But even if the women of Afghanistan don't starve to death in the upcoming months, there's a good chance they may kill themselves. According to Amowitz's report, 70 percent of women living under the Taliban had symptoms of depression, and 18 percent of all women in Taliban areas had attempted suicide, along with 9 percent in non-Taliban areas. ("That number is probably higher," Amowitz says, "because I can only talk to the people who survived, not those who didn't make it.")
But, she adds, the Taliban isn't entirely at fault here: Only 30 percent of these suicidal women blamed Taliban policies for their depression -- the truth is that the country's problems run far deeper than the edicts of its fundamentalist regime, Amowitz says.
"This is where you have to take the whole context of Afghanistan," she explains. "Twenty years of war, devastating poverty, a new drought. You've lost your livestock and you can't work, you've lost family members in the civil war. And then finally these people come in to power and they take away all your rights as a human being. That's probably enough to push you over the edge, and say, 'I've had enough, I want to end it all.'"
Amowitz was surprised to discover that many women outside Kabul didn't mind being wearing the burqa. Some 90 percent of the women who don't live under Taliban control still choose to wear the burqa, reports Amowitz, an indication that what urban, educated women in Kabul may find oppressive, others simply find traditional. Indeed, 82 percent of all of the women surveyed didn't consider it very important whether they were persecuted because they didn't wear the appropriate clothing. This could be because they weren't being persecuted, however -- only two of the women Amowitz spoke with had ever been punished for what they were wearing, despite highly publicized beatings over dress code violations in Kabul, documented by RAWA.
"That's not necessarily representative of what is going on everywhere in Afghanistan, and doesn't represent what goes on every day," says Amowitz. "If you talk to aid organizations that have been in the area for years and years, they will tell you that [physical abuse by the Taliban] is not as frequent as it would appear on TV." In fact, she contends that most such behavior happened in 1998 and 1999, and then only in the large cities like Kabul.
And although Taliban policies are extraordinarily oppressive, the Taliban turns a blind eye to its own edicts in some parts of the country. "The Taliban is not one group, it is a group of a lot of people with a lot of different ideas. There are moderate, liberal, severe and fanatical Taliban," says Amowitz. "In some areas the Taliban [avert] their eyes to women having education, and there are classes that occur; a lot of nongovernmental organizations run schools, and healthcare is not a problem. It depends on where you are in the country."
Still, more than 90 percent of both women and men interviewed by Amowitz in Afghanistan said they believe in women's rights -- specifically equal access to education, work, freedom of expression and representation in the government. Only half of those surveyed believe in strict dress codes for women. Furthermore, 80 percent of those surveyed felt that the teachings of Islam aren't inherently restrictive of women's rights. This, says Amowitz, was the most encouraging news yet, proving that the Taliban's attitude towards women isn't representative of the male population at large, nor of the version of Islam that the Taliban invokes. And a vast majority responded that these issues -- healthcare, education, freedom of expression, government representation and the right to work -- belonged in any future peace talks.
At the moment, though, human rights activists and doctors have few solutions for the humanitarian crisis taking place in Afghanistan. Amowitz contends that food should be brought in by truck wherever possible, and borders should be opened so that starving refugees have some kind of safe haven ("If aid organizations can't get in," she says, "the civilians should be able to get out.")
In the long term, she adds, if and when the Taliban is removed from power, Afghanistan's problem is even more daunting: Not only do women need to have their human rights returned to them by a benevolent government, but the entire country needs food, clean water, sanitation, hospitals, police stations, buildings and infrastructure. Afghanistan, says Amowitz, will need to be rebuilt from scratch.
For her own part, Amowitz climbed back on a plane on Monday and plans to quietly slip over the border into the northern part of Afghanistan, to catalogue the toll that the war is taking. "It's not clear what I will do there -- I need to do a lot of interviews and figure out what we can add to the situation, human rights-wise," she explains. In the meantime, she says, "I hope that our study shows that the Afghans have been victims for 23 years, and that victimizing them even further is unconscionable."
About the writer
Janelle Brown is a senior writer for Salon Technology.
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