Is the Afghan Government Almost as Bad as the Taliban for Women's Rights?

It isn't, but my co-blogger Sarah over at Women's Rights seems to think so. On my most recent post about women in Afghanistan, Sarah commented:

I am sure there have been improvements under the current government, but from what I've read (most recently, this article) it seems that the situation for Afghan women has been fairly egregious for the past several decades under foreign occupiers, and it doesn't seem to be getting considerably better now.

Of course, it's also really easy to point out all that is wrong in a country where women's rights have been so violently denied for so long, and it's a lot harder to spot progress when it's bound to be slow. But I'm not sure that with the U.S backing an obviously corrupt government and the CIA funding warlord drug dealers, the situation for women is going to get much better. I suppose I'm also deeply suspicious of any U.S-funded and controlled occupation - where has a government chosen and manipulated by the U.S ever done anything in the interests of the local population in the last century?

Sarah, here's my response:

1) Women have fared badly in Afghanistan for a long time, but their wellbeing hasn't been unchanging from one regime to another, and it is disingenuous to argue that the current Afghan government is no better than the Taliban for Afghan women.

Under the Taliban, women couldn't attend school, work, or participate in public life at all. Afghan women still face tremendous obstacles accessing education and employment and taking part in public life, but the barriers are not as many as they were eight years ago.

In Afghanistan today, the areas where few or no girls attend school, where women do not work, and where women cannot vote are the areas in which the Taliban hold sway, not where the hand of the central government is strongest.

2) You write that progress is "hard to spot." No, it's not. The most obvious example? Millions of girls in school.

Under the Taliban, the only education available to girls was through clandestine schools that could serve only a tiny fraction of the school-age female population, and operated at great risk to both students and teachers.

Today, women run for office, and some some even win without the assistance of gender quotas. There are outspoken female members of both houses of the parliament --Sabrina Saqib, Shinkai Karokhail, and Shukria Barakzai to name just three.  The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (itself a product of the post-Taliban order) is led by a woman, Dr. Sima Samar, and the province of Bamiyan has a female governor, the first in Afghanistan's history. Women work as journalists in print, radio, and television. Woman-led civil society organizations that operated underground during the Taliban years now operate in the open, and have been able to scale-up their work with the help of international donors.

These are real things that really matter. Downplaying them, almost to the point of denial, denigrates the work of Afghanistan's women reformers, both within the state and in civil society.

3) You correctly point to corruption in the Afghan government being a huge problem. In fact, the only country more corrupt than Afghanistan, according to Transparency International, is Somalia. So, corruption is a major issue. You won't find me arguing otherwise. But where does merely stating that, over and over and over, get us?

There are Afghans fighting corruption, now more vigorously and with more support from their own government and from the international community than at any other point in the last eight years. I believe we should give them a chance to try --and maybe even succeed?-- before we write off their efforts as doomed.

After all, what is the alternative? That's not a rhetorical question; I'm asking you to seriously consider what you would suggest instead.

4) "I'm also deeply suspicious of any U.S-funded and controlled occupation," you write, "where has a government chosen and manipulated by the U.S ever done anything in the interests of the local population in the last century?"

The Afghan government is not a monolith. Like every other government, it is a mixture of institutions, people, and motivations. There are Afghan civil servants who genuinely want to serve their country and do their jobs with integrity, others who are out only to enrich themselves and act accordingly, and still others who just muddle through.  The institutions of the state reflect this mixture.

It's almost useless to talk of the "Afghan government."  What and who is the government? The brave human rights commissioner is as much the government as the local police chief she is investigating for abuses.

From now on, when we criticize or praise, let's specify people and institutions.

As to your point about the government being "chosen and manipulated by the US" --that's an exaggeration, and a gross oversimplification.

Afghans chose their parliament and they chose their president in 2004 (this was less true in 2009, but not because of US manipulation). Afghans risked their lives to cast ballots in deeply flawed elections. Why? Because they believed, and still believe, that doing so can make their lives better.

The United States leans on the Afghan government, but not to the degree critics believe. Moreover, US influence --call it manipulation, I'm fine with that-- is not always bad for Afghans. Nor is it categorically opposed by civil society. In fact, there is a strong argument to be made, one that many Afghan civic leaders do make, that foreign governments involved in Afghanistan should use their influence more assertively to advance a progressive agenda --especially when it comes to women's human rights.

When the now notorious Shia Personal Status Law passed, one frustrated activist told representatives of the international community, “We understand if the embassies have to work behind the scenes. But they should be working, you know? And it is UNAMA’s job to be interfering, to speak up on human rights issues. That is why you are here.”

5) There has been regression in the conditions of Afghan women's lives over the past few years. Public space for women is shrinking, and women in public life are being targeted for violence in ever-increasing numbers. Politicians, journalists, entertainers and police officers have been murdered, and forced into hiding or exile.  Alarmingly, support for women's representation in government bodies has started falling, and so has support for women's participation in the workforce. But not only women in public life are suffering.

The worst-off women in Afghanistan by far are the rural poor, widows, displaced women, and victims of gender-based violence, for whom there is still only meager social and economic support, if any at all. There are not enough shelters for battered and trafficked women, and women escaping forced marriages. Gender equality laws are not enforced, and regressive legislation, some of its flagrantly unconstitutional, has not been allowed to go into force without much pushback from the president or international community. In the courts, women are seldom given fair hearings, and divorced women almost always lose custody of their children, even when their husbands are abusive. Hundreds of girls schools have been burned by the resurgent Taliban in just the last year, and female students and teachers have been viciously attacked, reversing education progress in many parts of the country.

The problems the women of Afghanistan face are horrendous, and emotionally draining to think about. The work that lies ahead is daunting. It will take decades and entail heartbreaking setbacks along the way. Lives will be lost in the struggle.

And this is the best case scenario. What does the worst case scenario look like? It looks a lot like Afghanistan in 1988, or 1993, or 2000.

Foreign governments, including our own, will continue to influence the policies of the Afghan government. It therefore falls on us to see that influence used to amplify the demands of Afghanistan's reformers and to advance the wellbeing of Afghan women and girls, not erode it.

[Photo: An Afghan schoolgirl looks out from the tent that serves as her classroom at Pul-e-Rangeena government primary school for girls in the north-western city of Herat. Shehzad Noorani (UNICEF).]