Hard to be a woman in Afghanistan ~ DEFCON 3

It’s understandable see the Talibans trying to stab to death the Americans from behind in Afghanistan. What is not so cool is Hamid Karzai, president of the country thanks to the Marines, doing so. But that’s exactly what has happened.

Campaign in Afghanistan was sold as an all war on terror, for democracy and freedom. In the whole world people could see on their TVs images of women completely covered by burqas, living under the dictatorship of their husbands and the Talibans, with no rights, not even the most elementary ones. Liberation of Afghan women was made the motto of the antiterrorist operation in Central Asia.

Seven years later, the situation of women hasn’t improved a lot. And if the law approved last month comes finally into effect, then we will be going backwards. On it, among other measures, is approved the rape inside marriage and women aren’t allowed to go outside without the authorization from their husbands.

If it still hasn’t came into effect is because of the internacional fire it come under -Barak Obama said the law was “abherrant”-, and Karzai decided to put it on hold to be revised.

It is not just a whim from the clergy -although it was so at the beginning. It is a law enacted through a legislative process, approved by the two houses of the Parliament after three months of debate and has the sign of Karzai on it. Too bad for him, who many accuse of trying to get the radical sectors onboard with him for the next elections now that lacks the support from the US. Mohammad Asif Mohseni, one of the heads of the clergy in Afghanistan and one the drafters of the law, is using precisely Karzai’s signature to defend the rape law’s validity:

“ The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights”.

Afghanistan is still today, after the Taliban fled from the Government, an Islamic country legislated under the Sharia. Although the polemic law only affects to the Shiite population (around the 20% of Afghans), Mohseni defends that it can also applied to the Sunnis in many articles.

Like what? Maybe the fact that women cannot deny having sex to their husbands every four nights? The cleric points out that women can refuse if she is “menstruating, sick, preparing for a pilgrimage, recovering from giving birth or during Ramadan”. Or maybe he was talking about the prohibition to go on the streets without the authorization of the husband? “The law is permissive”, said Mr. Mohseni, “allows a woman to go out for a medical emergency or other urgent reason without asking”.

Cool. Now I feel much better.

This highlights that make of Afghanistan a democratic country won’t be easy. And it won’t get solved just with more troops. We cannot talk about democracy to people without electricity of clean water. Democracy is a consequence of a high level of life for the middle class, not something that can be imposed from the outside. Definitely not in a country anchored (at least in its way of thinking) in the Middle Ages. What worked in Iraq won’t work in Afghanistan for ages.

Iraq, prior to Bush, was a laic country. The US changed that for a fundamentalist Shiite conglomerate of parties’ government. The situation of women in Iraq came back three decades after the invasion. But Iraqi women can consider themselves lucky. At least they know what they want to achieve because they were living it just six years ago. They have a fresh memory of freedom.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, doesn’t know what personal freedoms are since the 80s. That the Americans say that back three decades ago, under a communist regime, the Afghans were freer than now, shows the low standards in Afghanistan. But truth is that back in the 80s they were a lot of women fighting with the Russians against the muyahidins, those Islamic fundamentalists that United States funded for many years happily and later turn their backs on Uncle Sam.

Time will show us if Iraq becomes another Afghanistan (et vice versa). For now, priorities have changed. It’s not about winning an impossible winnable war, but to not lose it. Meanwhile, similarities between one and the other are more and more every day. And meanwhile, tomorrow it will be still a long hard day for women in Iraq and Afghanistan.