An Uneasy Peace (Page 3)

Samar's battle to be accepted has been compounded by other factors: Because she is Hazara, a minority ethnic group reviled by many Afghans, her support within the country is largely limited to other Hazaras.

There is a growing school of thought in Kabul among the expat aid community and the UN that Samar was appointed to fail. The minister's biggest problem, she herself says, is that Afghans don't think she is a real Muslim, that she is too Westernized, too secular, too radical for the country's orthodox leaders and opinion-makers. It hasn't helped that she once espoused Maoist politics. Samar's first husband, who shared her party philosophy, was arrested in 1979 and never seen again, and she was forced to flee to Pakistan. Samar was also one of the founders, in 1977, of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a group that has garnered considerably more publicity in the United States than it has credibility in its own country. RAWA's leader and two colleagues were assassinated in the 1980s, and it continues to be marginalized within the culture.

Ensler recognizes that Samar walks a thin line in her position. "I don't envy her. She's trying to appease a Western agenda, and a feminist approach doesn't help her in Afghanistan, since women's rights there need to be incrementally introduced."

A major challenge will be undoing five years of Taliban indoctrination on gender roles. "Small boys as young as 6 or 7 are treating women like dogs," says Rachel Wareham, a women's rights lobbyist in Kabul for Medica Mondiale, a German humanitarian agency, and a newly appointed planning, strategy and policy adviser to Samar. "There's incredible arrogance and lack of respect in boys so young. They refuse to let their mothers speak, and speak for them."

The return-to-school program, which is sending 1.5 million children (nearly half of them girls) back to school this month, will still leave more than two out of three without access to education, the vast majority female. Currently, only 4 percent of women and girls are literate. There's an estimated shortage of 100,000 teachers, and thousands of schools were destroyed during the fighting. Even before the Taliban ban on girls' education, enrollment was rarely higher than 5 percent. Also, since schools were frequently used as military bases, many have been heavily landmined. "And how do you educate children when they are hungry? People are in dire need of food," says Ensler.

Security issues have hampered food aid distribution. UN aid convoys are regularly attacked and robbed. Compounding the problem, the World Food Program has only received 5 percent of the nearly $300 million it needs for emergency food aid this year. And because the bulk of the food aid sent to Afghanistan is confined to wheat flour, the daily diet for too many families is limited to flat nan bread and sugarless green tea, if they can afford the latter, or nonpotable water if they can't. Death from hunger has become tragically commonplace. I spoke to many women who related how they had lost as many as five, six, seven children to starvation and exposure in the past two years. According to UN statistics, 12 million Afghans--70 percent of the population--are severely malnourished, and 1 in 2 children is stunted. Children's health is so fragile that a quarter don't survive to the age of 5, and 35,000 a year succumb to measles.

Since only 12 percent of women have access to even basic healthcare, it is perhaps not surprising that every thirty minutes an Afghan woman dies from pregnancy-related causes, according to UNICEF. The British medical journal Lancet also reports that the maternal death rate among Afghan refugees in Pakistani camps is among the highest ever recorded. Two decades of war, poverty and the recent drought have given Afghanistan one of the worst health profiles in the world, says Dr. Sidiq.

In this desperate situation, the US pledge of $296 million at the donors' conference in Tokyo this past January for the first year's reconstruction demonstrates a lukewarm commitment at best (especially compared with the billion dollars a month the United States says it has spent on the war effort). And the Tokyo pledge is even smaller than it seems: Only $50 million of the $296 million is new funding; the remainder had been previously committed for existing programs. Worse, with the delays in money transfer to Afghanistan, any funding not transmitted expires at the end of the year, and cannot be carried over.

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