Ann Jones: Can Life Get Worse for Afghan Women?

Women are made for homes or graves.
--Afghan saying

In her new piece for The Nation, Ann Jones has ripped the heart out of the argument that we should continue our mission in Afghanistan to prevent the plight of women. As someone who has worked with women there, Jones comes to this conclusion out of frustration at the Karzai administration, the extremist judiciary and the misogynistic rural warlords who have done so much to retard the advancement of women that there are not many steps backwards for women’s rights to take.

Jones kicks off her depressing account of the Afghan woman by treating us to the country’s constitution, which promises , "The citizens of Afghanistan--whether man or woman--have equal rights and duties before the law.” While some in the west might see the borrowed language of equality and freedom, the Afghan court interprets the phrase to suggest that men have a right to work while women have a right to obey their husbands. Not like rural women are really bringing class action lawsuits to challenge that assumption in the first place.

Next, Jones explains how President Karzai signed the Shiite Personal Status Law through run of the mill horsetrading with different conservative blocs. He didn’t think twice about selling out women’s rights (his own wife, a doctor, is rarely allowed to leave home). This law, also known as the Marital Rape Law includes the following provisions:
1. Husbands are authorized to deny food to a wife who does not provide sexual services once every four days (assuming the man has four wives, the maximum allowed under the law).
2. Only under rare conditions can women inherit, divorce or have guardianship of their children.
3. Women cannot marry without permission, and may be forced into marriage, beginning at the age of 16. (It apparently took a serious lobbying effort from women in Parliament to up the age from nine)
4. Women cannot leave the home except for “legitimate purposes”, as defined by their husbands or fathers.
5. Raping a woman outside of marriage is considered a property crime, requiring monetary restitution to the aggrieved man, not the victim.

In case anyone was wondering, the Afghan Supreme Court has declared the law constitutional. After its passage, even a female member of Parliament (one not under the control of her local warlord) forlornly conceded, "without a written law, men can do whatever they want." The marital rape law brought to mind the great philosophical challenge to democracy: what to do when, as in Nigeria, a law can be passed calling for a woman to be stoned to death for adultery, even if she was a rape victim?

Anyone who has traveled abroad, or even in parts of the United States, knows that sexism is a matter of gradation, and that women face appalling conditions all over the world. But the stuff coming out of Afghanistan is hard to match in its monstrosity. Here is the reality: right now female activists are murdered when they go public. We aren’t just talking about rabble-rousers though- popular local TV performer Shaima Rezayee, who was shot and killed after complaining of her gender driven ouster from television, and an actress, Parwin Mushtakhel fled Afghanistan after her husband was murdered for letting her out of the house.

According to UNIFEM, 87% of women are beaten regularly at home, and rape is nearly as prevalent, although women are unlikely to be forthcoming about rape, since it can land them in jail for adultery. UNAMA researchers concluded after one case, “For women, "human rights are values, standards, and entitlements that exist only in theory and at times, not even on paper.” Because it is U.S trained policemen who are hunting battered and raped women to throw them in jail, one can understand why the U.S plan to accelerate police training and arm more local men doesn’t exactly have women fired up and ready to go.

Interestingly, Jones makes the case that in pre-Soviet Afghanistan, half of the nation’s doctors and civil servants, along with three-quarters of the teachers were women. Jones suggests that the endless cycle of violence has permanently elevated ruthless, violent men to power in Afghanistan, and destroyed the civil institutions where women once played a prominent role.

Unfortunately, Jones doesn’t have an easy answer- she opposes staying the course and escalation, and admits that life wouldn’t get better under the Taliban. As Mark Danner explained to Bill Moyers the other night, though, sometimes the journalist is just the journalist. There’s nothing worse than a writer squeezing in a half-baked solution to close out a well thought-out fact piece (my paraphrasing). Ann Jones is one journalist, and while her perspective deserves more credence than most, there are probably some foreigners and locals that would claim she understates the heightened malice the Taliban would bring. But her article is too comprehensive to recreate in one diary without heinous copywrite infringement, so I’ll simply encourage people to check out the whole article.