It is about the thousands of women in Kandahar
Read more about Malalai Kakar, murdered by the brave pious merciful compassionate caring decent Taliban. (Thanks to mirax for the link.)
Most mornings, before her children wake, she peeks out her front door to look for a “night letter”-a death threat from the Taliban pinned to her home that she doesn’t want her children to see. “The notes say things like ‘Quit the force, or else,'” she says, with a thin smile. “Of course, I won’t.”…Malalai points out that women’s participation in law enforcement is not just about them. It is about the thousands of women in Kandahar who have been denied police assistance time and again, because the Muslim community does not allow men to interact closely with women they aren’t related to.
One down; how many more to go?
Perhaps the biggest reason the force needs women is the escalating rate of domestic violence in Afghanistan. There were 47 documented domestic murders in the country in 2005 and 20 in the first half of 2006, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. Moreover, they estimate that up to 80 percent of marriages are forced. Almost 60 percent of girls are married before the age of 16, some as young as 6. Incidents of self-immolation (in which a woman who has been physically or emotionally abused sets herself on fire as a means of protest) have risen dramatically since 2003, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.
Like so:
Malalai…searched the house and found a woman and her son chained by their hands and feet. They’d survived for 10 months on crusts of bread and cups of water. The woman, a widow, was handed over by her in-laws to her brother-in-law after her husband passed away. The brother married her and divorced her, a major taboo that guaranteed she would be a social outcast for the rest of her life. When she went to pick up her belongings, the brother-in-law forced her and her son into a cage and held them captive. “The Taliban may threaten me,” Malalai says. “But because of stories like rescuing this woman, the women and children love me.”
But now she’s gone, and the bastards have won.
The bastards haven’t won, they’ve just confirmed yet again they’re bastards – I’m actually quite pleased Kandahar is having such a department; it shows the bastards are loosing.
May Malalai inspire many Malalais!
They have won, damn them to hell – they killed Malalai Kakar, they will have intimidated every woman in Kandahar even more than she already was, they demonstrated for the millionth time that they will stop at nothing and that their loathing of women has no limit.
The next time someone says to me “oh but that’s their culture and you should respect that” I will probably punch them in the nose. Well I probably won’t but I’ll want to. I feel for Malalai’s children. What an absolutely heart-wrenching tragedy. What can we physically DO to stop these evil bastards? Is there something specific for Afghani women I can raise money for or volunteer for?
I was going to respond to JoB in the same vein, OB. You’re dead right. They won, the bastards.
Bugger!
Maybe it won’t intimidate them. Maybe, if so many women are on the point of self-immolation (risen since 2003–so I guess the 2001 invasion did no good in that regard?), they’re at the point where they will fight back even harder despite the greater risks to their lives.
Maybe.
Rose, there’s RAWA–the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan. Google them and check it out. They are the heroic frontline of feminism in the world today.
When I read things like this I wonder what exactly patriarchy does to the human mind that denudes it of all basic empathy. Because surely this man wouldn’t have done this to his sister-in-law and his nephew even if he’d grown up in Sweden?
Women self-immolate, and to what end? Do these protests have any effects? I’d love to see women attack the men in these countries: set fire to their coffee klatches and their all-male prayer sessions and their wedding “celebrations” of men with nine-year-old girls.
To answer your question, GT, because the only ‘purely military’ solution to a quasi-insurrectionary movement like the Taliban is to liquidate it with overwhelming force, allowing it absolutely no safe haven, killing ruthlessly anyone who comes into contact with it, and policing without exception the civilian population of the surrounding areas to maintain that cordon sanitaire.
A moment’s reflection on the geopolitics, and the plain old geography, of the region will show why this is practically impossible; while a further moment’s reflection on the actual implications of such a policy will show why it is morally undesirable.
Counter-insurgency, as the USA found out eventually in Iraq, must often be about giving the people who seem to support your enemies something that they want, when your martial instincts cry out to smite them. Hence the ‘Sunni Awakening’, etc. And even then, it doesn’t always work.
Why can they NOT be defeated militarily?
Could someone please explain?
They need to be defeated ideologically as well. It might be possible to smash them militarily, but that won’t change the mind-set, the values.
GT, read what I said, and think. Even venting as you do is a fair way down the path to ‘dragonhood’, if you wish to put it that way.
Tingey…will you shut up…
G. Tingey is right to be frustrated by the apparent inability to find a military solution to the Taliban problem. However, industrial military solutions to guerilla warfare are very difficult, as the Americans discovered in Vietnam, to take only one example.
Industrial war, of the kind fought by American and European forces, are premised on breaking the relationship between people, government, and military, so that the will to resist is lost. Once the industrial, ordered military forces are defeated in the field, the continuation of war is self-defeating, and the people will find it in their interest to cooperate with post-war settlements and reconstruction.
However, in guerilla type warfare, the triangular relation of people, government, military forces, have a common side – the people. Guerilla forces attempt to make it impossible for governments to provide a credible future for the people, so their loyalties are divided. Ordered military forces, in such situations, especially foreign ones, are overmatched for their opposition, so every propagandistic deed by the guerillas is a great victory for them, since the forces are so mismatched and the ‘spectacular’ deed makes it less likely that the government can profide confidence in an ordered future.
So Malalai’s murder was a great coup for the Taliban, and resulted in renewed calls from the government to support reconstruction, which looks correspondingly less stable than it was before.
In this sense, the bastards won, and they know that, if they can keep up this momentum, foreign industrial forces will get tired of fighting in an unwinable situation and will go home. All the Taliban need to do is to continue to destablise reconstruction, and, eventually, NATO forces will give up.
The only way to prevent this from happening, militarily, is to make it more and more difficult for Taliban forces to destablise the ‘legitimate’ government of the country. So far, they have not been able to do that. So the people, the common side of the triangle, are left with unpalatable options. Since men are already predominant, it is to their advantage to bring the fighting to an end. The only way to stop this from happening is to empower the women. Can this be done in the time available? That’s where the question of ‘Surely there is something we can do?’ will be answered.
Eric,
Damn them to hell, indeed, if only I’d believe in hell like they do. Quod non so it’ll have to stay with ‘find them, & put them to justice’ for me.
I find it disconcerting that you think they won. It implies that it’s a game, or worse, a war where it simply is the continuation to fight for process.
To say they won is to say Malalai lost & she definitely didn’t: if winning is to be the terminology used – she won & that’s that. She obviously wanted that it be known that there was another way of thinking & it is known now. & never mind that it is known here, who cares, it is known there, known enough for an enormous band of criminals to make the point they did. She shouldn’t be death but that was something she reasoned in into her actions so stop lamenting her as if she was a will-less creature and more than that even: that with her the last hope for which she fought died.
Surely the Taliban must go – & Taleban with them. Surely this will involve an enormous amount of shooting, but to go and assume all individuals involved do have to be burned from the face of the earth is a monstrosity – (If so, there is a bunch of Germans still awaitin to be killed)
If it ends it will end without winning & Malalai will take greater merits for the end than causers of Talibani loss.
Oh, JoB, for heaven’s sake, of course Kakar didn’t win, of course she lost. She didn’t want to be a martyr, she wanted to go on living and doing her job and taking care of her children. She didn’t want to be murdered so that people would know there was another way of thinking.
Furthermore, that other way of thinking is not the only thing that people know because of her murder. Another thing that people know because of her murder is that women who do what she did have a very good chance of being murdered. They already knew that, but now they know it that bit more. That’s not a win. It’s no good prettying it up so that it looks like a win.
And don’t tell us to stop lamenting her! Much less lamenting her ‘as if she was a will-less creature’ – fucking hell! Of course she wasn’t a will-less creature, she was mind-bogglingly brave, but she was murdered anyway. This isn’t Hollywood, this isn’t a novel, this isn’t the bastardization of Anne Frank’s diary which makes her last word ‘I still believe people are basically good at heart’ which was not her last word, not in the diary and sure as hell not in Auschwitz. We can fight and rebel and be brave and so on and so on but if thugs with guns want to kill us, they can do that, and if they do, we won’t have won.
Nobody has said ‘that with her the last hope for which she fought died’ – nobody has said anything like that. But she was killed and that sucks and that’s all there is to it; it doesn’t become a pretty story of heroic inspiring martyrdom just because you say so.
Well maybe you thought my last sentence was saying something like that. That’s not what I meant – I didn’t mean the bastards have won the whole war and it’s all over. I meant the bastards have won this particular skirmish, as they’ve won many others. And that matters.
I’m sorry but I really hated that first comment of yours – ‘May Malalai inspire many Malalais!’
There is nothing inspiring about being shot down like a rabid dog! It’s not inspiring, it’s the opposite of inspiring – it’s frightening and despair-inducing. The idea that it’s inspiring is sheer Hollywood, and rather childish.
And another thing – sorry, but this really riles me.
The way to win, the way to inspire, the way to make things better, is not to be murdered, it’s to go on living and working, which is what Malalai Kakar wanted to do. This idea that death is inspirational is Romantic and fascist at the same time. Murderers aren’t doing us a favour by killing off women. People’s lives aren’t fodder for our daydreams.
Ophelia,
Well I was ticked off by the winning & the loosing bit. I grant that it sucks & that it would be much more inspiring if she lived – I also agree completely we don’t need martyrs. Nevertheless, I do believe what she did wasn’t in vain & wasn’t lost because it wasn’t and it is a good thing that the bastards feel the need to make a point of it instead of just doing it as they always did, & not having to make a fuzz over it.
So strike the inspire. Delete it – but neither by death or by success as both are equally loathsome & equally HollyW as is the whole inspiration business.
Peace.
JoB, no, I don’t think what she did was in vain. But I do think the bastards got what they wanted – and all the horrible rest of it.
There’s a part of this story that doesn’t seem to have received much attention. Malalai Kakar was shot as she was being driven to work from her home by her fifteen year old son! Isn’t this a significant part of this story?
The way to win for the Taliban is to kill high profile people like Kakar, and she was obviously given scant protection. If Karzai and the Kabul government want to win, they’re going to have to do much better than this.
I hope women of the calibre of Malalai Kakarin (in the Afghanistan police force) emerge, to carry on the good work of unchaining women and children. They are desperately needed in that god forsaken country
Malalai really put the nijab to good use. She will be such a sad loss to the vulnerable, forlorn and immensely abused people.
I cannot help wondering if her large family will be at risk.
The older children will be left with no other option, I suppose, than to braid the hair of their younger siblings. As it will rather out of necessity than out of choice.
I just note, for the record, Shukria Barakzai’s remark (in the article: “Women in Afghanistan: Dying for the Job”) that “the government does little to help, other than letting her know she is at risk.” And she goes on: “That is all that the government does – send a letter by mail once every month saying my life is under threat. There isn’t talk of even providing security. I am going crazy.”
If this is true, the Kabul government is actually complicit in the Taliban terrorising of women. Not an encouraging sign for the future of Afghanistan. And if, as it seems, the Taliban have a safe haven in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan (see the article on the Taliban control of medical services for women in the NWF Province), there is no way they can be defeated with regular forces. As both the British and the Russians discovered, there are no winners in the Great Game.