The Politics of Gender and Reconstruction in Afghanistan

THE LEGACIES OF CONFLICT: IS THERE A GENDER SUB-TEXT?
(and children’s) vulnerabilities. 18 Rubin (2004), for instance, draws attention to the fact that warlords and drug
traffickers who keep cultivators in debt bondage stimulate the resort to “giving” their daughters to traffickers as
wives. The loss of personal and community autonomy in the context of the “commander system” that enmeshes
clients in bonds of indebtedness and dependence also increases vulnerability to abuses of various kinds. In
some contexts, heavy veiling by women may itself be a defensive response to predatory parties exercising droit
de seigneur rather than an expression of religion or culture (Wood 2003). Indeed, interpreting these patterns as
some unmediated expression of local culture only acts to conceal the complex nexus of influences that deepen
the vulnerability of women and girls.
Despite the serious pressures women were subjected to, there is some evidence that women’s solidarity networks
and organizations, some of which operated clandestinely under the Taliban, acted as a medium of both political
resistance and empowerment (Povey 2003). Organizations such as the Union of Afghan Women, the Women’s
Vocational and Training Centre and the Women’s Association of Afghanistan, to name but a few, mobilized professional
women who offered their services as doctors or teachers, offering literacy classes and skills training to
numerous girls and boys in homes turned into clandestine schools. Indeed, Johnson and Leslie (2002) point
out that the war years stimulated the demand for girls’ education, partly due to exposure to schooling in refugee
camps. Some UN agencies and NGOs endeavoured to safeguard humanitarian assistance projects targeting
women and attempted to keep their female staff in employment. There was often a tension, however, between
commitment to women’s rights and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. 19 Some successful programmes were,
nonetheless, able to operate. For instance, bakeries staffed by women were set up by the World Food Programme
(WFP) to assist widows and the poorest women by providing them with subsidized bread. The UN Habitat Community
Fora, which were created through the “Rebuilding Communities in Urban Afghanistan” project to promote
community initiatives, set up women’s community fora (WCFs) to provide opportunities for income generation
and to support women’s community leadership roles. The WCFs operated in difficult conditions under the
Taliban, including permanent surveillance and a degree of clandestinity. However, the fact that there were no
other avenues for women’s professional and community activities meant that women with high levels of education
and skill devoted their energies to the fora, which served as training grounds for others. Paradoxically, when
the demand for skilled personnel increased after the establishment of the Afghanistan Transitional Authority
(ATA), the expansion of the activities of international organizations meant that the best talent was diverted
to higher earning jobs in those organizations, diminishing the spirit of voluntarism that animated many women’s
civil society initiatives.
The fall of the Taliban was the result of Operation Enduring Freedom in the wake of 11 September 2001,
which targeted the regime’s Al Qaeda backers under the banner of the fight against international terrorism. This
operation was carried out by a US-led international military coalition complemented by Afghan opposition
factions, many of which had been involved in the devastating civil war of the early 1990s. The international
community and the United Nations acted rapidly to bring these factions and the political leadership in the
Afghan diaspora together to agree to interim power-sharing arrangements that led to the Bonn Agreement of
December 2001.
18 A recent study by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) shows that there is a growing human trafficking problem in Afghanistan, with victims
drawn from among the destitute, the displaced and the indebted. Young rural women (and children) are subjected to forced prostitution, forced
labour and practices akin to slavery (abduction and forced marriage, exchange of women to settle disputes, or marriage in exchange for debt repayment)
(IOM 2003).
19 Agencies like the World Food Programme (WFP) issued directives that at least half the beneficiaries of food-for-work projects had to be women; this
resulted in a significant reduction in the food aid made available even to women. Some agencies discontinued their programmes altogether. Others
adopted a more accommodating approach, negotiating concessions with respect to the employment of women (with 5,874 female personnel in the
international assistance community).
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