After bumping along five hours of potholes and rock-strewn mountain switchbacks on the main commercial artery from Kabul to Pakistan early last month, I was surprised as we entered the Jalalabad Valley to see an enormous campaign poster, the size of a Times Square billboard, featuring not the boyish face of Hazrat Ali -- Jalalabad's most famous ex-warlord and a parliamentary candidate -- but that of Safia Siddiqi. It's striking enough that a woman would appear so boldly in such a poster in a city where women still do not appear in public without a burka -- more striking still that she was wrapped in a shawl made from the green, black and red of the Afghan flag. These colorful, patriotic images of Siddiqi also loomed over the streets of Jalalabad itself, offering a lush kind of hope for its residents. But Jalalabad is still a place dominated by Pashtunwali, the customary law that regulates life throughout the Pashtun belt (the eastern and southern half of Afghanistan). The Pashtun code is based on the values of honor, sanctuary, solidarity, shame and revenge, and it treats women as property. In such a place, how much difference can a few female politicians really make? Many Afghans question all the fuss over elections, and the $150 million expense, when, after three and a half years of American and international efforts, they still have few roads, unclean water and crumbling schools. And still every 30 minutes an Afghan woman dies in childbirth.
The image of Afghan women is easily reduced to stereotypes. At one extreme is the hidden, voiceless, blue-burkaed cloud floating through the dusty streets behind her turbaned man. At the other is the endangered young feminist firing off a tirade against warlords. Both exist, but reality is mostly between the extremes. If nothing else, perhaps women in Parliament -- by law, 68 seats of 249 are reserved for women -- will begin to demolish these caricatures.
In her rebelliousness, Siddiqi reflects a quality of Pashtun women that lives in the poetic memory of eastern and southern Afghanistan and was archived in a small book of women's poetry collected and edited by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, one of Afghanistan's most revered modern poets. A dean of literature at Kabul University, a former governor of Kapisa Province, Majrouh, at age 59 in 1988, was assassinated in Peshawar, Pakistan, where the various mujahedeen factions fighting the Soviet Union were based. Shortly before his murder, Majrouh went through refugee camps in Pakistan to collect landays: simple two-line cries of emotion, usually recited by women to women at the river or the well or at wedding parties. They are physical and brutal, passionate and direct. One that was recited to me on a few occasions last month was almost a threat to the beloved. It shows how embedded is the tribal sense of honor for both men and women: "If you do not have a wound in the center of your chest/I shall remain indifferent, even if your back is riddled like a sieve with holes."
The women who composed and shared these poems, Majrouh wrote, "feel repressed, scorned and thought of as second-rate human beings. From the cradle on, they are received with sadness and shame.. . .The father who learns of such an unwelcome arrival seems to go into mourning, whereas he gives a party and fires off a salvo of gunshots at the birth of a boy. Later, and without ever being consulted, the little girl becomes monetary exchange between families of the same clan." Majrouh, in exile among the hostile mujahedeen, seemed to identify with the anguish of Pashtun women. And he identified with their means of defiance -- the landays. They could be cries of despair: "Cruel people, who see how an old man leads me to his bed/And you ask why I weep and tear out my hair!" They could also be bold and desirous: "Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields/So we can love each other or fall together beneath the blows of knives."
Safia Siddiqi has taken the boldness of the landays into both in politics and poetry. At a reading last year in Kandahar, attended more by men than women, she read from a poem of hers called "I Am Telling the Truth." In it the poet addresses her lover, saying she wants to "smother you with kisses/To put you in the swing of my lap/And to cover you/With the wings of my hair."
Siddiqi has always enjoyed the spotlight and ached when it dimmed. She was born to a family of judges and religious scholars. Reared in the village of Nazarabad, just outside Jalalabad, she was taught at home and in Koran classes next door at the corner mosque. The Soviet invasion destroyed Nazarabad's village tranquillity, and the family was uprooted to Kabul. Siddiqi began tailoring at night near her house to supplement her father's reduced income. By 11th grade she had published a poetry collection, "Veil," in which the chador became a metaphor for protection not just from strange men but also from the Soviet invaders. Siddiqi went to law school and was energized by the artistic and intellectual life of the university.
"It was the peak time for women's liberty," she told me. It all ended abruptly. The Communists were pressuring people like her to join the party. "They were afraid of me at my college," she said. "My education. My books." Her father decided to send the family to Pakistan. "And there I was accused by the Islamists of being a Communist," she said. "They wanted to kill me. It was Hekmatyar's party" -- the Hezb-i-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar -- "with those women in Saudi black burkas. And I hate those black burkas to this day."
Yet she had to wear one herself. In Pakistan, she had no name, no degree, no poetry. She was just a poor refugee, and it made her crazy. She began to work at an entry-level job for an N.G.O., forced herself to learn English and rose in the ranks. Prominence attracted more threats, particularly from the Taliban after they captured Kabul in 1996. She wrote poetry of angry self-assertion and exploration. "Who am I?" begins one poem. "Am I a nomad?. . . No I'm not a nomad, nor a refugee/ They are much better than me." Siddiqi also wrote: "When I'm walking down the street, the people watch me/Disrespectfully and surprisingly/Watch me,/They are talking and saying/'Who is this lout?/Who is she?/Whose daughter is she?/Whose sister is she?/Whose wife is she?' Oh! Allah, is it honor?"
"We had such a bad life in Pakistan as educated women because they never accepted our raising our voice," she told me. She formed a small group of activist women and eventually emigrated to Canada, where she met -- quite late by Afghan standards -- her husband, Asif Safi, an artist and journalist. He cuts an unusual figure in the Afghan landscape in his goth get-up: black wool pakool, black tunic, black baggy trousers, black shoes and long black hair. He's in charge of Siddiqi's security, and he is paranoid, with good reason. Already last year, when she and Safi were consulting for the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, Siddiqi was attacked in a tough tribal region. Now that she was campaigning, she would have to go back.
At the end of 2001, just after the Taliban scattered from their Kandahari stronghold, I received a strange proposal from Mullah Abdul Salaam, known as Rocketi, a neckless barrel of a Taliban commander. He was hiding in a remote village in Zabul, a province of sand dunes, camels and abandoned mud forts, peopled by suspicious men with thick kohl painted around their eyes and a taste for burning down girls' schools. Rocketi was wanted by the Americans. He had been the Taliban corps commander of Jalalabad -- not because he was in love with the Taliban but because all he really knew how to do was wage jihad and fire rockets (thus the nickname). He showed me his Stinger missiles, stashed away in a barn, and asked me to help him deliver them to the Americans in exchange for amnesty. I told him it was impossible. The next day he was forced to trust a man he didn't trust, Ismail Gailani, who is from one of the most respected religious families in Afghanistan. Rocketi tried to hide out in the mountains for a time but eventually landed in an American-run prison.
That is why I was so surprised when I found him in Kabul this summer, in a fine black tunic and a long silver-and-black turban, on his way to the Afghan television studios to record a campaign ad for himself. He was running for Parliament, he said, on a simple platform: "I say that I love all God's people." That's it? "If you promise a lot and do a little, that is not delicious," he told me. "But if you promise a little and do a lot, it will be very, very delicious." His smile soon turned to a frown, however, as he contemplated his chief misfortune: "No matter how much I respect humanity and how great a person I am, my name still misrepresents me."
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, his nickname, Rocketi's chances for winning a seat in Parliament were excellent. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission tried to force the adoption of an affidavit whereby candidates would have to pledge that they were never involved in any war crimes or drug dealing. "It was never included," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, one of the commission's more outspoken members, when I went to see him shortly after meeting Rocketi. "All that was left in the affidavit is that 'you are not in an armed group now.' " So any commanders under suspicion simply turned in some weapons. Ultimately just a few dozen candidates were disqualified on the basis of arms. Nadery said that although warlords are a small proportion of the candidates, they were overshadowing the process. Which makes sense. Who, after all, has been running Afghanistan for the past 25 years? Many Afghans understandably wonder whether such elections aren't intended to show "progress" in nation building -- and give the United States a way out.
On the western outskirts of Kabul, in a neighborhood still scarred by the mujahedeen rockets that tore apart Kabul during the civil war 10 years ago, Shukria Barakzai stepped from a silver Mercedes to greet a few dozen women waiting for her in the garden of a neighborhood elder. Though she's one of Kabul's higher-profile women -- she started a newspaper called Women's Mirror shortly after the Taliban fell and often appears on political talk shows in bright, translucent headscarves and high-heeled, pointy pink or ivory shoes -- on this day she had the air of a schoolgirl breaking taboos. A few days earlier, at the official start of campaign season, she took an unprecedented move for Afghan women and went wading through a crowded bazaar to address men and women, shopkeepers and taxi drivers and the police. She was thrilled by it. She also must have enjoyed the fact that it irritated her husband, and that there was nothing he could do about it.
Like an Afghan version of a Tracy-Hepburn movie, both Barakzai and her husband were running for Parliament. And the tension was palpable between them -- two years ago, when she was battling warlords as a delegate to the loya jirga, or grand assembly, convened to agree on a constitution, she heard that he had taken a second wife. Her friends at women's organizations wanted to take to the streets to protest the laws that allow men to take up to four wives. Barakzai refused. She decided to ride out the change, instead, and in the process grow more familiar with the lives of ordinary Afghan women. During the campaign she mocked her husband's tactics. As a millionaire, she said, "he doesn't have to do anything except have big lunches for people in trade halls." (He made his fortune as an exporter.) She teased that he liked it that way because he is uncomfortable with public speaking. So, unlike Shukria -- who had not hung up any posters yet, preferring radio and TV appearances and the woman-on-the-street approach -- her husband had his team plaster a photograph of himself in a suit and tie, with a horse as his voting emblem, all over the trees and billboards and shop windows of Kabul.
The women waiting to hear Barakzai beneath the grapevine canopies were illiterate. The neighborhood still had no power, no roads and no buses to take anyone to work if there was any work to be had. The odor of open sewage wafted through the streets and gardens. Some women told Barakzai that their husbands wouldn't let them get their voting-registration cards. One said to me, "This is Afghanistan, and the men are rotten-natured," and a chorus of laughter ensued. Unimaginable cruelty had been meted out in this neighborhood just 10 years ago. The women remembered it vividly. One woman had lost 17 members of her family. These women were mystified that the same people who "fried us in oil and pounded nails in our heads" were in power, running for Parliament. Even worse, said one woman with a laugh, "people will vote for them."
Barakzai told them to vote for women instead. Otherwise, "the Mujahedeen leaders will suffocate us," she said. "But they won't be able to oppress you with a strong female voice in the Parliament." This was campaign-trail chatter, though; in private, she admitted that everything depended on the quality of the women elected. Many female candidates were put up by husbands whose records, even by Rocketi standards, were too tarnished. Others were put up by the Islamist parties.
Barakzai hauled herself up onto the bed of a pickup and addressed a crowd of young men. When one of them told me he was going to vote for the mullah Sayyaf because he had served his country all these years, an old woman from behind the mesh of her burka said: "Oh, you're a good one. We're waiting like beggars for wheat because of the service of people like him."
Having lived through the civil war, through Taliban rule, through the complicated compromises she observed and participated in as a delegate to the constitutional loya jirga, Barakzai was realistic about the composition of Afghan society. And she was realistic about an American policy that still supported the old commanders in the belief that inclusion was the best way to preserve stability in Afghanistan. "Of course, 75 percent of our Parliament will be commanders and drug lords," she told me. "But, on the other hand, it's a kind of pluralism of the last three decades. And some people say it's better they are all coming together."
When a news report said that U.S. soldiers were desecrating the Koran at Guantánamo, thousands of enraged men marched through Jalalabad's streets, torched government buildings, the Pakistani consulate and foreign aid agencies, chanted "death to America" and burned an effigy of President Bush.
In the parliamentary campaign, this same spirit manifested itself in a political allergy to the rhetoric of human rights, women's rights and all Western-sounding values. Anti-human-rights rhetoric also makes for good old-fashioned politicking, the kind that easily rouses the emotions of men, reminding them of the simpler days of jihad against the Soviets, when the mujahedeen were somehow heroes of both the Islamic and the Western worlds, and even seen as fighting for human rights -- not as war criminals or the followers of war criminals.
At a sunbaked rally for the ex-commander Hazrat Ali, a white-haired, long-bearded blind mullah energized the crowd when he took to the podium and began cursing human rights. "The Koran says women cannot ask for divorce," he cried, "whereas human rights say women should ask for divorce! In the name of human rights we are told to release fornicators and thieves from prison. We know anyone who steals should have his hand cut off. Human rights says, 'No.' You should vote for someone who can fight all those who want to bring human rights law in Islamic law. We need a Moses to save us, and that is Hazrat Ali." A great rumbling and clapping ensued.
The women of Jalalabad understand the mentality they are up against. Safia Siddiqi and her leading female rival, Saima Khogiani, do not pepper their speeches with talk of women's rights or changing traditions. They speak of the honor of the Pashtun woman, and of how the Pashtuns respect their women. They warn the men of the dangers of succumbing to the bribes of old warlords and rich, lying candidates. They offer the service of their clean past. And they play on the pride of the Pashtun.
When I first met Saima Khogiani, a 34-year-old former schoolteacher, she was sitting cross-legged, curled over herself, on the floor of the crumbling Jalalabadi house she'd rented for her campaign offices. She peered at me from beneath the brown embroidery of a black wool scarf. She was rough and defensive, armored with a sardonic smirk. Khogiani faced the ire of her local mullahs when she first decided to run for office. Her uncles wouldn't speak to her. But she insisted and -- despite the curse of one mullah, who warned that the people would be sending 12 generations of their ancestors to hell if they voted for her -- the men were turning up to check her out and offer support in return for assistance. She had a small army of some 15 male cousins who stayed with her and decided where she could campaign. She was the only woman in the entire family who was allowed to meet with men. "This one," a cousin said, pointing to Khogiani's gregarious young niece, "will be banned from the men's room in two years." The young niece pouted. Then she said she didn't care because she was going to become a doctor.
But at a campaign stop up in the mountains, in a settlement of salmon-colored mud-and-straw houses, the women were uninterested in women's rights. After reciting a landay about perpetual poverty, one woman was urged by the others to tell Khogiani about their opium problem. "We know it's not good for Afghanistan, but it solved all our problems," she said. "It grows in drought, with almost no water. And it sells for a good price." The men vowed that they would plant poppies again this autumn, even under the threat of death. As Khogiani said, "The people lost their poppy, and the Americans and the government have not fulfilled their promises of an alternative-livelihoods program." The United States Agency for International Development has begun financing short-term projects -- like clearing ditches -- that local communities would have done anyway. It is not a true alternative, and while the farmers will lose their opium income, the governors, police chiefs and smugglers will simply traffic in opium grown elsewhere.
After returning to Afghanistan, Safia Siddiqi, like Shukria Barakzai, was a delegate to the constitutional loya jirga, where she spoke up to defend a young woman who had condemned the jihadis for their crimes against ordinary Afghans -- then, for the sake of peace, urged the same young woman to apologize. Siddiqi understands politics well, as I saw when we drove out to her home district of Surkhab, a 40-minute drive from Jalalabad. The village elders had all gathered in a leafy outdoor meeting ground and dragged along their young men, who could be heard grumbling on the sidelines about how bored they were of political campaigns. Siddiqi appealed to them as Pashtuns, pressing them not to accept money or food in exchange for their votes. She appealed to the male elders, recognizing the suffering of their community and the uselessness of succumbing to warlords. She was in the village of her uncles and cousins. They all knew her father, knew that she's the daughter of a judge. This was a village still without television, where all the children gather at night to hear an elder tell them the love story of Saiful Maluk, son of the king, and Badri Jamal, a fairy girl. The story can take three nights or longer. When Siddiqi invoked the elders, she was signaling that she understood that they will decide who gets the votes; most likely it would be her. This is how politics works in the countryside. Siddiqi wrapped up her speech with another effort at tribal bonding: "You and I are Pashtuns. We appreciate and respect women more than the others. And I will not be able to talk as freely to others as I do to you."
Still, when she did speak to others -- for example, educated women in Jalalabad at the government's Department of Public Works -- her tone was markedly different. "Our men are uneducated," she told them. "Our women don't have jobs. And when you go out, everyone stares at you. If you remove your chador, everyone will call you a bad woman. The girl who should go to school is getting tailoring education because she has to make money for her family. Our kids should go to school, have teachers even at home. Should we vote for someone who intimidates or stops women from going to school? They want to make us scared of everything so we stay at home and out of politics. But we want to help the culture. Who was Malalai?" Siddiqi was referring to the 19th-century Pashtun heroine who braved British guns to raise the Afghan flag. "She was a woman. A hero of our country. The reason we don't have any other Malalai is because we have people who won't allow us to go to school."
As if on cue, a teacher interrupted and said: "Prove to us that the rights of men and women are the same in Islam. Because the men are saying: 'Don't vote for women. It's not Koranic. It's only the command of Bush's wife, Laura, that women are candidates.' "
A few days later, Siddiqi made the mistake of accepting an invitation to the most remote region of Khogiani, Saima Khogiani's tribal base. It's a place of lurking Taliban, where roadside bombs are now commonplace and people joke that the women have to do most of the work because the men are all hiding from blood feuds. Siddiqi delivered her speech to hundreds. Then, just as they were rolling out of the village, rockets and grenades and rifle fire hit her convoy. A few of the police officers in the leading car were wounded. Siddiqi lay with her brother on the ground and then walked for hours to escape from the village.
Yet a week later, when most of the female candidates were lying low, ordered by their families to campaign only at home by receiving visitors, Siddiqi rallied for one last splashy trip through the bazaar of Jalalabad. In a coasting S.U.V. she popped out of the sunroof and addressed the crowd through a loudspeaker. Men followed her progress in mild horror. "Look at this cow out of the car," one shopkeeper said. "Isn't she ashamed to wander through the bazaar?" another said. But no, she wasn't, and as she passed though Pashtunistan Square she confronted the people of Nangarhar with her promises and her questions. "This was the second attack that happened to me here" -- the first was last year. "Did I kill someone? Did I steal something? Are my hands red with blood? Why did you take the weapon to kill me? It is not in our culture to kill a woman without reason." She thanked the crowd for their support. Then her husband jumped in to dispel the rumors that he was in fact a Hollywood actor, not a real Afghan Muslim. Children read poetry. The Koran was recited. And on election day, Siddiqi donned her Afghan flag chador and voted.
It was a strange day. The turnout in Nangarhar, as elsewhere, was very low. One Afghan woman I met, who worked for an N.G.O., told me that when she tried to urge women to decide for themselves, not to be under the influence of their men, they told her, "Why shouldn't we listen to our husbands and brothers? You are a kafir" -- an infidel -- "you've been with all these foreigners so long!" A woman who was voting for Siddiqi explained, "My owner told me to." "Your owner?" I asked. "Yes. Mullah Abdul Rahim. Our husband is our owner."
Early returns showed Siddiqi, Khogiani, Barakzai and Rocketi all headed for Parliament. Although the returns were incomplete, initial counts even had Siddiqi ahead of Hazrat Ali.
A few days after the elections, I drove out of Jalalabad along the Kunar River through acres of brown sea-turtle-size stones that gave way to unexpectedly lush fields. I was looking for the father of Khalida, a young woman I'd met in a hospital. She had thrown kerosene from a lamp upon herself, lighted a match and tried to die. She was reed-thin, with burns from her face to her toes. She had little feeling left. But she was upset by what she saw in the little mirror her sister gave her. She wanted to speak and managed to get a few words out in spurts: "My father is an old man"; "We are poor"; "I have two little brothers, one is mad"; "My husband was 35, and he was good to me at first." She was 15 when they were married. Her price was small -- 50,000 rupees, just under $1,000. For whatever reason, perhaps poverty, perhaps jealousy or frustration, her in-laws began to beat her while her husband was away working as a driver in Saudi Arabia. They complained to her husband that she was doing bad work -- and when he returned to their home, he began to beat her, too. After five years, with a 3-year-old daughter, she couldn't bear it any longer. "That day my father-in-law hit my head with a brick"; she crawled away and found the kerosene lamp.
When her father-in-law discovered her, he kept her for some 20 days on a bed without a mattress next to the cows. The filth and the flies infected her wounds. Her suffering and her story, told in the stifling heat of the hospital, was like so many others and would end, a week later, with her death.
In his collection of women's landays, the poet Majrouh wrote that in the face of a life of perpetual inferiority and humiliation -- "even her husband does not stoop so low as to eat with her" -- what is the Pashtun woman's reaction? Submission. Duties performed like clockwork. Acceptance and suffering. "Yet," he wrote, "if one takes a slightly closer look, it turns out that in her innermost self the Pashtun woman is indignant and skeptical, feeding her rebellion. From this deep-seated and hidden protest that grows more resistant with every passing day, she comes out with only two forms of evidence in the end -- her suicide and her song."
He wrote that the tribal code of honor considers suicide a cowardly act, and the Pashtun male will never resort to it. In his time the two methods women used were poison or drowning. Today, Sharifa Shahab, a tireless young woman from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who has worked in Herat, Kabul and now Jalalabad, has found that women tend to choose poison or self-immolation. It was Majrouh's conviction that the songs of Afghan women challenge the society in a similar way as their suicides, by glorifying three themes that taste of blood -- love, honor and death. "By eliminating herself in such an accursed way," he wrote, "a woman thus tragically proclaims her hatred of the community's law."
I don't know what exactly I hoped to find by tracking down Khalida's father out in his wind-swept village. He was a short way from the cemetery where he buried his daughter and, before that, his mad son, whom Khalida never knew was dead. Certainly I did not expect the depth of the man's wretchedness. "I thought a mullah" -- Khalida's father-in-law -- "would be a good person to take care of my daughter," he said. "I was wrong. He had no sympathy." He wept so hard I thought his fragile frame would snap.
What I did find in this man, who had spent most of his life as a shoe-mender in Pakistan and now, in his old age, would often travel the eight hours to Kabul to seek work in the bazaar as a laborer, was precisely what Majrouh had surmised lay in the innermost self of the Pashtun woman -- a wild rage and hatred of the community's law.
I also found a surprising belief that telling the story of his daughter's demise and her in-laws' malevolence might somehow help prevent such things from happening again and prevent Khalida's husband from getting another wife. What the father wanted was justice. He didn't know how a jirga -- the assembly of elders who settle disputes -- could deliver that, given the many months that his in-laws, who were also his cousins, had been able to get away with torturing his daughter. "By the human rights commission," he said, "we will find them and bring them to court."
Sharifa Shahab has less faith than Khalida's grieving father that the government will be the place to resolve the issues of abuse of women. As she said to me one night: "How can we trust the government to do anything when all the warlords are in government? Dostum" -- an indestructible warlord from Mazar-i-Sharif -- "burned my house down during the civil war because my father was against the Communists. Ismail Khan" -- formerly governor of Herat, still power broker there and minister of water and power -- "had his men assault my son because I tried to set up a women's council without his permission. Khalili" -- Abdul Karim Khalili, currently a vice president -- "captured all my father's lands. And in Jalalabad, I had an official letter that we are sure is from the old governor saying I better leave Jalalabad because I was trying to change the religion of the people by working on women's issues."
And then Shahab told me the story of two wives who were recently killed. Two men exchanged their sisters so they could avoid the high price of a proper bride. One of the men killed his wife the first night, accusing her of having had sexual relations before marriage. When the news arrived in the other village, the other man brought his wife -- the other man's sister -- and made her walk around the grave; he cut her hands and feet off and killed her on the grave of the other girl. "Why? I asked him, and he said, 'He killed my sister; I had to,' " Shahab told me. "The government forgave the murderers because the jirga forgave them, and the jirga is higher than the law." So she will not wait for the government or any electoral miracle to intervene. Instead, she's creating women's jirgas, using Afghan traditions to bring about change. "Otherwise, I am totally alone here," she said.