The Taliban did not spring directly from hell. They sprang from Afghan culture strained through hell. They had roots and antecedents in Afghan culture, just as Charles Manson had roots and antecedents in the Summer of Love. Because of these thematic echoes, criticisms of the Taliban do not always make careful distinctions between the depravities of the Taliban and the values of traditional Afghan culture. Attacks on the one merge unnoticed into attacks upon the other. Enthusiastic prescriptions for restoring peace and justice to Afghanistan sometimes boil down to plans for replacing Afghan-style traditional Islamic culture with Western-style (secular) democracy.
Personally, I doubt that's going to happen. I think rural Afghans will be looking to reinstate the traditions and the way of life they lost. In the short term anyhow, Afghanistan will emerge from this as a socially conservative Islamic society. And if it does, this should not be confused with restoring the Taliban. If left alone and allowed to heal, Afghanistan will evolve, and who knows to what. But social change imposed from outside by fiat cannot produce a healthy society.
I worry about coercive language that has found its way unnoticed into conversations about the women's issue in Afghanistan. I think it was Laura Bush who said "putting" women into the Afghan government was "nonnegotiable." But instead of "putting women into," why don't we think in terms of supporting Afghan efforts to build a government of their own that includes women?
A powerful organization of European women recently laid down a quota: 40 percent of government posts in Afghanistan have to go to women. Refresh my memory: What's the legal quota for women in the U.S. Congress?
Virtually all the talk about empowering women in Afghanistan focuses on the agenda of the urban elite -- getting women into the national government, liberating women from a dress code, ensuring their access to all professions, and affording them a university education. Excellent goals. I hope they're met.
But what about the rest of Afghanistan? Is access to professional jobs and freedom from a dress code next on the agendas of rural women? Perhaps their most immediate hopes are for a cow to milk, shelter from strangers and a functional extended family that includes men. Maybe not, I haven't asked them; but to my knowledge, neither has anyone else.
Wherever Afghans choose their traditional way of life, I think the international community should work with rather than against the grain of the culture. Empowering women through their traditional roles may lead to the deepest changes. To me, right now, a historic opportunity exists to support the real empowerment of Afghan women without engaging in a cultural tug of war with traditional Afghanistan. This country's most critical needs coincide with the roles traditionally assigned to women, and shouldering these tasks will put women center stage, authentically shaping the future of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is starving. Food shipments will come in. Someone will have to distribute it. It makes sense to put rural women in charge of that. Families are decimated, households shattered, someone will have to care for the old, ill and feeble. If international aid agencies work directly through women to attack these problems, rural women could end up running social services, staffing clinics, distributing medicines.
Afghans are in rags; someone will have to make and distribute warm clothing. It makes sense to provide small loans to rural women to buy looms so they can clothe their own families. And one day, perhaps, they will be able to produce a surplus to sell. And eventually perhaps they will develop a garment industry, but that's up to them. And isn't that better than having Levi Strauss build a factor in Kunduz and impose on them the rule that half their hires have to be women?
And then there's a task that looms above all others. Someone will have to take in the orphans -- half a million of them, and many of them disabled. Someone will have to tend to those broken bodies, mend their hearts and make them feel important and loved, because if those kids don't get a stake in peace and a chance to grow up healthy, we're looking at another generation of emotionally damaged troublemakers 15 years down the line -- more Taliban.
So when the aid money starts flowing, how about earmarking a serious chunk of it for orphanages? And let those orphanages be staffed and administered by Afghan war widows. The orphans need shelter, the widows need honorable employment and the world, for its own sake, needs to rescue the next generation of Afghanistan from horror.
Putting a few women into the national government is fine, but if it stops there it could end up as tokenism. Worse, it could line up the international community on one side of the enduring tension in Afghanistan between city and country. If Afghanistan is to heal, the well-wishers need to be on both sides of that line.
About the writer
Tamim Ansary is a writer in San Francisco.
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