Abstract

Letter From Afghanistan

The article looks at social conditions and rights for women in Afghanistan as of October 2004. The United States President George W. Bush Administration claims to have established democracy in Afghanistan--but what can "democracy" possibly mean when more than half the population is property? Afghan girls and women are still bought, sold and traded as commodities. So far, the Bush administration has met that problem by ignoring it and spinning the official line that Afghan women were "liberated" when the Taliban dispersed, as if ideas of women and social control so deeply embedded in religion and culture could be thrown off like old burqas--which, incidentally, most women still wear. All of this is made painfully clear by the story of the Herati shelter girls. These twenty-six women first came to the attention of human rights workers in January of 2003 when a man reported to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) that refugee girls and women were imprisoned in a guesthouse belonging to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, held in "protective custody" by Ismail Khan, the notoriously dictatorial governor of Herat, in western Afghanistan. The UNHCR investigator found evidence of beatings by the guards, fights among the women, self-mutilations, repeated suicide attempts and profound psychological disturbance. International aid workers in Kabul have been warned not to raise the issue of women's rights before the Afghan presidential election, now scheduled for October, lest it spook a "conservative" reaction, topple the fragile Karzai government and reflect badly on the nation-building abilities of Bush.