Fighting patriarchy, and fearing worse from the Taliban

When Gaisu Yari was 6, she was engaged to the 6-year-old son of a pro-Taliban commander in eastern Afghanistan.

After she turned 18, Yari said, she escaped the forced engagement and fled to the United States with the help of US soldiers. She returned to Afghanistan five years ago with a master’s degree from Columbia University and now works as a government civil service commissioner.

But Yari, 32, fears that her prominent position — and all her achievements — could be erased if the Taliban return to power now that they have signed a deal that started a US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

For employed women, whose positions barely existed under Taliban rule, the possible return of the extremists is especially alarming. Thousands of Afghan women have moved into jobs and public roles in the nearly 19 years since the US invasion toppled the Taliban and ended strictures that had confined women to their homes and brutally punished them for violations.

The peace deal envisions intra-Afghan negotiations that would return the Taliban to political power in a postwar government. The Taliban’s deputy leader has said that “the rights of women granted by Islam” would be respected. But that was the same principle cited during the Taliban’s harsh rule.

Just four of the 21 members of the Afghan government’s negotiating team are women. One female negotiator, Fawzia Koofi, survived an assassination attempt by unknown gunmen in Kabul on Aug. 14.

Yari and three other women spoke to The New York Times about their concerns. All said that even as they worry about a Taliban return, they are already struggling to navigate a patriarchal society deeply hostile to equal rights for women.

Gaisu Yari, rights official

When Yari saw the first television report of the peace agreement, her thoughts flashed to her father.

The same pro-Taliban commander who had forced her father to agree to Yari’s engagement with his son then demanded Yari’s older sister as a bride, she said. When her father refused, she said, he was kidnapped in 2000 and has not been heard from since.

Her father’s fate is a reminder of how far she has come, Yari said, and how common it still is for Afghan women to be treated as property.

“The environment here in Afghanistan is still not friendly to women, to say the least,” she said.

Even in Kabul, the capital, women who do not fully cover their hair or who appear in public with a man who is not a family member are sometimes cursed or attacked by men. Child marriages are common in rural areas. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan girls do not attend school.

Yari has a prominent job: She reviews human rights and civil rights cases brought by civil service employees in the US-backed government in Kabul. It is a position that would have been inconceivable for a woman under Taliban rule, but it is no insurance against harassment or harsh judgments, Yari said.

“When I was trying to escape a child marriage, I didn’t feel as much stress as I do now,” she said. “I still feel pressure at many levels. Do I wear makeup or not? Do I wear my scarf? Do I wear tight or loose clothes?”

After she returned to Afghanistan in 2015 with a master’s degree, Yari said, she feared retribution from the commander and her spurned fiancé. She said she stayed off social media and refused media interviews until she learned that the two men had been killed by a rival faction.

Now she speaks openly of her journey from arranged child marriage to professional woman.

“I’m a survivor,” she said. “I came a long way to get where I am right now. I refuse to go back.”

Hasiba Ebrahimi, actress

In Afghanistan, one colloquial synonym for actress is prostitute.

“The best way to call someone a bad or immoral woman is to call them an actress,” said Hasiba Ebrahimi, who has defied social customs and her own family by working as an actress on TV dramas in Kabul.

Ebrahimi, 24, said she has been insulted on the street and vilified on social media because of her career. Afghans have posted bold red “X’s” over her face on her Facebook page. She has been referred to, dismissively, as “the girl in the film.”

“That’s the same as saying, you know, the prostitute,” she said.

Performing as an actress was unimaginable under the Taliban, who did not allow women to leave their homes unescorted. But nearly two decades after the extremists were removed from power, actresses like Ebrahimi still struggle to shed images as dissolute women.

Acting can still be a life-threatening pursuit. On Aug 25, Saba Sahar, 46, a prominent Afghan actress and women’s right campaigner who also works as a police gender affairs official, was wounded in an assassination attempt in Kabul that also injured her driver and bodyguard.

Ebrahimi said it took years for her family to accept her profession. Her mother invented cover stories when neighbours asked about her daughter’s frequent absences from home. A cousin threatened to report her to the Taliban if she continued acting.

Now, with a Taliban return possible, Ebrahimi feared the worst, and said she would consider fleeing the country.

“I don’t want to have to fight the Taliban,” she said. “I already have to fight my family and society. I can’t fight any more battles.”

Raihana Azad, politician

When Raihana Azad ran for a seat in the Afghan parliament, she received no support from members of her own family. In fact, they publicly opposed her.

Azad, a mother of two who had entered an arranged marriage at age 13, had committed a grave sin in the eyes of her family: She had divorced her husband of 10 years. It is rare in Afghanistan for a woman to file for divorce, and a badge of shame for the woman’s family.

Azad, 37, earned her seat in parliament by winning the most votes in her district in eastern Afghanistan, rather than being appointed under a quota system that reserves some seats for women.

Some male members of parliament challenged her victory. A legislator from western Afghanistan called her a whore and a spy for foreigners. He said she had disrespected Islam by divorcing her husband.

For Azad, the accusations were a reminder that life for women could become even more precarious if the Taliban returned to government. She said the US, in negotiating the peace deal, had abandoned gains women have made since 2001.

“The Americans don’t care about rights for Afghan women,” she said. “This deal happened behind closed doors, and Afghan women were not part of it.”

As a member of parliament, Azad said, she is trying to set an example as a modern woman willing to challenge Afghan culture and tradition.

“I stand against this culture not just for my own sake, but for the next generation of young girls,” she said. “I want my granddaughters to feel like they are human beings.”

Nargiss Hurakhsh, journalist

After Nargiss Hurakhsh, a television journalist, reported on the details of the US-Taliban peace deal, she concluded that the US had abandoned Afghanistan.

“They are no longer interested in this country,” she said. “The Americans want to leave Afghanistan at any cost. And neither the Americans nor the Taliban care about Afghan women anymore.”

For the country’s small band of professional women, she said, the peace agreement marked the beginning of a period in which they are struggling to maintain and extend their hard-won rights even as they face a Taliban return that would likely end them.

“We are a small group within society,” Hurakhsh said. “We live a different life — we face unique challenges every day.”

She said she treasures her ability to report independently, and to interview men in defiance of Afghan customs that discourage male contact with unmarried women. She has achieved something approaching equality with her male colleagues, she said. She wonders how long it would last if the Taliban returned to power.

Hurakhsh, 23, is one of seven children. She said her mother, who entered an arranged marriage at age 14, was not permitted to attend school during the Taliban era. But Hurakhsh studied political science at a university and secured her TV reporting job at a time when American and other Western aid donors pressured employers to hire women.

The most painful part of her job, she said, was covering Taliban car bombings and suicide attacks that target civilians. She has visited families of victims and mourned with them. It has been a life-altering experience.

“After every attack, I feel so old,” she said. “I am only 23 but sometimes I feel that I have lived for more than 50 years.”

c.2020 The New York Times Company