Peace Without Women: The Afghan Reconstruction Process and the Fight for Women's Voices

Peace Without Women: The Afghan Reconstruction Process and the Fight for Women’s Voices

With the recent conclusion of the Bonn conference and the presence of drawdown strategies in our national debates, the peace process in Afghanistan is one of the hot topics to be thinking about and discussing amongst us military and foreign policy wonks. What is often conveniently left out of both discussion and policy is the need to address women’s and gender issues during the peace process and process of Afghanistan’s economic and security development and independence and the need to overtly create inclusive systems that involve women.

In my post summarizing Bonn’s results, I pointed out that “women” was a phrase used a total of four times in the concluding document (“gender” is used once). As a phrase, “human rights” is similarly used five times. The discussion of women’s rights (and their broader connection with human rights issues) is incredibly superficial even on the international level. The international community and the Afghan government have unsurprisingly fallen prey to one of politics’ and governance’s more pervasive tropes - that women’s rights are secondary, nay tertiary or even further down the list than that, when it comes to building up a nation and transitioning a government. Women’s rights do not in reality and should not in policy take the back burner to the issues of national security and economic development. In actuality, women’s rights and the need for inclusion of women in political participation and decision-making are central considerations of both those key issues. Without actual concrete attention paid to the gender issue that so many consider a lesser focus, if a focus at all, economic and security policies will be ineffective and myopic and actual progress will be doomed.

I know I sound apocalyptic here, but I genuinely believe that we can’t expect any country in any region of the world to build its existence solely on the concerns and the input of one sex. This is not an argument for needing some innately female intuition to solve the world’s problems, because that is just another side of the coin on the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” approach to the world (a genuinely stupid and essentialist approach with which I wholeheartedly disagree). My argument is simply operating on the assumption that if you ignore the needs of nearly half of the population you can’t build effective social and political spheres and institutions that keep a country afloat.

The outcome document does mention women, and it does consider gender equality, but should get no accolades for its superficial approach. While the explanations about the desires of the conference for Afghan security and economy became increasing more specific, concrete and directly elaborated, the mention of gender equality and women’s rights were nominal and depthless with no actual concrete requests but vague prescriptions for an indefinitely progressive approach to gender and an obvious lack of political pressure on Afghanistan to give much weight to the issue.

It isn’t that there aren’t women’s issues to talk about and offer solutions for. Here is a short (and incomplete) list of issues that we might want to be addressing head on:

Health (particularly maternal mortality). When it comes to talk about there are a lot of specific issues to talk about. Afghanistan is a dangerous country for all sexes, but women, who threatened by war, by bullets and attacks and rape and domestic abuse, are 200 times more likely to die in childbirth than by a bomb or a bullet. Afghanistan has the world’s worst rate of maternal mortality: 1 in 11 women are likely to die from childbirth.
Political participation and voicelessness. Women are integral parts of the community, and the ones who have carved out political spaces for themselves have been active and amazing, but have had to fight a hard fight for their recognition and their ability. Part of the problem is fear that the gains that have allowed women to take 28% of parliamentary seats will be rolled back during a transitional process. Another problem is the fact that, as a recent UN Women report noted, progress in formal politics is not a guarantee of any progress or social change in daily life. Voicelessness is an incredible problem for women in Afghanistan: culturally and politically and that has been visible in the peace process. (I urge you all for the billionth time to watch PBS’s “Peace Unveiled,” the documentary from the Women War & Peace series that is about exactly this issue). Currently women hold only nine, largely symbolic or token, positions in the 79 member loya jirga set up by Karzai for peace negotiations.
Effects of war and Taliban rule. A recent survey taken of Afghan women showed that nine out of ten of them fear a return to a Taliban-style government in which they lose hard-won gains made over the last ten years.
Domestic violence and rape. Women face horrible rates of abuse and forced marriages, which has been partly to blame in increased rates of suicide. Recently the case of Gulnaz, a 19-year old Afghan woman, highlighted the problems women face in this category. After being raped by a male relative, she was jailed for adultery and released only after agreeing to marry him.
Rule of law. More than half of the women currently in prison in Afghanistan are imprisoned for “moral” crimes.
Literacy and education. Since 2001, girls’ school attendance has dramatically increased, but there are still attacks on female students and teachers aimed at punishing them and preventing them from going to school. Meanwhile, according to TrustLaw’s recent ranking of Afghanistan as the most dangerous country for women, 87 percent of women are illiterate.

The international community seems to satisfy itself by the mere mention of women’s rights, and needs to make more effort to involve itself in depth with what specific issues have to be addressed and how, or how a more gender-inclusive government might look. There is still time to do this, despite the lackluster moves made on national and international levels.