A Discussion With Anne Brodsky

Author of the book With All Our Strength, which chronicles the experiences of Afghan women, Brodsky recently  said: "Nearly five years after the Bush administration's self-proclaimed 'liberation' of Afghanistan, one would expect a world of improvement in a country touted as the model for Iraq. Unfortunately, last month, during my fifth trip to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, one sees instead a country in which luxury hotels, armor-plated Landrovers of international organizations, and Pakistan-inspired private palaces built to launder drug money substitute for the necessary peace, security, rule of law, and economic development that would benefit the populace. Where girls and women continue to be forced and sold into marriage, and where a recent UNIFEM report finds that violence against women is widespread and continues with impunity.

"The window of opportunity for freedom and democracy, opened nearly five years ago, has instead been filled with continued violence, graft, and the largest opium crop in Afghanistan's history, equal to 50 percent of the country's legal GDP. This drug trade feeds, among others, the coffers of the warlords who grabbed 60 percent of the seats in parliament and the ever-strengthening Taliban resurgence. The result is a country where the people, who have never stopped struggling to build a better life after the Taliban, are losing hope as they find themselves more and more mired in poverty, suicide bombings, rising fear, school burnings that keep children, particularly girls, from education, fundamentalist backlash, and a growing resentment and lack of faith in Western intervention and in the very values that the West claimed to espouse during the routing of the Taliban." Brodsky is director of gender and women's studies at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County.

Shahram Vahdany -  When was the last time you were in Afghanistan?

Anne Brodsky- In July and August of this year.

SV - How many times have you been to Afghanistan?

AB - I've been in Afghanistan five times and I've been to Pakistan and working with Afghan refugees an additional, three times.

SV - Were you there during the Taliban regime?

AB - I was in Pakistan during that time and the people I was working with really stressed that it was too dangerous, so the first time I was there was during the summer of 2002.

SV - But you went to Pakistan during the Taliban but you were in contact with Afghans?

AB - Yes.

SV - What do you see or hear in the difference between how the Taliban operated and what you see now. What is the difference in Afghanistan in general?

AB - Well in general it's true that alot of the restrictions that the Taliban had in place particularly for women but also for men, are no longer legally sanctioned, so women are no longer legally kept from being in school or work or leaving the house without a close male relative. But in practice, in many parts of the country not much has actually changed after the Taliban in terms of those restrictions on women because of security issues, because of the power that remains in the hands of people who think like the Taliban, or perhaps people who still are Taliban. So, that's one thing that's superficially changed but at the same time really not changed. The other thing that's really gone the reverse direction than we would, all around the world, have hope for is that security is much worse. And this was particularly true this trip. Other trips I'd always heard a little bit of this concern.  Two years ago when I was there last time people were beginning to say you know this is more dangerous than it was under Taliban, but this last trip everyone was saying “as awful as the Taliban were, there was security and there's just no security from the, you know, the suicide bombings in Kabul and elsewhere and all the other continuing violence.  And suicide bombing is not part of Afghan culture, has never been a part of Afghanistan . In addition, there’s military violence, school burnings, attacks on people who speak out; everyone's afraid.

SV - What is the role of the Northern Alliance in this situation.

AB - Well, that is indeed a good question. There's alot of people who have reasons to want the current government to not succeed in the way that it's configured. The warlords that are in the government, some of whom are northern alliance, some of whom are from other Jihadi factions have reasons to gum up the process. It's not just seeing that their own conservative laws etc. are passed, it's that thye can also keep themselves from being punished for past crimes and just kind of make sure that things don't move in a progressive manner that someone like President Karzai might like to see at some level. When I was there they were talking about the riots in Kabul in May, the story that everyone was telling was that, yes, a military convoy had lost control, people blame the US military for driving much too fast, for being reckless, for not caring about civilians and so, when that truck crashed and killed civilians and crashed into civilians cars in a pretty populated area, people were angry, they came out, they started protesting against that vehicle, and then someone opened fire and it was unclear who opened fire but that caused the riot to escalate at that point, but, from there when it spread throughout the city that was a planned event and most people blame the Northern Alliance for that and say it was just agitators who were waiting for an opportunity to cause problems. Throughout the city, the reports were that people had maps and slogans and things that were already to go, that there were text messages sent out telling people where to go, and that police officers took off their uniforms and joined in as well, which of course, doesn't give much hope for law and order and protection.

SV - Doesn't the Northern Alliance operate as a paramilitary for the government?   

AB - I didn't hear proof of that, but what people talk about is that they still do have a great deal of power. In every official and non-official building in Kabul where there is a picture of Karzai, there is a picture of Massoud. People talk about how they need to dress so that they can sort have pass for being Northern Alliance and won't get hassled so much on the street if they're a driver. There's alot of power still among the Panshiris in terms of who has land, who has jobs, who has opportunity. It's less clear what they're doing militarily, from the people I was talking to at least.

SV - How is the control of the Government over the tribes and warlords and the whole country? Do they have full control or is the country still run by the tribe leaders.

AB - Karzai has always been referred to as sort of the Mayor of Kabul because the control of the central government never spread out into the provinces very strongly. While the central government appoints the governors, they've been doing so in a way to just kind of bribe people to not cause trouble and try to keep them quiet to sort of buy them off for their support.  Probably the country would probably be doing better if it were the tribal leaders who were in charge. Because the old tribal leaders are the folks who really do have the best interests of their people in mind. They are from families, from the region who are respected and for the most part are much more interested in peace and security. The problem is that the folks who  have control in the provinces are the warlords whose power comes from having guns, having money and having been able to buy this power because, basically the west gave them the money, training and guns to fight the Soviets and most recently to fight the Taliban. It's the warlords, the drug lords at this point, and there's lots of overlap between who's who. But, Afghanistan’s poppy crop was 59% higher than last year. This year they're estimating they're able to meet 130% of world wide demand for Heroin. It's just astronomical and not the way to keep peace and security in a country.  And that money doesn't go to the farmers, the farmers are estimated to get about 10% of that, the money's going to warlords, the Taliban, the drug dealers, and the criminals.

SV - I remember when the Taliban were in power they banned the poppy crops, they were made illegal. Is it legal now, or is it just tolerated?

AB - It's not legal but it's tolerated, it’s out of control. The problem is that there are many people in the ministries and in Karzai's government who are benefiting from it. And so because there are people at high levels who would have reasons to protect it, nothing happens to stop it. Plus, right after they defeated the Taliban, when there were peacekeepers put in place they weren't put in place outside of Kabul, there weren't enough of them and so there was just this window of opportunity with basically no one in control. The one thing the Taliban did, you have to say, is they kept control. With them gone there was no one keeping control and anyone could do anything and that's where the beginning of the rise of the poppy crops came from. The other thing that was happening was that there had been a 4-5 year drought and poppies are quite drought resistance so it became sort of quick thing that you could put in and it would grow in very degraded soil without of lot of water and so, farmers said to themselves, I know this isn't right, this isn't the crop I want to grow, but what do I do, my family will starve. Now what we're starting to hear alot more is that farmers are saying, they’re forcing me to do it, I don't have a choice. Someone is coming with a gun and telling me what to do with my land.

SV - How is the level of poverty now in Afghanistan?

AB - Enormous. It's just enormous. The last estimate I read is that unemployment is 40%. From what I saw even in Kabul or in the provinces it is hard to believe that it's that low. The economic progress has just not come to the people. All of that aid money, all of that reconstruction money seems to have disappeared into projects that benefit the wrong people. Like, for an example, early on, I was out in a village outside of Kabul and we were probably 45 minutes out. Out in the middle of nowhere, I don't know the area, but look around, we are in the middle of farm country, little villages and they are putting in a black top road where, they weren’t putting blacktop road in Kabul at the time, and I asked, why here? And they said, oh well, there's a base there so they need it, NATO wants it out here. And those kind of decisions you see everywhere. In Kabul for instance, in the new city center, they're putting in fancy glass buildings, elevators and lots of people see pictures of it, you know, fancy stores and hotels and restaurants, but that doesn't do anything for the average person. There's been almost no public housing built, the people in houses or apartments are sort of doing their own kinds of repairs, there's no money for doing that and also there just hasn't been investment in jobs. There's a bread factory that's barely running, they used to have cement factories; they're importing all their cement from Iran and Pakistan. So, the way you could have seen employment, you could have seen products, you could have seen all these things benefiting the people, working hand in hand with reconstruction. It just hasn't happened. I was out in Herat and they complained about the fact that everything is coming from Iran, the milk, eggs, and the cloth. They're growing the grapes, the grapes are going over to Iran where they're being cleaned and processed and then they’re coming back as raisins at a higher price. And they're not getting the wages.

SV - What's the situation for children? Are they able to go to school or do they have to work?

AB - You certainly see alot of child labor. You see them on the streets of Kabul, in Herat. I was working with this organization called 'Voice of Women Organization’ and they were putting in a grant to try to get some projects for Herat street children and the project wasn't totally to take them out of work because they needed to be able to work to help their family to survive but it was to provide them with education half time and try to provide some field training so that they could get better jobs, safer jobs. It's true that the schools reopened, which is a wonderful advancement over the Taliban, but if you actually look at the numbers there may be 5 million children back to school but the numbers of children in Afghanistan is more than 15 million. Two of the other things about kids being back to school; girls only make up about a quarter of that total, there're alot of girls still missing from schools. And the majority of kids who are back in the school come from the five major provinces the ones that are much more urban, and so, so much of the rest of the country just hasn't seen the impact of schools reopening.

SV - Is it mandatory for children to go to school?

AB - No. I can't exactly remember how the rule is written, but even if it were mandatory; nothing in Afghanistan follows the rule of law. There are lots of things said in the constitution that just aren't happening. Women are still being sold in marriage, there's still not choice, there's still not free and fair elections etc.

The other thing I wanted to say and it's really important is that a number of schools that had reopened have now closed. UNICEF just issued a report in July showing that there were 99 reported school-burnings, missile attacks, threats, closures in the first half of 2006 and this, because of the way the Afghan school years works, probably would only have been March to July, so not even a full six months. And that's six time more than the same time period in 2005, and there's also been teachers threatened and killed, there was a terrible story about a principle who was beheaded in front of his family for running a school that had girls in it, so, alot of the people who even originally might have been happy to see their children go back to school are keeping them out now because it's not safe or they aren't able to send them because the school's been destroyed.

SV - I know that there's still forced marriage in Afghanistan. Is there open prostitution now as a result of poverty?

AB - Yes, there is as well. Unfortunately, where you have troops, where you have peacekeepers, you have prostitution. There's alot of prostitutes, women who have been imported into Afghanistan into prostitution. There have been a number of Chinese prostitution rings that have been broken up over the years. But there are also women who are finding again that that's the only way to survive and of course, in an Islamic country it's a thousand times worse for a woman to have to make that choice as a last resort or be forced into it.

SV - Could you elaborate on imported prostitution, because usually it happens in the countries that are able to pay for prostitution, Afghanistan is very poor.

AB - Right. Well these are prostitutes who are trafficked for international forces, there are lots of foreigners there, and there are also some Afghans with money through the drug trade and warlords and that sort of thing. So unfortunately, there's this market in sex as well. And there's concerns about the rise of STD's and that sort of thing because of course it’s not something that’s talked about easily at all. And there's concerns about HIV because of the poppy crop and opium, which in the past wasn't produced in Afghanistan but now it's been processed into opium in Afghanistan and so there's, in some reports, a rise in injection drug use as well. All of these are problems Afghanistan didn't have in the past.

SV - I just read a report that the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which used to operate during the Taliban, whose function was to oversee people's public conduct, has been revived.

AB - Yes. And this is a deal that Karzai struck. In late summer, he met with some Taliban and some other conservatives and agreed to reinstitute this department and it's caused an enormous uproar and when I was there, it was just before it was being reinstituted and you know no one knows where their authority comes from and what they will do. There were some people who were speaking in the most hopeful tones, you know, if the right person ran it then we could say, this is what virtue is in Afghanistan and if they didn't hassle women and they didn't respond to petty, ridiculous things well then it would be a way of saying, see, society's fine. But of course the concern is that they are go to merely re-enact the Taliban era, “your veil isn't right and your beard's not the right length and who is that you're talking to and show me ID to prove that that really is your relative”. It would be the same thing as under the Taliban.

SV - Yes, I remember, some of them used to have sticks and hit woman in the streets.

AB - And that, you know, people don't understand that that was such a degradation of Afghan culture. Women had the potential of being quite oppressed in the home, there was domestic violence in the home, but one line that wasn't crossed is that a woman would be safe from a stranger for the most part, so part of what the Taliban did was they destroyed men's sense of their control in the family because they were beating someone else's sister or mother or wife on the street and that sort of violence in a public way against women by a strange man, who has no right to criticize an unrelated woman was a real change. As someone who doesn't believe that, women or anyone should be beaten by anyone it's hard for me to say that was better. But you really see this change in a society where levels of respect and dignity and expectations of goodwill from strangers - it's not there anymore. And when I'm there, each time I see people being more suspicious of each other, I hear them more and more unsure of who to trust and certainly I saw alot more negativity toward me as a foreigner than I have in the past.

SV - What is the function of NATO forces in Afghanistan? What are they doing there?

AB - In part NATO forces are supposed to be peacekeeping but they're really quite engaged in fighting what's being called Taliban insurgents in the south and I just read an article today saying they're noting an up-tick in violence in the West as well. And when I was out in Herat, in the West along the Iranian border, I heard from people that the districts outside of the city had become quite violent and dangerous In many parts, NATO is really engaged in some fierce fighting these days it seems and there was that request by the NATO commander for 2000 more troops that yesterday it looked like he wasn't going to get it at all and then today Poland has said they're going to send an thousand, but you know every country around the world is ensconced in other things and Iraq So unfortunately again, what Afghanistan needs to actually keep the peace is just not there and the thing that is the most disturbing to me is that there was a chance for something positive here and it just keeps slipping away. I'm one of the few people, I think, who was never in favor of bombing Afghanistan. I didn't think that was the way to go about it. It wasn't that I didn't think Al Qaida needed to be punished for what had happened, it wasn't that I didn't think the Taliban who were cooperating with Al Qaida were also dangerous and I was certainly concerned about Taliban and what they were doing in Afghanistan well before Sept. 11th happened. But what I'd always heard from Afghans was that what was needed was disarmament, peacekeeping and if the West had just stopped the flow of arms and money to the Taliban they weren't producing anything there, there was no functioning sort of country government economy, whatever. And that would have made a difference, so, to me, going in and killing Afghan civilians and having a war there was not my first choice but, that being said, when the Taliban did leave, where their regime was defeated there was this window of opportunity that could have been filled with what the West really said it wanted which means with security, liberation and democracy. But instead, that opportunity was really squandered and what we have five years later is its being filled with drugs and with continued violence and with Taliban insurgents and warlords in the parliament. So, I'm not sure NATO's doing what they originally said and the US military isstill running around looking for Osama, and not really looking for the security of the people of Afghanistan.

SV - I read that the people are actually nostalgic about the Taliban's time in Afghanistan.

AB - Some are, unfortunately. I have to say that I still talk to alot of people who say that the US and the West are different from the Soviets. Not everyone is saying this is an invasion, but so many more people are saying that “this is not what we were promised.” And “this is beginning to look like a failure.” And this is the word among educated people. But there's a big other group that's just saying, “you know, look around. I don't have a job, I can't feed my family, it's dangerous, you know, I don't care whether my daughter goes to school or not and if the Taliban came back it might be better.” There's so many people who don't have jobs or who are working as a driver or a guard or whatever for some foreign NGO, they see the discrepancies in their pay, they see the discrepancies in some ways in how they get treated, they see how the money goes to keeping the foreigners in secure places, with armored cars and you hear mumblings that maybe the Taliban was better. The other thing, I was on the radio last week with Qayum Karzai who is the brother of Hamid Karzai and who himself is a member of Parliament, and I thought he expressed this very well and I can't quote his exact words but basically he said, in 1996 the people chose the Taliban over the Jihadi warlords because the Jihadis had been so atrocious during the civil war period and if left with that choice, between the Taliban and the warlords they'll have to choose the Taliban. Not because they love the Taliban or what they stand for, but because the warlords are so much worse. For many people the only hope of any stability in the country is that NATO stays there. And people said to me that that they are terrified that if Taliban and other warlords thought that they could take Kabul for more than two days, they would be able to storm it and take it. It's just the presence of foreign troops that keeps them a little bit under control.

SV - How realistic is it to imagine an independent and secure Afghanistan in the near future?

AB - I used to think it was realistic and now I don't know. You know I can't say I have decades of international experience to say, oh, this is just like wherever and here’s the scenario that will play out, but what I see when I'm there is so many people who want an independent and secure homelandbut just feel like their arms are tied behind their back and I spend my time speaking to lots of women activists, lots of fairly educated people so these are pretty rare people in this country, but also, speaking to the ordinary people that they help - I was in a shelter in Herat where women were living because they had to run away from home to save their lives, to escape forced marriage or had been so brutalized that someone had finally intervened and gotten them to shelter, which is lucky, because alot of women get arrested and put in jail still for leaving a violent situation. All of those people, what they want is plain and simple a better, safer, healthier life with opportunities for themselves and their families.  There's no sort of average Joe on the streets who you can talk to who's saying, “oh yeah, I want to see these crooks and criminals and people with human rights violations in control of the country.” I don't believe in military solutions, but there really is an armed and dangerous element in that country right now, be it Taliban, there's lots of talk of foreign fighters being there, warlords and drug lords and that sort of thing and they could still be disarmed and kept from causing this kind of trouble. It's not like Iraq, because it's not an ideological battle of the people of a country against an invading force. It's a battle over resources and it's a battle over land and in some ways, it's a battle for security and economics. So if we'd actually done what we promised, which was to secure the country, to have free elections, to help them rebuild after thirty years of war so that there was an infrastructure, an economic infrastructure, there were jobs, that would be enough and the country would be able to run itself. There are educated people there, there's really good ideas of how to do it, it's not, despite everything we hear, it's not as splintered as the populace in Iraq seems to be. There's not the sectarian violence at the level of the populace, it’s at the warlord level as far as I can tell.

SV - What should the responsibility of NATO in Afghanistan be right now? They've been saying that by building Afghan security forces they would be able to stabilize the country. Shouldn't they be focusing more on Afghanistan’s economy, infrastructure, education and healthcare?

AB - Definitely. If alot of these guys had jobs and could feed themselves and their families, they would have no interest in the poppy crop, in the insurgency and any of those things. Alot of it is a response to what they see as the next failed state and the fact that these promises have not been kept. So, I think, even one of the NATO generals was saying was that the big failure here is the failure of hearts and minds. The reason the Taliban are able to get people riled up and get support is that they say, “well, you know, look around, is this better than when we were here? No.” People need to be able to eat, they need to be able to feel safe on the street, they need to be able to think about a future for their families that includes education and all those sorts of things. I’m reading some reports that the Afghan national army is growing and has been able to provide security. The police seem to be a different story. There are some contracts out there that are, not all of them, but there's some contracts that are giving pretty shoddy training for the police. The police are not getting paid on time, they're not getting paid enough, and so there are those who took off their uniforms to go join the riots because that meets their needs more than being in uniform and trying to stop it. Not all of them did, but there were enough reports of that happening. The last estimate I saw was that if you compare military expenditure versus development expenditure the differential is 900%. And by some estimates, the same article said that ten times as much money is spent on security as development by the actually development agencies. There are reports that people are starving in Khandahar that humanitarian aid is not reaching the people in need. 
 
SH- Thank you Dr. Brodsky for your time.

It should be added that the reports out of Afghanistan over the past week are just another indication of how serious the problems are.  There were four suicide bombing, including one today, bringing the total for the year to 92 versus 11 such attacks in all of the year 2005.  There was the cold blooded killing of a well respected, middle aged, Afghan woman government official as she left for work in Kandahar.  When Karzai and  Musharraf had dinner at the White House last week they had already spent the week blaming each other for Afghanistan’s problems and couldn’t even muster a public handshake, and through all of this Bush continues to promote the tired rhetoric that we are making progress.   The people of Afghanistan deserve better and even if the US only cares about its own self-interest, it’s hard to understand how the failure that have been allowed to occur in Afghanistan help the US in the least.  If we are to truly believe that the peace, liberty and democracy the US means to spread is exemplified by life in Afghanistan it’s either a disgraceful statement about what US values really mean, or its got to be called a dismal failure and we all need to step up to the plate to make good on the promises of a better life that were prominsed Afghanistan and that every people in the world deserves. 

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