women.
Conclusion
The addition of a veil over Queen Soraya in the portrait gallery of the Ministry of Information and Culture just after the collapse of the Taliban while at the same moment images of women lifting their veils in the streets of Kabul were broadcast on Western TV channels as symbols of “women’s liberation” underlines the complex and contested position of women in the reconstruction period. Their bodies, at times veiled and hidden, at others displayed and unveiled, are sites of political struggles over national identity. From the 1920s onward, the “woman question” has been manipulated to serve political purposes and to assert opposite views of civilization. The archive pictures that illustrate this chapter should not be taken at face value: their purpose was less to document everyday life in Afghanistan than to promote an image of progress and development for external audiences. The display of images of women taking part in public life, wearing Western clothes, and working side by side with men was meant to portray Afghanistan as contemporary to “modern and civilized” nations.
A closer look at the history of women in Afghanistan demonstrates how, in addition to gender, other sets of variables such as class and the urban/rural divide have to be taken into account in order to understand the variety of women’s experiences. Women in the countryside benefited neither from the expanding public services nor from the dynamic cultural and intellectual movements and events that made the period prior to the Soviet occupation exhilarating for urban women. The revolutionary changes and relatively liberal social values and norms experienced by educated middle- and upper class women in the 1960s and 1970s stood in stark contrast to the tribal and traditional values shaping the life of the majority of Afghan women at the time.
The plight of Afghan women under the Taliban rule was widely publicized in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States as one of the humanitarian issues justifying intervention. However, the political context in which the Taliban movement emerged was hardly mentioned. Their gender discriminatory policies, which resulted in the social exclusion of women, were mostly explained by misidentified expressions of local “culture.” But the Taliban did not arise out of thin air. The emergence of religious fundamentalism in the region has been the result of broader geopolitical developments that involved the interference of foreign countries such as the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia during the Cold War period.
Finally, the history of Afghanistan shows that reforms aimed at changing the status of women raised hopes and fears, expectations and resistance in the social arena. From the reign of Amanullah to the Taliban regime, the contested rights of women became a primary symbol of the new order. All efforts by reformist kings from the early twentieth century onward were doomed due to their incapacity to incorporate the rural peripheries into their programs and to envision indigenous paths for social transformation. When the Communist government attempted to introduce an egalitarian society and implement women’s rights under a secular framework and through coercion, acute civil strife ensued.
The Islamist movements that have regained power in the region since the 1980s have focused on the disciplining of women’s bodies because they represent a political site of difference and resistance to the homogenizing and egalitarian forces of Western modernity (Göle 1996). By promoting the return to strict Islamic clothing, these movements attempt to reassert a collective identity. Far from being a return to greater religiosity and ritual practice, these movements have focused, like the modernists before them, on lifestyles and attitudes in public because they signal shared societal values and moral norms.
CHAPTER 2
National Women’s Machinery: Coaching Lives in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs
Four years after my first journey, in winter 2007, I landed in Kabul for the second time. Renovations had somewhat improved the appearance of the small airport trapped between snowy mountaintops. Customs officers in uniforms were equipped with computers, the moving walkways were running, and passengers were directed toward waiting lines. A semblance of organization prevailed. But what surprised me the most was to discover that even though the city’s infrastructure still remained in disarray, billboards and commercials had anarchically invaded the streets of Kabul. “Roshan, Nazdik shodan!” (Roshan, close to you!), a new mobile phone company advertised. “Urdu y melli Afghan ba shoma zaroorat darad!” (The Afghan National Army wants you!) stated a military officer pointing a finger at an imaginary observer on a poster that copied the famous World War I military recruitment campaign in the United States. “Hafteh se parvaz ba Dubai baa Kam Air” (Fly three times a week to Dubai with Kam’air) announced the new airline company owned by the powerful commander Rashid Dostum. The advertisement boom signaled a radical shift not only because under the Taliban images had totally disappeared from public spaces—a decree had declared visual representations of human beings un-Islamic and banned TV sets and cameras—but also because of the sharp contrast between these consumerist messages and the increased visibility of public poverty resulting from internal displacements and massive returns of refugees.
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