Leaping to conclusions

Well-meaning observers are making dangerous assumptions about Afghan women and their goals for the future.

By Tamim Ansary

Dec. 17, 2001 | Some of the language I hear in conversations about women's roles in post-Taliban Afghanistan makes me nervous. It seems that certain misconceptions may have crept into public perception of the issue.

For example, if I go by what I read and hear, women in pre-Taliban Afghanistan lived pretty much as women do in Italy or France. They enjoyed access to all the professions, served in the government, dated and married whom they pleased and wore cosmetics and miniskirts.

Not quite.

Some women did these things, but they constitued a fraction of the population -- 10 percent tops. These were the women who lived in the city of Kabul and belonged to the Westernized, educated, urban elite. In rural Afghanistan, in the villages, smaller towns and provincial cities such as Kandahar -- which is to say, most of Afghanistan -- a different way of life prevailed.

I'm 53, and when I was growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan was a world of villages and walled compounds with virtually no technology, no factories and no industries -- a society of tribal peasants who eked out their subsistence as farmers and herders.

In this world, life was divided, not exactly between men and women, but between a public realm and a private one. The public realm belonged, indeed, to men. Women rarely left the shelter of their compound walls without male escorts and then they wore chadris, that body-bag veil now known as the burqa.

The roles of men and women were firmly divided: Women were in charge of home, household, food, domestic animals, marriage, children and the fundamentals of early religious instruction. Men were in charge of farming, fighting, commerce and government.

This wasnt Afghanistan in medieval times. This was Afghanistan when Elvis was king. What's more, although Afghanistan represented an extreme, this concept of a divided world prevailed down through south Asia. It didn't just spring out of Islam; it came out of a deep soil of local traditions.

And here is what outsiders didn't realize: The private realm, at least in old Afghanistan, was a universe unto itself -- big, rich and complex. In that hidden universe, women had authentic power. You want proof? The first three female heads of state in the modern world emerged not in France, Italy or the United States, but in Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. Clearly, in that hidden universe, women were somehow growing up trained for leadership.

Then the changes began. The Cold War brought both superpowers glad-handing into Afghanistan with suitcases full of cash and ideas for development projects. Wherever the 20th century rubbed directly against traditional Afghanistan, ferment bubbled up. Kabul went through 2,000 years of social change in two decades.

But the provinces didn't -- largely, I think, because people there, women included, had a way of life that was working for them and fit their material circumstances. For this reason, a cultural rift opened up between Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan until, inevitably, Kabul began to function like an imperialist power within its own borders, attempting to impose cultural hegemony.

And the thorniest issue between Kabul and old Afghanistan had to do with sexuality and women's roles.

When the Communists took power, their program departed even more radically from traditional Afghan culture, and their methods were so coercive that the rift turned into a rip. The countryside took up arms. This sparked the Soviet invasion. Virtually all Afghans then opposed the Soviets as foreign invaders, but the bloodshed that erupted seeped into the deeper indigenous conflict between old Afghanistan, which was tribal, rural, conservative and religious, and new Afghanistan made up of the urban, Westernized, elite minority.

As the war developed, most of that educated urban elite escaped to Europe and America. Those who stayed to fight the Soviets were by and large the provincials. The refugees in Pakistan, those millions who lived in the squalid camps that spawned the Taliban, were mostly the women and children of the men who stayed in the country to fight the Soviets and die like ants.

When the Mujahedin finally toppled the last Communist ruler of Afghanistan and marched into Kabul, it wasnt just the triumph of the Afghan people against the foreign invaders but the conquest, finally, of Kabul (and its culture) by the countryside.

Now, thanks to American intervention, the educated, Westernized, urban elite will come back to power. This is good news. When the traditional conservatives got their hands on the levers they tore the country to shreds and ran it into the ground. But it's wishful thinking to suppose that Kabul equals Afghanistan. Most of Afghanistan was never Kabul, and most of Afghanistan is still out there.

Which brings us to the question of women.

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