequently family businesses, afloat.

In a society where entering and navigating patrimonial networks, lubricated with bribes, is the only way upwards, a simplistic approach to poverty, discrimination and social exclusion continues to be pushed by a literate class, often working in non-government or civil society entities, to foreigners who come on short contracts, live in secure compounds and do not understand or question the context. Many ordinary Afghans perceive NGOs, like war profiteers, to have inserted themselves between funding bodies, government elites and ‘the poor’ and disenfranchised.14 They mobilize poverty statistics and write about empowerment in reports, but they are looking for profit. They are also forced to ignore or fail to challenge structures of social differentiation, akin to feudalism, and quietly skirt their powerlessness in the face of pervasive human rights abuses perpetrated by firmly entrenched and heavily armed criminal groups among others.

In Afghan culture, as elsewhere, the poor receive charitable donations. The ability to feed a large retinue at a large dastarkhan or floor cloth, provide freebies and access to services also signifies power, influence and wealth. This model was not about creating change for clients to enable them to stand on their own two feet but about reinforcing a hierarchical relationship. Donor funding became a sought after means for facilitating this largesse and eventually women with aspirations to politics and power followed male counterparts and moved in on this game. They were not interested in transforming the lives of poorer, marginalized women who have been used for decades as ‘poverty porn’.15 Donor funding allowed some of these women to set up a mechanism solely for boosting their power and public persona.

Social Unrest, Social Change

Historically, Afghan women could only emerge, function and have a semi-autonomous voice in Afghanistan’s strictly demarcated, hierarchical system if they enjoyed the strong support and approval of powerful, forward-thinking male-relatives or if the deployment of womenfolk provided access to money or power for their male relatives (Knabe 1977). Issues around ‘class’ are rarely discussed in related literature, although discussing this in Afghan culture is complex since the population is highly fragmented along many different identity lines which impact social mobility and access to income. What is certain is that social inequality is very marked and large swathes of Afghan society are voiceless, oppressed, and overlooked. Periods of social unrest did not alter this; nor did it result in a women’s movement.

With the rise of cohorts of predominantly male students, a youth bulge (see Urdal 2010) occurred in the sixties and seventies. The civil service could only accommodate a limited number of educated young men. The result was dissatisfaction, social unrest and tension, leading to Communist groups on the one hand and Islamist groups on the other (Olesen 1995). Both wished to control female dress and public presence as symbols of their socio-political agendas. Women had virtually no role in the leaderships of these political movements as they still had limited access to education, did not control funds and definitely had no role in leading the subsidised military forces which upheld or threatened regimes.

Afghanistan was never industrialized. Rural areas were feudal. Urbanization was slow and ebbed and flowed, following patterns of war and displacement. This has left millions of women and girls of the lower socioeconomic groups trapped on, or below, the poverty line. Such women remain isolated,

14 NGOs, contractors and CSOs are often described as thieves and corrupt institutions by both government and ordinary Afghans. This has created tension and at times open conflict. See, for example, Mehrdad, How Liberal Values Became a Business in Afghanistan Foreign Policy, Apr 6, 2021

15 See, as an example, Shahghasemi, E. (2020) Pornography of Poverty: Celebrities’ Sexual Appeal at Service to the Poor? The 2nd International Conference on Future of Social Sciences and Humanities, Prague.

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voiceless, and disenfranchised. They are used as low-paid or unpaid labour usually in the informal economy, or as low value assets and pawns in marriage alliances. The relatively small but growing cohort of middle and upper-class women, constantly paraded as influential and successful women’s rights advocates, do not represent women on the margins or, indeed, a cohesive women’s movement.

Unlike their predecessors from the sixties and seventies women now have access to funding, parcelled out according to donor agendas, but the fate of Afghan society is still determined by armies and weapons. Peace processes have proven to be publicity stunts and including women in these processes is lip service. Afghan women of all backgrounds will eventually have to organize and unite to pursue paths which they choose for themselves.

Education as the Path to Power

Education as a path to power is critical, and for girls in Afghanistan, it should be a lifeline as promised. Yet again, girls were betrayed. The Afghan government showcased girls’ education knowing that it was falsifying figures, not investing in female teachers’ pay and not showing commitment to tackle the high drop-out rates (UNESCO 2021). Here was yet another sector which was ravaged by chronic corruption from top to bottom (Bjelica 2017). Donors who colluded with the Afghan government in selling success stories are as guilty as the government officials who lined their pockets.

Even though access to education, especially for girls, is given a great deal of importance as a path to gender equality, the quality of education in a country that has been poor, had bad infrastructure and was wracked by decades of war is, understandably, still low and generally not enough to help women access mid to high level jobs in government, where the number of positions for women has been, in any case, limited (UNESCO 2021). Many women who reached prominent positions in government in the past two decades had worked in the UN or NGO sector with tremendous support16, were returning diaspora (educated abroad), or chose to redo their studies in private colleges or universities.17 As with male counterparts, they were generally hired through contacts (wassete). From the nineties onwards, as noted above, a number of jobs for women were made available by donor funding in UN agencies, NGOs and so on. These jobs could be accessed by women who spoke English or other foreign languages to an acceptable standard. It was often difficult to find qualified women to fit these roles.18 This puts into question narratives around the importance of public education for helping women ‘better their future’.

Even after education was made available to women, they had to be linked to powerful men through blood ties (e.g. daughters/sisters), marriage, sexual relations or other transactional arrangements for access to opportunities (Wimpelmann 2017). This situation only began to gradually shift from the nineties, when donors began funding the creation of Afghan non-government and, later, civil society organizations. With the availability of funding for women’s organizations, educated women were given the opportunity by their families, as well as funders, to head such organizations.19

The Rise of the Non-Government Sector

Since the war against the Soviets erupted in the early 1980s, agencies helping Afghans proliferated and brought with them project and contract culture. With the re-emergence of the Taliban as an armed-anti government force and growing conflict around the country, the rationale shifted from reconstruction to stabilization but the projects were the same. Contracts were normally dominated and owned by speakers of foreign languages, and later by computer literate people. In this war economy, success was based on

16 The untold story is that these women often became the ‘projects’ of international women who informally mentored and supported them, provided all sorts of help to them from emotional support and fighting men on their behalf, to doing their work, or speech writing and form filling for them. There was also special treatment from organizations and donors who saw women as victims needing to be saved.

17 Author’s observation is based on discussions with a large sample of Afghans over a number of years, on their background and their choices around educating their children.

18 Author’s observation having been involved with recruitment, training and mentoring of female staff for almost three decades in the Afghan context.

19 From late 1999 until 2003 the author was involved in mentoring and capacity building directors from a number of women’s NGOs which were set up in the Peshawar refugee camps.

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contacts in donor agencies and the ability to produce proposals, spend money and show ‘results’. The NGO/civil society sector created a small grouping in an all-female niche which began to stand in for a women’s movement. Although a united front was presented as the crisis deepened, this women-led endeavour was riven by rivalries and identity conflicts, as women competed for available resources and occupation of high-profile roles. This very much resembled male-dominated politics albeit on a much smaller scale.

Entry into this sector for women was slow and incremental. Before the rise of ‘gender’ projects, relief assistance was provided to ‘widows and vulnerable women’ and ‘poor women’ as handouts. In the nineties, NGOs started looking at the possibilities of hiring female staff, a difficult prospect as most NGOs and UN agencies were staffed by men with affiliations to Mujahideen groups with conservative outlooks.20 Programming with women continued on a hand-out model, as a tiny side event to important activities undertaken by men. Apart from health projects, income-generation activities started, once again, with the handout of materials. By the late nineties, gender and human rights were being discussed in small numbers of workshops. Numbers of females in organizations were growing in the Pakistan refugee context, as men grudgingly admitted a trickle of females in various low-level and/or part-time roles.

After the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001, with a donor funding bonanza for ‘gender’ and a hunt for women to promote as leaders and role models, there was an insistence on quotas, subsidised by international donors, for women in parliament, the civil service, security forces and so on (SIGAR 2021). In the immediate post-Bonn phase, having female staff and activities for women began to be a sought after ‘result’. Foreign languages were a must and specific skills were not necessary. The women were expected to learn on the job but mostly to express the opinion of ‘Afghan women’ – nobody asked which Afghan women’s opinions counted. Cohorts of young English-speaking, computer literate young women entered workplaces created by donor funding for government, projects, media, businesses, etc. There was a sense that they had to project a performative persona so they learned how to navigate the system and pitch an interchangeable mix of personal narratives, fluctuating between heroine triumphing against all odds and downtrodden victim.

Since funding was available and risk was reduced by foreign patronage, Afghan families and male-run patrimonial and criminal networks also started promoting and backing women to enter different arenas, including parliament and ministries (Larson 2011). Some women, following cultural norms and indigenous models, began to shift towards the creation of their own patrimonial networks of clients but this was still the exception rather than the norm.

Even within the feudal set up in villages, male heads had become used to project staff seeking ‘widows and vulnerable women’ and these were carefully selected to fit outsider criteria while not being vocal or skilled at upsetting the balance of power within the community that was being approached.21 Women of all sorts had become deployable assets or bait to capture international funding and largesse, as well as to enter national power games. The difference was that elite women had some level of control around how they mobilized their identities for gain while the poorest had their identities used without necessarily receiving any benefits.22

Operating in Workshop Space

It can be argued that a version of an Afghan women’s movement has largely existed and operated in spaces removed from the day-to-day life of the country, especially since that space was awash in conflict and weapons. Within the political economy of contract culture, the project (and in particular the training/workshop) space is communicated and sold as a transformative space, where social change is

20 Author’s personal experience working with NGOs, involved with hiring and supporting female staff from 1995 to 2001. In a British NGO in 1995, for example, the Afghan Hezb-i-Islami human resource director threatened to kill himself rather than hire a female receptionist.

21 Author’s observations based on interviews with district governors and village heads during fieldwork 1995- 2014

22 See footnote 13 on poverty porn.

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facilitated and individuals are ‘made aware’, ‘skilled up’ or ‘empowered’, within a timeframe of a day, a week or a year. These paid-for transformative spaces are only linked to the outside geography via the individuals who are brought into the workshop space. The process is described by project literature which declares with photos how an aspect of life or topic-specific ignorance is transformed by a course on literacy, hand-washing, dress-making, human rights education, strategy, media, assertiveness, etc. Later, such spaces were further expanded for meeting and ‘appreciating efforts’, and for ceremonies giving and receiving prizes for ‘achievements’. Follow-up rarely, if ever, occurred and the proliferation of these ‘miracle’ spaces eventually led to a blurring between real and imagined, with a gradual belief that Afghanistan was being transformed by women, for women.

Workshops can be interpreted as an expression of orientalism, where ‘backward’ people are othered with the ‘enlightened’ among them guided to a more appropriate position through facilitation in ideas based on hegemonic Eurocentric discourses.23 Additionally, such spaces have rules, often unspoken. Apart from respecting the opinions of others, those who enter have to respect human rights, state a belief in gender equality, or declare that a transformation has taken place to perpetuate the flow of funds.24 Within these donor-funded spaces, if women were in the majority or powerful international females presided, men with views contrary to the agenda were othered as ‘oppressive’ or ‘backward’ and would repent of how badly they had treated women or declare they had now ‘seen the light”. Women understood their rights, and more people were trained to expand these ideologies of emancipation following trainings. These spaces were carefully curated for specific results. The assumptions were that workshop participants had been converted to a new way of thinking, that they wanted to bring about change, and that such thinking could be disseminated without risk.

In reality, people turn up at workshops across the developing world in the hope of forming links to useful people, assistance, lunch, a small stipend25 or just time spent away from a brutal life. Employees turn up because they understand that they have to convey obedience to the dominant ideologies of their employers and donors. All participants know that they can go home and continue their normal lives. With Afghanistan being an oral, performative culture with well-worn narratives and set texts, Afghans took to performing in contracted workshops like ducks to water. For women, these spaces gave them temporary agency to challenge many aspects of their identity, but once outside, it was business as usual.

The scale of these events and curated spaces has grown as international women wield greater power and move into male-dominated spaces in global hierarchies. Women can now demand more visibility for their developing country projects and protégés. Congratulating and celebrating women, especially if they have been ‘saved’, in general is a lucrative business, an off-shoot of celebrity culture and the motivational, self-help industry, which requires objects to be displayed and inspiring stories to be sold. Additionally, the orientalist, and often Islamophobic, press panders to an audience which still hungers for the formulaic tales of maidens saved from the clutches of savage ‘others’ by white saviours. Touring and writing on social media about ‘important meetings’ where ‘important issues’ were discussed has become the sole raison d’être of many celebrity activists across the world. If their links to and credentials in their home context are dubious and if their fame and fortune translates into zero net gains for the people they claim to represent, it does not really matter, as long as ritual aspects of such performative events are observed and the video clips lead to more business for hosts and guests. The flurry of such activity by individuals of Afghan origin, who have become darlings of some circuits, can also be mistaken for a women’s movement.

23 Academic discourse around decolonization engages with these issues.

24 Authors observations during interviews for project evaluations and meetings with visiting delegations. Afghans understand dynamics of the project space very well. Phrases seen to have a positive impact are rapidly picked up and disseminated, to have the desired effect perpetuating the funding flow. One example of such a phrase was: “Thanks to education we were blind but we can now see” – a phrase used for almost a decade to the delight of western audiences.

25 See, for example, Søreide et al. (2016)

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Interactions with the Masculine

Much overlooked in addressing gender issues and shifting socio-political attitudes to women in Afghanistan is the issue of masculinity and related normative principles pertaining to equality, control, and power (Myrttinen 2018). In the Afghan context, beyond curated spaces operated by the international community, the concept of ‘honour’, and how it plays out in gendered interactions, is critical for transforming gender relations (Azarbaijani-Moghaddam et al. 2008). Men are still the owners of honour while women are the bearers and weak points where a man’s honour can be threatened. This means that, inevitably, in the face of any proposed change involving women, there comes a time in any intervention when some men invoke ‘farhang o ananat’26 which packages together all the many ways in which ‘honour’ is upheld or threatened.

Culture is presented as reified and immutable, underscoring traditional gender norms and expectations, although regional and class comparisons show that this is inaccurate. Interpretations of culture and religion are used to restrict and fence women into spaces beyond the control of foreigners and their funding. Even within those spaces, men would invoke ‘culture’ as a restrictive force for the uneducated masses ‘out there’. Restrictions are frequently imposed in the name of namus27 (King 2008) and gheirat28(Razavi et al. 2020). Such notions lead to attitudes which present “gender-based violence, although not right, [as] justifiable when women resist men’s decisions” (Myrttinen 2018).

The scale of violence against women in Afghanistan bears witness to the consequences of women challenging these aspects of masculinity outside carefully curated spaces created by the international community. Gender equality, women’s rights, all are seen as synonymous and as an attack on a way of life and a threat to men’s privileges within the existing social order. Beyond the spaces where change has occurred and men and women feel safe to express dissenting views, pursuit of discussions on such issues can lead to hostility and passive aggressive retaliation for introducing ‘foreign’ and ‘corrupting’ ideas to women who are seen as innocent, naive and susceptible. Additionally, “[w]hen it comes to leadership quality and level of education, a belief in men as superior to women within and outside the home is comprehensively apparent” (ibid.).

In armed conflict and other situations where hypermasculinity and toxic masculinity enter the arena, women’s public space shrinks and disappears, especially where it is perceived as being linked to an alien and potentially threatening agenda. Empowerment becomes a meaningless slogan in contexts where the exercise of power frequently involves displays of violence and brutality against a backdrop of insecurity. Project spaces with the presence of internationals almost operate like the holy sanctuaries of old where combatants vow not to shed blood; it is disingenuous and unhelpful to be in denial about this.

As mentioned, there has been sociocultural change in Afghan society, directly and indirectly affected by war, the rise of extremism, displacement, and exposure to the outside world, but this change has taken place organically over a number of decades. Afghan men and women had ownership of and negotiated this change at family and community levels; this was critical for men as well as women for long-lasting shifts in attitude, leading to sustainable societal change.

The task of achieving gender equality has been left to a small group of international and national women activists operating in curated spaces but it requires the active involvement of men who need to change their attitudes and behaviours, making it essential to engage Afghan and international men in ways that go beyond rhetoric in enclosed spaces. The artificial and performative space of the workshop or project has not provided men in different socioeconomic groups the necessary time and space to process the oppressive effects and costs of gender inequality on both sexes and to accept the responsibility and ethical obligation for renegotiating gender relations because of the unjust privilege they hold (Flood

26 Customs and culture.

27 According to Edwards (1996), “The concept of namus ... signifies those people (especially his wife, mother, sisters, and daughters), objects (e.g., his rifle), and properties (especially his home, lands and tribal homeland) that a man must defend in order to preserve his honour.”

28 Roughly translated as honour.

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2019). For the most part, Afghan women activists realized too late the importance of forming strategic alliances as a united front, with men, beyond the bargains made by individuals, to struggle for a women’s movement beyond safe and contained spaces.

Concluding Remarks

Afghan women have, for the most part, repeatedly been placed in, then removed from politically sanctioned spaces in the shadow of men, at the direction of men and on the margins of male-dominated space. They have been adored and abandoned by the international community. When considering subsidized military elites upholding their regimes and ideologies in Afghanistan, women’s groups have been an extension of this phenomenon and are therefore sustained directly and indirectly by rentier arrangements opening them to accusations of pushing foreign doctrines. Heavily donor-funded, there have been no women’s groupings which have raised funds themselves, a very important point to note, and therefore been freed from the direct influence of government and/or international donors.

In order to survive, women’s groups were always reflecting donor trends and agendas rather than the needs and interests of women at grass roots level. Since women are operating in borrowed space at the invitation of others, they self-censor or tailor their messaging to suit their sponsor.29 It is only since August 2021 that women have been showing any form of independent resistance based on the interests of the majority of women and that still in modest numbers. Even some of this resistance is, apparently, male-dominated, being used as part of information operations by opposition groups seeking support to fight the Taliban.

A critical question is the actual level of political will surrounding efforts ostensibly focussed on improving the status of women. In a country which has a long history of rentier arrangements, it should be of no surprise that gender and women’s rights related activities were also part of the rentier package, thus linking the situation of women to the fate of subsidized militaries representing proxy arrangements and effectively putting the fate of women up for sale. Those women who claim activism themselves have not wished to consolidate power as a movement by investing their own money in funding women’s rights platforms. Instead, like the militaries, they are part of a political economy, with each individual clamouring for funds to fight a “war”; in the case of women, this war was fought over terrain in an artificial curated space where they can perform roles determined by sponsors.

Similarly, male leaders eventually came to understand that a theatrical process of performative window dressing using women was required in order to placate their external funders but they also understood that if questions around women threatened to destabilize the country then women could very easily be silenced, side-lined, or jettisoned. The Taliban, like groups such as Hezb-i-Islami in their early years, are similarly performative in removing women from the public sphere and denying them a platform, once again for appreciative domestic and international audiences with a conservative agenda. Commitment was very much linked to the attitude of domestic and international vested interests. At the end, with the collapse of Ghani’s government in August 2021, the curated spaces also disappeared like genie castles from the Thousand and One Nights. The reality was a barren wasteland for those who had been trained for two decades as ‘activists’ in a virtual version of Afghan society. There was no option

for most but to fly away, following their mentors and donors.

Now more than ever there is an opportunity to address the situation of Afghan women, armed with knowledge that the interventions of the past twenty years and more bore mixed and unsustainable results. Change continues to occur in Afghan society and there are indigenous efforts to create spaces for gender equality which have proved more sustainable. The deeply fragmented groupings of women can slowly be brought together in a more cohesive platform. It is important to be wary of grooming Afghan women as the mascots of a new wave of orientalist and Islamophobic foreign policy. With the international community dismayed at seeing the impact of billions of dollars’ worth of titanic assistance efforts disappear with little trace, providing lifeboats to rescue and promote a small group of Afghan

29 Vocal women who openly addressed taboo subjects over the years were threatened with violence and some would get asylum abroad. Whether this was by accident or design has been a matter of intense social media speculation among Afghans and Afghanophiles.

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women abroad, as survivors of tragedy, has become like a beacon to signal that the stricken vessel of international hopes for a liberal society has not started its final descent to the depths. As important as this is to some, it may lead to actions which lead to the collapse of the Afghan economy, unleashing a tidal wave of backlash against even the most benign and neutral efforts to assist millions of women in one of the poorest, ravaged, post-conflict countries in the world. Afghan women should not be sacrificed in a futile last stand to defend the hubris of the international community’s failed liberal adventure in Afghanistan.

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