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New York, N.Y.
ISOBEL COLEMAN: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming today. I think we’re going to have a terrific session. I’m very pleased to introduce Masuda Sultan, who is here with us— she’s just finishing up a year at Harvard, where she got a master’s in public administration. Masuda is one of the directors of Women for Afghan Women, and has written the report that we’re going to hear about today.
Before Masuda starts, I’m going to introduce Carla Koppell, who’s going to say a few words about Women Waging Peace, which sponsored the report. And after Masuda speaks, we’re going to hear a few words of comment from Dr. Barney Rubin on my right, who has been an adviser to [U.N. Special Representative] Lakhdar Brahimi in Afghanistan, and he’s an expert on Afghanistan. So we’re pleased to have all of this expertise here on Afghanistan today.
And with no further adieu, I’m going to turn it over to Carla. Thank you.
CARLA KOPPELL: Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us. And let me start— I have two things to start with. First is to thank Isobel and [Council Research Associate] Mehlaqa [Samdani] and the Council on Foreign Relations for setting up this wonderful opportunity for us to talk about our most recent report. The second thing I need to do is apologize on behalf of Ambassador Swanee Hunt, who very much— who’s the chair of the initiative, and who very much hoped to be here to join us this afternoon, but fell ill.
I direct policy for Women Waging Peace, which is an initiative of the Hunt Alternative Fund that was created in 1999 to advocate and make the case for women’s inclusion. And while our research, of which the Afghanistan report is one product, was created three years ago, essentially to make that case— why women make a difference, how they add value to peace processes around the world— we also advocate extensively for women’s inclusion in specific conflict areas, whether it’s Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Colombia, and other countries around the world.
This Afghanistan report is one of the series we’ve produced. It speaks to women’s inclusion around the world and the role that women play as change agents in conflict settings. And the series actually works across themes. So there are other reports that deal with conflict-prevention, as well as those that deal with governing and political participation, negotiation and mediation, transitional justice and reconciliation, as well as disarmament, demobilization, reintegration, their impact on reform. And our goal in producing these reports is to really document how women add value around the world, and to help make the case for women’s inclusion in all of these peace-building efforts.
I will close by saying that we are honored to have had Masuda as the author of our Afghanistan report. And Masuda and I worked closely in putting the report together, and so it was my great pleasure to work with her in completing it. And there are copies of the report outside, as well as copies of Ambassador Hunt’s book on the voices of Bosnian women [This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace], for you to take home as gifts from Swanee and from Women Waging Peace. So thank you very much, Isobel, and I look forward to hearing what Masuda has to say.
MASUDA SULTAN: I also want to thank Isobel and the Council on Foreign Relations for holding the event, and to Women Waging Peace for being interested in documenting Afghan women’s contributions to peace; something that we know has been going on for a very long time, and it’s nice to be able to put it down in a report. I’m just going to talk a little bit about the findings of the report, and I know that Barney Rubin will also discuss— sort of give some context as well.
In this report, we really wanted to look at women’s political participation, to focus on their— as you know, in Afghanistan, Afghan women’s participation in the reconstruction became the— a focal point for international media and for the international community. It was the first time that Afghan women— that women’s involvement in reconstruction took the international stage at this level. And of course, the progress thus far has been remarkable, given Afghanistan’s recent history with the Taliban, and previously to that, was then mujahadeen and the wars that had been going on for over 23 years.
Looking at just the numbers in terms of women’s participation in the peace process, if you look at Bonn, the Bonn negotiations that happened in November of 2001 [to reestablish a permanent Afghani government], there were about six out of 60 delegates that were women. That’s about 10 percent, although only two of them were formal delegates to the Bonn process. A Ministry of Women’s Affairs came out of the Bonn process, and [Afghani] President [Hamid] Karzai appointed both a woman to the minister of women’s affairs position as well as minister of health. So there were two women in the new Cabinet.
Moving forward to the emergency loya jirga [grand council], which essentially convened and gave President Karzai more formal authority from the people, there was about 10 percent— excuse me, 12 percent participation of women in the emergency loya jirga. And moving finally on to the constitutional loya jirga— both that and, previous to that, the constitutional-drafting commission— there was a commission, just to explain, that drafted the constitution, a 35-member body, and 20 percent of that was women. Moving forward to the constitutional loya jirga, where people were elected from throughout the country, about 20 percent of the delegates were also women.
So if you look at the numbers, it sort of goes 10 percent, 12 percent, 20 [percent], 20 [percent]. And then, based on the new constitution in Afghanistan, women will be 25 percent of the lower house of parliament, which is definitely an increase, and they’ll be 17 percent of the upper house of parliament. To explain how that works, the upper house of parliament, President Karzai will be selecting one third of the seats, and half of those seats will be women. So certainly, there has been a great deal of progress in terms of looking at the numbers. Some women would say— some Afghan women would say that the progress has been largely symbolic, and that they’re looking for a lot more gains to occur. They don’t feel like they have enough power politically, although in numbers, they may be growing.
If you also look at what’s happening throughout the country in terms of education, there are— 35 percent of girls are enrolled in schools, which is great. But if you look at the rural areas and particularly the south, that number decreases dramatically.
About 40 percent of registrants for the presidential election— presidential elections happened in October, October 9 of 2004, and the whole world was shocked to see that 40 percent of the registrants— over 40 percent— were women. And they turned out in large numbers, which really was an incredible accomplishment for women in Afghanistan. They showed the entire world that they were interested and ready to participate in the first democratic election in Afghanistan for president.
Unfortunately, while the registrations were taking place, however, there were lots of incidents where women were attacked. There were bus bombings, and women were reporting to us that they were extremely scared to go out and vote. And that’s why the numbers actually surprised us more than they would have, ordinarily.
We always knew that Afghan women were eager to participate in the democratic process, and especially in elections. Some of them wore their best clothes that day. But we also heard a lot of them saying— one of the women that I’m in close touch with in Kandahar— she’s an Afghan-American woman named Rangina Hamidi— she said that she was not going to vote. And that saddened us greatly because, as an Afghan-American, she could set incredible example. But even she knew that she would be a target in Afghanistan if she went out to vote. And so it just illustrated to us what incredible courage it took for women to just come out, both to register and to vote.
The U.N. had set up about 4,000 polling stations. Male and female were separated. And so there was some real efforts by the United Nations to make sure that they encouraged women to come out and vote, that cultural resistance would not restrict them; or the idea was to resist— to reduce the cultural resistance as much as possible.
If you looked at some of the polling that was done by Asia Foundation, they found that, in large part— I have the statistics here— large part, men expected women to ask them who to vote for, they expected it to be able to— one man said, you know, “I don’t have one vote, I have 20 votes,” because he had the votes of all the women and men in his extended family. And so that was sort of the attitude.
Of course, part of what needed to be done and what was done to some extent was to educate women about what it meant, that their votes would be private, that this was their decision and this was their voice in the process. That’s an interesting analysis. The numbers look very good, very encouraging.
What really we’re excited about and look forward to is the parliamentary elections, because this is when local leaders— there’s— that the battle is fought at the local level. And that’s really a more interesting field to look at, because a lot of women have been complaining about local warlords and commanders strong-arming everything from, you know, the amount of money that comes in to a town or in terms of reconstruction or their military presence. And I’m sure all of you know stories— about stories in Afghanistan where local militia men essentially take control of the area and the population has very little say in what goes on. It’s usually a one-man government with his own private militia, although there are efforts being made to train a national army and a police force.
In terms of the constitution, I just want to mention that it’s a remarkable constitution. It essentially gives women and men equal rights. What this constitution showed, though, is the power of women when they are there in numbers— and they weren’t a huge number; they were 20 percent of the constitutional loya jirga. But what they did, I would say, was a turning point for women in Afghanistan, because they combined all of their energy and their resources, and what they did was they negotiated with a lot of other factions.
For example, they partnered with minorities who were looking to make Uzbek language, for example, and other minority languages have some sort of official status. And so they negotiated with them and said— basically said, “You give us, you know, support for women, and we’ll give you support for your minority language status.”
Now, Afghan women aren’t immune from ethnic rivalry, and I’m not going to exaggerate and say that, you know, women are special and they don’t see ethnicity, or the fact that over 23 years of war, that the woman sitting across from them has a son that killed their son. We saw that in Kandahar, where we organized a group of 45 women to come together around the Afghan constitution and to look at other constitutions of other countries, especially Muslim countries, to see what kinds of provisions were made for women. But when we gathered these women— 45 of them, like I said, under one roof to live and work in the same compound for five days, you can imagine, from a variety of different ethnicities, all over the country, north, south, east, west, different ages, some were grassroots women and some were— considered themselves more expert— there were definitely a lot of tensions in that compound. Some women said that men from their ethnicity did not rape, while others challenged that. Other women found out that their sons had been taken to areas where women of— where mothers of another ethnicity had their children fighting.
And so there’s this kind of overlap all over Afghan society, where people realize that they’ve been at opposite ends of a battle, and they are coming together now. And that the power of women, I would say, is that they’re— at least in my experience— they’ve been more likely to set aside those rivalries and that history, at least a little more quickly then the men have. And so, with the Afghan constitution and the constitutional loya jirga, that’s essentially what they did. And they gathered together and were able to pass language that called for equality between Afghan men and women.
Now, we can get more into the discussion about what that really means, given that there are other provisions in the Afghan constitution, like Article 3, that say that no law or provision can be contrary to the belief of Islam, and that where there’s no other law sharia [official Islamic law] will apply. And so there— it gets very tricky in terms of implementation, but at least you have a constitution that recognizes— you have something, and women have told us that. You have something that they can take, either to a minister’s office or to the local court in Herat, where— you know, where girls are essentially burning themselves alive because of family problems and no way out; something you can hold on to and show that women deserve equal rights; women deserve respect; women deserve to be— you know, not to be beaten, not to be— and so, it— it’s something that they need to hold onto. And the fact that it’s there is a huge accomplishment.
How it’s going to be implemented is a whole other issue, and one that I wish I could be more hopeful about in the short term, but one that really requires extensive judicial reform. And in fact, [inaudible] believes 70 [percent] to 80 percent of the law in Afghanistan is implemented informally, where essentially, you have a local judge that hasn’t been trained by any sort of official means; or he might have, but in most cases, has been trained by his village or in his court on Islamic law and on the civil code.
And so you have these informal applications of law which— it really— what it comes down to is, for a woman who is seeking just application of the civil code and of the constitution, it depends on whether she has the resources— whether she has the money, the connections, knows the right people— to be able to get fair treatment. And so that’s really a concern, and judicial reform is something that we’re pushing for, and hoping that Barney Rubin could maybe talk a little bit more about. So I’m going to wrap up. I have a lot to say, but I know we’re trying to keep this short and [inaudible]. Thank you.
COLEMAN: Thank you, Masuda. Barney, you want to make some comments?
BARNEY RUBIN: Sure. Well, how does this work? Oh, it’s on already, OK.
COLEMAN: Yeah.
RUBIN: Well, the comments I would like to make— I’m sorry; I want to put a little bit of a damper on Masuda’s positive spin on events because, you know, if Afghan women are going to be 25 percent of the lower house of parliament, that means that they will have about twice the representation of American women in the U.S. Congress and about half the representation of Swedish women in the parliament.
But you would be very mistaken if you thought that’s because the status of Afghan women was somewhere between that of U.S. women and Swedish women. And the numbers that— because basically, I would say you wouldn’t— it’s not far off the truth to say that today, Afghan women have no political power. They have had some leverage due to support from international actors at various points, and I’ll go over some of the numbers that Masuda mentioned and explain how those numbers came about. They have been used— their numbers have been used for political purposes, political and ethnic purposes, as in the presidential elections. But they— and at a few key moments, they because of positions they have been essentially given by international actors, they have managed to leverage something, which is part of what happened at the constitutional loya jirga, though I think the story of what happened there is not quite so positive as Masuda said. I was there as part of the U.N. team.
Now first, the type of society that Afghanistan is. Afghanistan is a family-based society. If you see women coming out and voting in large numbers, that does not mean that all of those women made individual decisions as individual citizens to come out in large numbers. It means that families decided that they wanted those women to vote. It is not only women who look to their male heads of households to decide how to vote; everyone in Afghanistan looks to the male head of household to decide how to vote, because it is a family- and collective identity-based society.
Women who get education, get jobs, and so on, do so with— through a family decision-making process— that is, the family decides that— and it is a male-dominated family. That doesn’t mean it is a male personalistic dictatorship. All families in Afghanistan are not run like Uzbekistan. But it— you know, women participate in those decision-making processes. But it is— and Afghan women have repeated this to me, you know, to emphasize— a family decision-making process in which, at least symbolically, men have the last word.
And any— an incident I think that exemplifies the danger of this is a killing recently of a woman television presenter who was the host of an MTV-like show on a new private television station, Tolo TV. Now, this television station was founded and run by three Afghan-Australian brothers who are a lawyer, an accountant, and a business consultant, who came back to Afghanistan after basically growing up in Australia and established a kind of western-style TV and radio station with this very modern young woman hosting the show. Now, under pressure from religious authorities and the government, they stopped the program. Several months after the program was stopped, she was murdered. It appears that she was murdered by her brothers. In other words, this was a political honor-killing because what she did she didn’t do with the permission of her family.
Now, that has very little to do with Islam; that as the clergy called for the program to be stopped, they did not call for her to be killed by her brothers. But I think what it kind of exemplifies here is one of the most modern women in the society that that was— that because she did this without the permission of her family, she was murdered— possibly; we don’t know the whole story. But that— if that were true, that wouldn’t contradict what we know about the society.
Now about the numbers. The Bonn talks were set up by the United Nations. I’m not sure who the six women there— one of them was put there because the special envoy— the wife of the special envoy of the United States insisted the one political group should be— should have an observer there. Another— one of the women was counted twice because she was actually put on two delegations. There was only one full delegate there. At any case— and they played— the women who were there did not play any role in the major negotiations that went on, because decision-making’s done by men.
Hamid Karzai did not appoint those two women to the Cabinet because Hamid Karzai wasn’t at Bonn. The Cabinet was put together by the U.N., based on submissions by the people there. Similarly, the reason that the emergency loya jirga and the constitutional loya jirga had those large numbers of people is because, basically, the U.N. controlled the decision about the structure of the loya jirgas.
The 20 percent of women who were elected to the constitutional loya jirga were not elected from general constituencies or from the general electorate. But the people who were elected by the provincial electorates, you know, to the loya jirga, it was an indirect system, meaning they were all men. The women were elected by women [inaudible], because they were 20 percent seats who were reserved for women, and the only voters for those were women NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. So the U.N., actually, and Afghan-American women working for the U.N., organized women NGOs to elect those people. Now, if the process had been an Afghan-led and directed process, you would not have had 20 percent women in the constitutional loya jirga, because women do not have that kind of political power or recognition in Afghanistan today.
Now, because the international community got those 20 percent women there, once they were there, they were able to negotiate. And I mean, I know the story of the negotiations over the language. I never heard that they really affected that, because it wasn’t voted on. So their votes didn’t count. It was negotiated among a set of all male elites.
Now, what they did get put in was the very important provision in Article 26, which states that all citizens of Afghanistan, men and women, have equal rights before the law. Now that is, of course, potentially contradictory with a number of— with, in particular, Article 3, as Masuda said, which says that no provisions in Afghanistan— no law can be passed that contradicts the provisions and beliefs of the sacred religion of Islam.
Now, what that means is, of course, open to interpretation. It doesn’t say only the Hanafi school of [Sunni] jurisprudence; therefore, it’s— conceivably, the courts could decide to use any kind of Islamic jurisprudence, including some more liberal provisions somewhere. But, in fact, the constitution itself does not have any provision for reconciling that.
Similarly— and you know, I know some back-story about how these things were crafted— but it also says in Article 7 that the Afghan government will respect all the international agreements and covenants to which it is a party, which includes the major human rights covenants. The reason that is in there without any qualifications as regard to Islam is solely because of extremely heavy pressure from the international community, because that was not the way it was drafted and it was not the way it would have gone through the constitutional commission or the loya jirga, without that very heavy pressure. The main concern was not actually about women; the main concern was freedom of religion, including freedom to change your religion which— and apostasy is not— there’s a general consensus among Muslims that apostasy by Muslims is not— is not permitted, and indeed it can be a capital crime.
Now what this means is that— and you know, the overall situation of women in Afghanistan has not changed very much. You know, girls are still sold to pay off debts, there are forced marriages, the literacy rate, despite— I mean, the— Afghanistan has, according to UNDP [U.N. Development Program], the worst education system in the world. It has the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. It has the lowest female literacy rates in the world. All these things mean that women’s empowerment and improvement of the status of women is not something that can be brought about in a few years through an American military intervention and a few international programs for promoting women’s welfare. It means that, probably, women in Afghanistan have lower status and less power than women in any other country in the world, and in a society which has one of the weakest governments in the world and certainly one of the weakest legal systems. It means that we have— we should not— if we take— you know, get ahead, too much ahead of what the reality can bear— and in fact, if outsiders push too quickly on the wrong things— there can be a backlash which is as damaging as the honor killing of the woman who was on television.
And I— therefore, I would say there will be women in Afghan parliament. That is now a fait accompli. I don’t know what they’ll be able to— I’m sure some of them will be very outspoken. It means there will be a political process. The parliament will find it very difficult to pass any laws. The court system will still have— under the new constitution, the supreme court has the power of judicial review over all actions that the government and all laws, as to whether they are consistent with the constitution, which means as to whether they are consistent with the provisions and beliefs of the sacred religion of Islam.
The judiciary is not 100 percent male. There are women judges, but they are confined, as far as I know, to family courts. There are none on the Supreme Court. And for the first time, they appointed a Shia Muslim to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court and the judiciary, in general as Masuda said, is composed of very untrained people. But it’s not just a matter of the qualifications of the individuals. The whole judicial system has a very retrograde character and generally has been the sole part of the state that was reserved to the mullah or Islamic clergy in Afghanistan, as they’ve lost all other parts of political power since the defeat of the Taliban and the marginalization of the mujahadeen parties.
This is one thing they are holding onto very much. And the Islamic clergy in Afghanistan also has lost its most educated and progressive members in the past several decades, and is now an extremely conservative, and are not particularly well trained Islamic clergy, even compared to the Islamic clergy in other countries in the region or around the world. And it’s not familiar with modern trends and Islamic jurisprudence and very much holds on to its conservative interpretation as part of the basis for its power.
Now I would— I think that the judicial area is a very key one for reform. Not only reform of the formal judicial system, but as Masuda said, most disputes are handled outside of the formal judicial system. And one of the key debates now is, given that the informal dispute settlement system includes a number of provisions that very much violate the rights of women— such as the exchange of girls between families to settle disputes— whether it should simply be abolished in favor of the formal system or whether it should somehow be incorporated and regulated into the system so that it becomes subject to more human rights and so on.
But as far as I know, that’s just being discussed at this point. But I guess my overall point is I think that, by pushing for certain very visible things that correspond more to political vision of western governments, we could actually put Afghan women in jeopardy. What they need is— what they say they need in particular is education, access to healthcare, and the opportunity to get into positions within the government, but which will take quite a while to actually empower them given their overall social structure.
I might just— one anecdote about the elections and the participation. People were expecting that the Pashtun tribes might prevent women from voting, but actually, they had a jirga, or a tribal council of the Ahmadzai tribe, which was the largest Pashtun tribe before the registration. And the elders of the Ahmadzai tribe say that, with the application of every member of the Ahmadzai tribe, which means men, to ensure that all of the members of his family— men and women— would register and vote. And that if anyone didn’t do that, they would burn that person’s house down. And the reason for that was because they wanted to be— because the main issue for them was assuring that a Pashtun leader would get a majority in those elections. They would therefore help push out those in the Northern Alliance.
So on the one hand, a majoritarian system helps empower women in a sense it made it in the interest of men to bring women into the political sphere. But we should not interpret that in the wrong way to believe that women are now empowered and are self-empowering, or that their votes actually will lead to pro-women’s policies. We’ve seen even in Pakistan, even having a woman prime minister actually did not lead to any particularly pro-women’s policy. So we’ll take a lot more for organization empowerment, and decades and decades before those really take [inaudible].
COLEMAN: Thank you, Barney, for your comments. Having read Masuda’s report closely, I think there’s almost nothing in it that really contradicts what you’re saying. I think that there’s a sense that women have made some gain, be it for the wrong reasons or cynical reasons or being under international pressure or because of tribal leaders wanting to assure their representation. Whatever it may be, there have been some small gains, but there are some very, very big issues that remain going forward— to even consolidate those small gains and actually make progress on more fundamental issues which I think, as you pointed out rightly, are the medieval status of education and healthcare in that country for women.
You’ve both touched upon the judiciary and let me just start out by asking the first question. How do you get from here to there? The [Supreme Court Chief Justice Fazl Hadi] Shinwari, who is still, I think, the head of the judiciary, is by all accounts, one of the most conservative people. The vast majority of judges in Afghanistan are barely literate and have been trained only in Islamic law. And how do you change that? I mean, I know that the Italians were put in charge of trying to help the Afghans reform the judicial system. That seems a little interesting to me, but I think it’s stalled anyway. I don’t think it’s gone anywhere. I just love both of your comments on giving. You both agree on this importance of judicial reform. What would you do about it? Do you want to start?
SULTAN: Well, one very fundamental thing is the training of judges to really understand what the law is. There are training programs, but there’s no real monitoring going on. I think nationwide, we don’t really know what’s happening in a lot of these places outside of Kabul. How are these decisions being made inside the courts? How do they— in Kandahar, the Afghan civil society did a project where they essentially sat in on decisions and they found that decisions were being made with absolutely no consistency— very arbitrary.
And having dealt with prisoners in Kandahar— female prisoners, I found out that it was a police chief that was making decisions about whether people should go to prison or not go to prison. And so the complete lack of infrastructure— you don’t have formal judges. People don’t even, a lot of times, know where to go in a province. I’m talking about women who are a lot of times uneducated, completely disconnected from the official government. All they know is to go into a building that is the police station and ask for help. These people need to— these people have no idea who’s the authority figure.
And so— and who is the authority figure in a lot of these cases? I’m not exactly sure how judges are appointed. I know that, in some cases, it’s part of the government, but in terms of provincially, there’s no official system for training and appointment of judges. I think that’s one of the things that really needs to be done. I don’t think a lot of these judges even know what the law is.
Then to monitor the implementation: We know that women are going to prison all over the country for things such as traveling without a male relative still— yes, that happens. Being accused of committing adultery— yes, that still happens. You can go to prison for that. And other crimes like that, and so the fact that this is still happening in Afghanistan basically tells me that the judicial system is not functioning at all and these judges don’t even know what the law is or care not to apply it.
RUBIN: Well, I don’t know how much you want to go through the judicial system, but the constitution unfortunately has made judicial reform more difficult. Because the constitution has institutionalized the old system under which the Supreme Court is the head of the judiciary. It’s not just the high-all judicial instance. It is the administrative head of the judiciary. It appoints the other judges. It pays their salaries. It disciplines them. It promotes them. It assigns cases to them and it also hears appeals from those cases. So it creates corrupt networks among judges. And here I’m quoting the members of the constitutional commission who refuse to change it. And [it] actually means that, if you train people, you’re just training them to run a dysfunctional system.
So there is no— technically, there are two kinds of judicial appointment in sharia. One is to make a non-judge into a judge and only the Emir, which is in this case the president, can do that. But once a person enters into this caste of judges, then the other judges are in charge of them. And when we tried to discuss this with members of the constitutional commission— but there was one in particular, a former judge, who actually went completely apoplectic and started screaming to the point where you could not have any more discussion, whenever we discussed having any non-judge having anything to do with the judicial system. So this is the kind of resistance that there is.
According to the law, according to this constitution, within 30 days after the parliament takes office, the president will have to submit to the parliament the nominations for the— a new Supreme Court. And that will be a time when the 80-year-old Justice Shinwari may not be renewed and new individuals may come in. However, there are some other issues. One is— this is not always— I haven’t really seen this— there’s nothing. Justice Shinwari is not only the chief justice of Afghanistan. He is also the head of the Council of Ulema. In his role as chief justice, he has the highest judicial authority, including the power of judicial review to rule any action unconstitutional. And the president is always consulting him as to whether things are unconstitutional. As the head of the ulema of Afghanistan, he has the authority to issue fatwas, that is, advisory opinions on any matter that concerns him.
And furthermore, Justice Shinwari and the other members of the Supreme Court do not make a clear distinction between a written judgment on matters of law and fatwas, legal opinions. So that means it’s as if the members of the Supreme Court could just take up any political issue they like at any time and make a public statement saying, “Doing this is unconstitutional.”
So you have— and the constitutional— the drafters refused to add the word only to argue 121, which would have prevented the Supreme Court from taking up matters under what we call self-seizure. That is taking up an issue without having standing because it is referred or appealed. So the constitution— an important element will be the passage of a law regulating the conduct of the judiciary which hopefully will outlaw self-seizure and state, which the constitution does not state, that the Supreme Court can only take up matters of judicial review if it is referred by the government or appealed from a lower court. That is not the system right now.
As far as the Italians are concerned, the Italians are the lead donor on judicial reform. But the Italians are not in a position to take on the Islamic clergy of Afghanistan politically. And the Italians are complaining about this. At the recent donor meeting that I attended, the Italian woman who’s in charge of it there— I forget her name, now— was saying, “Look, we can train people. We can build buildings. But until the government takes political decisions about what kind of a judiciary they want, that’s all— we can’t reform the judiciary.”
COLEMAN: [Inaudible]
RUBIN: Maybe they could do a better job.
COLEMAN: I’m going to open it up to questions. I imagine that there are lots of questions. Can you please just raise your hand, identify yourself, ask a short question. You can ask it of one or of both and just get my attention, I’ll write your name down and take them in order as I see them. Please also everybody just check that your cell phones are off. We’ll start over here.
QUESTIONER: Hi [inaudible], my name is [inaudible]. My question is back to judicial reform. This past winter, I had occasion to have many conversations with both men and women about the need for judicial reform, including a long afternoon I spent in an Afghan police station with a group of police officers, for reasons that we don’t need to get into for this group. And even they were talking about this as being the most critical issue facing the country. So my question is, what do we believe the role or the influence of the people— those men and women will be in terms of their demand for judicial reform occurring? And do they have— is there ability for the people to actually accelerate the basic change?
SULTAN: I do think that the NGO sector has been incredibly loud on this issue, and I think that, unfortunately, because of the way that the NGO sector stands in Afghanistan right now, in terms of the fact that the Afghan government feels that there is— too much of the aid is coming through the NGO sector and they’re too powerful. They’re not accountable. And the fact that they essentially at one point, and I’m not sure if it’s still in effect, they stopped NGO registration from happening and then still refused.
And so I really do think that the NGO sector is really the voice— the only channel, really, for people to have voice. Because if you look outside of Kabul at the provinces, there’s no infrastructure. The government is essentially run by a local governor or warlord who also has his own militia. And so people don’t really have channels to express their views. And so, whether or not people are ready for change, what degree of change is something that civil society needs to determine? And so what are the channels for that? It’s NGOs. And given the relationship that the Afghan government currently has with NGOs, it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.
RUBIN: Well, during the consultations about the constitution, corruption of the judiciary was one of the main complaints by the people. During a recent donor meeting, it was— everyone converged on the idea that this is becoming a real bottleneck to everything from counter-narcotics, security, everything. However, no one on the constitutional commission appeared to have read the report or drawn any specific conclusions from it. I would say there are two— there are different processes that would lead into actual reform of the judiciary.
First of all, there has to be a lawmaking process to create a different framework. That will be the job of the parliament. And I think that the people’s views about the corruption of the judicial system will be reflected in the parliament and therefore, there may be some pressure coming from the parliament to change it. However, it will be quite some— I don’t think the parliament will not be much better trained in lawmaking than the judiciary is in adjudication. So it will be some time before the parliament is able really to craft a well designed law on the operation of the judiciary.
Second, even if they do so, you need to have that kind of grassroots movement. First, you need to get the provinces, but also the other side of institutional review is what Masuda was talking about, the need for access to justice. That is building capacity in the society to use the justice system. And of course, just the background condition is that, currently, the government’s total domestic revenue for everything it does is $11 per capita per year. They can buy everybody a case of Coke and then if it wants to do anything else, like have a court system or an army, it has to go begging.
And, the literacy rate is about 30 percent. And there are few— and the court houses are just in the provincial capitals which are very— several days’ travel away from where many people in the country live. So there are a lot of basic things before— that has to happen before a justice system can function.
COLEMAN: Pat.
QUESTIONER: Pat Rosenfield, Carnegie Corporation. My question is based on having attended many meetings on Afghanistan over the past two or three years. And I’d like to ask a fundamental question about the role of the international sector, including international advisers. And then I’d like to go to the point of whether— Barney’s point about whether it is empowering or disempowering for women to have so much international attention and activity. And I think it’s a really important point, because I feel that there’s so much, especially with how we present it here in— even in a group like this, as very sympathetic, concerned individuals, with no one who’s actually on the ground in Afghanistan now [inaudible] being able to respond to some of the comments. Perhaps there is someone, and I’m not aware of it.
So I’m wondering whether we are holding back developments in Afghanistan in a way that is actually, taking up Barney’s point, disempowering them. Or whether there is something more positive that could be done by the international community to actually— not just health and education, which I think are very important, but in terms of the women’s role in society from the grassroots on up and top down that could be more positive.
SULTAN: I definitely want to address that, because if you look at Afghanistan’s history, there’ve been many efforts to publicly empower women or efforts for modernization that have had significant backlash. And so we always want to keep that in mind. And we always want to keep in mind that Afghanistan is still a very conservative society, still a very tribal society.
And what I’ve seen from a lot of Afghan women on the ground is that the international community support is absolutely essential. Without it, they are nothing and they will say that upfront. The other piece that they’ll say it doesn’t always come in the way that they need it. And I’ve seen this up close. A lot of times, programs are designed without real input from women on the ground. I mean, programs are packaged from one country, brought into another country without regard for the ethnic issues, the tribal issues, the religious issues in Afghanistan. The lack of infrastructure.
And a lot of times, these programs are meant to select sort of the most liberal of Afghan women. NGOs to this point have mostly been focused inside Kabul. Of course, they’re expanding now, but when an organization comes in from outside of Afghanistan, sets up shop, sets up an office, and says, “We want to train women in sewing,” or, “We want to train women in politics,” they sort of are waiting for people to come into— they don’t have connections. They don’t have a network within the country that can really reach out, because they often don’t use the local networks.
They use the systems that they’ve used in other countries. For example, in Kandahar, there was an amazing Pashtun factory that had opened a few years ago with USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] help. I was so happy that it was there that I went out to see what was going on, and I found out that the majority of the women there were not of the Pashtun ethnicity. And this is something that— I thought it was great that they were promoting an ethnicity that was a minority, that they were essentially trying to promote anyone who would come and work at that factory.
But unfortunately, they hadn’t reached out to the local population. They had reached out to particular networks. And they were pretty much blind to the fact that— when I went back to Kabul and talked to the people who were administering that— they were pretty much blind to the fact that this was creating a lot of difficulty within the community in terms of ethnic issues and rivalry between the women. Things like that. Things like often going in and recruiting women to come to the United States or come to other countries. You get the cream of the crop, or you get the extremely desperate ones, whose families have absolutely no choice. But often those programs are not targeting them. They’re targeting the women who can travel, who speak some English.
Without a real regard for the family behind her, it’s often, “We want women so we can say that we have women in our program,” is often what is behind a lot of that. Just to give you an example, we have 12 Afghan women in New York City, now, who have come over for training in business— three weeks of business training. And what we found in discussing with them, their businesses, these are some of the lead businesswomen in Afghanistan. They’re doing embroidery and sewing projects and some of them speak English. And we knew we were going for the type of women that would be able to travel, that would be able to do business, that were somewhat educated, because those women employed anywhere from 4 to 300 women. And so, if we could help those women become successful, more successful, that would be better and lift a lot of women out of poverty.
And so in dealing with those women, we found out that even though most of them were coming to our program and saying they had their businesses, there were their husbands and their brothers and their sons involved in their businesses in significant ways. But they were trying to hide that, because they knew what the international organizations are looking for. They’re looking for women that they can proudly hold up and say, “This woman is independent and she doesn’t rely on her family and she can travel. Look at her, she’s fierce.” But there’s a whole network behind her. And to ignore that is really to destroy all the efforts that are happening. And so, what I haven’t found, is a real integration of sort of women’s voices, the real honest discussion. And even when local women feel that they have something to say, lately they’ve been learning that it doesn’t matter that they have something to say, that people are looking for— international people are looking for certain programs and certain personalities and certain types of women.
And so you have the elite mostly going from country to country. They don’t have any time to be working in Afghanistan, because they’re going from one conference to another. They’re in high demand. They’re doing interviews, et cetera. So that’s something that I’ve noticed and it’s really frustrating to see, because I know the international community’s needed and wanted. But in terms of how we carry out the work, especially on the issue of Islam and integrating, working within an Islamic framework for women’s rights, pointing to women’s rights education, women’s rights to work, working through that, and that’s not something that a lot of international organizations are willing to do because of their own standards and their own beliefs. And that’s really a tragic thing, because I think that, in order to empower women in Afghanistan, you have to do it through an Islamic framework and an Islamic perspective. And go to where they are and their reality.
RUBIN: Of course, of things Masuda’s talking about apply to all aid programs in Afghanistan, not only ones regarding women, although there are some particular aspects regarding women as well. But there is another dimension, which is the political dimension, which is that the United States is the military and the political project of the Bush administration, with regard to the war on terror and the greater Middle East that is of course, in a sense, the backbone of the operation in Afghanistan.
And part of the legitimization that is put forward for that political project is to free the women of the Muslim world. And in fact, if you read publications here, you will see that women are referred to as the soft underbelly of Islam in some of these analyses, which is the same analysis that was used by the Soviet Union in Central Asia where women were defined as the surrogate proletariat. Now, the Islamists in the region are quite— are totally aware of this, and therefore, they perceive this as part of— as a way of undermining their society by finding collaborators. And in fact, this was— it already happened in Afghanistan, because the Soviet Union did exactly the same thing. And the Taliban were not just the resurgence of some unchanging Afghan conservative tradition. They were very much a reaction against the instrumentalization of modernizing reform in the service of what they saw as imperial conquest.
And the Soviet Union left Afghanistan and the women that it had recruited to those things were left undefended. Some of them are now being recruited into NGOs or active at the loya jirga. And people who don’t know their political background put them forward as big supporters of democracy. I’m not against their— they should participate. But they also carry this baggage. Therefore, the use of women’s rights rhetoric or women’s liberation rhetoric as part of, essentially, an imperial project or a global strategic project by the United States is something that has the potential for causing a very serious backlash in the future, especially when the international community leaves, as it will.
KOPPELL: I just wanted to add two quick points. I think we’ve found that women— there are many women in a lot of these countries that welcome and support the assistance from the international community to give them a leg up. And that it really needs to be handled with care. But if we’re talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, any of these countries where you see a real struggle for women’s rights, the international assistance, if handled properly, is very much appreciated by these women.
In terms of how you consolidate gains that are externally imposed, the one thing I would add and I think is really important and is sort of lacking in the case of Afghanistan, is the need to also route service provision and assistance through women’s organizations. In the case of Afghanistan, as in many war-torn regions around the world, women are the ones who have these networks that kept society going all the way through the war. And these established networks, though they’re sort of hard to reach because these people don’t often speak English, don’t interact with the internationals, aren’t the first people who come out front, can really fill important, important gaps in places that others can’t reach. And what you see in Afghanistan is 0.02 percent of the development assistance going through women’s organizations. So if you have a very visible political commitment to women’s rights, you have to buttress that from the bottom by helping consolidate their role in reconstruction.
SULTAN: [Inaudible] An example of that is that the ministry of commerce has a center for women’s entrepreneurship. And as a ministry of commerce, [they] are encouraging women’s entrepreneurship as opposed to expecting the ministry of women’s affairs to go ahead and encourage women’s entrepreneurship. So, mainstreaming genders is another piece of that. Minister [Habiba] Sarabi, the previous women’s minister, this is one of her programs that she wanted to institute and now it’s being carried out by the new minister of women’s affairs, Masooda Jalal, who incidentally was the first woman to run— Afghan woman to run for president. She came in sixth with one percent of the vote, even though she had no office. She gave up her job. When asked of her email address, she said— because she used to work for the U.N.--she gave that up. She didn’t have anything.
COLEMAN: I have about 10 names on the list and I’m just going to ask while we’re talking about this ministry of women’s affairs, just one quick question. You talk a little bit about the ministry of women’s affairs in your report. You say that it has been largely ineffective. And I’d just like to quiz you on that. Is it, in fact, completely irrelevant? Is it a waste of resources to even put resources into it? I’ve been to visit the ministry of women’s affairs. They were teaching hairdressing in [inaudible] huge building. I just wonder whether if it’s in fact distractive or not? Can you give me a quick answer on that?
SULTAN: The need for preventive centers is obvious, it’s clear; a place where women can go to congregate because there is no such place for them right now. They don’t go to the mosque. There’s no— barely any health infrastructure. And so a place where women can come to, where they can learn about their rights, where they can learn about voter education, where they can understand— where they can network, essentially, and get training and find out, who are the police that I need to go to? Who’s the local judge? Those kind of things need to be carried out by these provincial centers.
But unfortunately like you said, I’ve been to some as well, where they’re doing sewing classes and embroidery classes. And it breaks my heart to see that. So I think that— and if you go and talk to the minister of women’s affairs, she says she doesn’t have the funding to really implement programs on a large scale. And it comes back to what Carla was saying, is that you need the funding to go along with these commitments. I don’t think they’re a waste, but I do think they will be if they don’t get more funding.
RUBIN: I would first, just in fairness, we should acknowledge that the ministry of women’s affairs is not the only ministry in the Afghan government that is ineffective. But I think the question is, ineffective at what? Because it has not gotten a clear mission. And it’s very hard to be effective when you don’t have a clear mission. Now, what I think the ministry of— and what has happened is, it’s recruited a lot people who basically have an NGO background and whose orientation, therefore, is toward implementing projects. And that’s primarily what the ministry of women’s affairs is doing. My view is, it should be reorganized. Its mission should be to mainstream gender into policy. That should be the mission of the ministry of women’s affairs. And therefore, it should act as a kind of horizontal coordinating body with the actual line ministry. There may be some projects that should be carried out through the women’s affairs. I don’t want to have a theological position on that.
But I think on the whole, its primary mission should be as a policy body to work with the other ministries to ensure that gender is mainstreamed into policy. However, the fact is that, at the moment, the role of the Afghan government in making policy is also somewhat marginal, because most funding comes from donors. And therefore, the process of policy-making is an interactive one that involves donor institutions and certain key members of the Afghan government and elite who know how to interact with donors and the rest of the government, including the ministry of women’s affairs, but not only the ministry of women’s affairs, [which] are pretty marginalized from that policy-making process.
SULTAN: Just want to say that the minister, both previous ministers and this minister have stated that their goal is to advance women at the policy level and to not function as an NGO. But they believe that their hands are essentially tied behind their backs and they really don’t— aren’t able to do much else.
[Ed note: The speaker went off-the-record briefly at this point.]
But getting back to what the international community needs to be doing, I don’t see in a lot of these organizations, or the U.N., really trying to create an Afghanistan that Afghans can take over. They’re essentially helping them. They’re running the government. They’re running the NGO sector on a large scale. I don’t know what that process is, but what needs to happen is that local Afghans need to understand how to do, how to run, how to operate, how to implement, how to create policy. And thus far, there’s a lot of leadership happening outside of Afghanistan’s people.
And what scares me is, as Barney Rubin says, Afghanistan is essentially going to be left behind. And the international community is going to pull out at some point, because the types of resources that are being committed right now, as little as they are for what the need is, is not going to continue in the long run. And so Afghans need to take responsibility for what’s happening. And how do they do that when they feel there’s always an international person who knows what they’re doing with the contacts. How do you transfer those skills? Those skills are not being transferred effectively right now.
QUESTIONER: [Inaudible] I actually asked myself this question before Mr. Rubin spoke at all. I was wondering whether would you get the women’s perspective and evaluation of the changes that have occurred to them, [if it] might be different than men’s perception of it, and [there] might not [be] sort of this criticism? What would women say? And maybe you can’t know that. Maybe you can’t poll enough people. What’s your perception of what women would say, in terms of your evaluation and what has happened to them in the last three years?
SULTAN: I’ll just sum that up by what one woman told me. She said all these changes are cosmetic and they’re symbolic. The fact that, in the women’s ministry, the cooks who make $25 a month, cutting up onions with knives that are not sharp— the cooks— the knife was cutting into the other side of her skin because she was cutting up onions. And she’s happy that she works in the women’s ministry. And she doesn’t have time to go to computer classes, which the ministry is offering. The reality, if you talk to women, and even if you talk to the most elite women, you have an honest conversation with them, they will tell you, it’s just cosmetic. It’s not happening.
QUESTIONER: So when you tell us that 20 percent of the women are in government or 40 percent or whatever voted, are you telling us that that’s cosmetic as well?
SULTAN: Well, in the political sphere, that’s where you see the greatest accomplishment in terms of numbers only. And as Barney said, a lot of that is happening, for a variety of reasons, most because families are allowing it to happen. With women coming out to vote, some of that had to do with ethnic rivalry and various ethnicities wanting to increase their numbers. And so, if you look at the polls that occurred of families, they essentially said that women will not be able to vote unless the men allow them to and that women will be voting for candidates that their family decide they’ll be voting for.
And so you see the numbers in the political participation, but you don’t see it in terms of real power. You don’t see it in terms of economic development with employment. I think for Afghan women, it’s over 80 percent unemployment. You don’t see it in healthcare. You still see the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. So if you look at purely the numbers on politics, it looks OK. But that is probably because of an interesting political climate, the fact that the international community is pushing on those. And quite frankly, to some extent, we all know that the United States and the international community is looking for a success story in Afghanistan.
And what better thing to point to than 20 percent here and 40 percent there and it doesn’t take a lot to go out to a polling booth— an all-female polling booth and vote. But when that same woman is pregnant and she doesn’t have a doctor around, who’s evaluating that? I think those indicators are just as important as the others and need to be taken all together.
RUBIN: What concerns me about this rhetoric about women’s progress is of a piece with the general rhetoric about progress in Afghanistan, which is that now Afghanistan is a democracy. And it’s very difficult to strike the right tone, because the situation is much better than it was three or four years ago. That is true. But people do not understand what the situation was like three or four years ago.
First, since Laura Bush just said on the Jay Leno show that, when she was in Afghanistan for a day, and she said, “I didn’t see any women wearing burqas [full veils].” Now, I’m sure she’s telling the truth, because no one gets within 10 kilometers of her without being vetted. But Jay Leno said, of course, that only dates back to 1996, meaning that the Taliban invented the burqa in 1996. But of course, that’s not the case. And these women— these maternal mortality figures were pretty much the same before the Taliban, during the Taliban and after the Taliban. So of course, these things are being floated for political reasons. What is dangerous about that, is it may lead people to believe that international actors have accomplished more in Afghanistan than they have. Which is not to say they’ve accomplished nothing, but— there is less remaining to do than there is.
