and Vladimir Grib (Moscow: Planeta, 1984), 58.
The war against the Soviet occupation had a devastating impact on Afghanistan’s economy. An estimated five million people fled to Pakistan, Iran, and further afield. As a result of the war, social services provided by the government became largely limited to the urban centers. Both the human and economic costs and losses of the war were enormous.
Figure 10. “Volunteer detachments for the Defence of the Revolution include urban and rural workers, men and women, middle aged people and young patriots of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Their country has given them arms to fight the enemies of the Revolution and they are defending it without thought of their own life” (original caption). From The Revolution Continues, ed. Makhmud Baryalai, Abdullo Spantghar, and Vladimir Grib (Moscow: Planeta, 1984), 193.
Jihad
Armed by the United States, the different mujahideen factions organized resistance from the refugee camps in Pakistan to their villages of origin. Village women participated in the movement in various ways: by transporting weapons under their chadari, installing landmines around their village, looking after the wounded, and cooking for the combatants (N. H. Dupree 1984).
Women did not only support the jihad but they also encouraged their husbands to go to war. Of the time of resistance against the Soviets, cultural historian Nancy Dupree writes: “During the jihad one would often see men coming home from the war to rest with their families in the Pakistani camps. If they were a little slow about going back to the battlefield, the women would push and shame them into doing their duty for the jihad. The women therefore played a vital part in the war, for it was their strength that motivated men to keep fighting” (1986, 10). From their participation in the resistance movement, women developed a sense of pride and usefulness. In recognition for their participation in the war effort some of them were given political positions once the mujahideen government took over Kabul.
Pul-i-Charkhi
Conducting clandestine activities was not without risk. Repression was severe, systematic, and merciless. Political opponents were tracked by the secret services, arrested, tortured, and executed. Located just east of Kabul, the prison of Pul-i-Charkhi became one of the darkest holes in the last quarter century of Afghanistan’s war-torn history. During the years of Soviet and Communist control, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were kept behind the solid stone walls in dark concrete cells with unknown thousands never coming out alive, victims of nightly executions on the military range beyond the prison walls (Barry 2002).
What happened behind the stone walls of Pul-i-Charkhi reflects the dark side of the PDPA’s political agenda. Modernization projects conducted under the Communist government were meant to convey an ideology, a particular vision of social organization that tolerated no opposition. The immense enterprise of social engineering was conducted by the regime under the guise of development aimed at gaining people’s consent for the Red Army’s occupation of the country. But the remolding of the Afghan nation along secular lines triggered fierce resistance to social changes that were perceived as threats to Afghan culture and tradition. In obedience to the Islamic principle of leaving lands occupied by infidels, millions of Afghans sought refuge in Iran and Pakistan.
Life in the Refugee Camps
During this period Afghanistan became the battlefield upon which the United States conducted a proxy war against the Soviet Union. The Afghan resistance movement was organized around U.S.-sponsored conservative Islamist groups under the rubric of the mujahideen. The very first refugee camps were probably extensions of military training camps that the Pakistani government built for the opponents of the left-wing and pro-Soviet elements of the Afghan government. Since 1973 (nearly six years before the Soviet intervention) Gulbudin Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Masood, and Burnanuddin Rabbani—the leaders of resistance—had fled to Peshawar to build up support with the help of the Pakistani government. A number of camps, military in origin, may have been conceived as rallying points around specific military commanders with strong fundamentalist leanings, not just as neutral gathering places for refugees (Mackenzie 2001).
As in Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Congo, the United States supported opponents to the pro-Soviet regime, without any regard for their violations of human rights or their reactionary social goals. Warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who later became a fervent supporter of the Taliban and who received substantial financial support from the United States, were considered by the United States as “freedom fighters” and were trained in military camps in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
Unlike other liberation movements elsewhere, the Afghan mujahideen never encouraged the active participation of women in jihad. Women in Peshawar who criticized the politics of the mujahideen were threatened and sometimes killed. This is what happened to Meena Keshwar Kamal - almost universally known by just her first name - founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who denounced the gender discriminatory policies of the fundamentalist groups together with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (Moghadam 1994).
Attacks against women did not begin with the Taliban. In the mujahideen-ruled refugee camps in Pakistan, women had to face constant restrictions of movement and threats to their lives. In 1989, a fatwa (religious decree) was promulgated against women who worked for humanitarian organizations. Women were also requested to wear the hijab (head covering) and to strictly respect the rules of purdah. According to the fatwa, “women were not to wear perfume, noisy bangles or Western clothes. Veils had to cover the body at all times and clothes were not to be made of material which was soft or which rustled. Women were not to walk in the middle of the street or swing their hips, they were not to talk, laugh, or joke with strangers or foreigners” (Moghadam 2002, 25). A year later, girls were forbidden to attend school. The United States never reacted to these decrees and simply abandoned the Afghans once their proxy war with the Soviet Union was over.
Under mujahideen control, the camps provided laboratory conditions to experiment with modern forms of gendered repression. The rigorous separation of the sexes was reinforced through the mobilization of men to the cause of jihad and military operations. Separated from their male relatives, women were rooted in the camps, under the control of religious and fundamentalist leaders (Olesen 1996). Therefore, the fundamentalist attitude to women could be summarized as a vindictive application of sharia within the context of a political program aimed at the establishment of a complete Islamic state, justified by what they considered to be a literal interpretation of the Koran. Traditional appeals to modesty and self-effacement were turned into systematic interdiction of any visible form of feminine expression that was interpreted as anti-Islamic. These policies were implemented by the mujahideen when they took control of Kabul in 1992 and further reinforced when the Taliban came to power.
The Civil War, 1992–96
During the years of Soviet occupation, Kabul had been perceived as the origin of all the country’s misfortunes. For the conservative rural-based mujahideen opposition, which had been supported by the United States during the Cold War, Kabul and other cities were perceived to be the centers of “sin” and “vice” precisely because of the high visibility of educated, emancipated urban women. There was a widespread perception that the population of Kabul had collaborated with and had been therefore corrupted by the Soviet regime. Many mujahideen groups shared the idea that the people of Kabul should be punished for their “immoral values” (Kandiyoti 2005). As Tamin Ansary (2001) puts it: “When the Mujahedin finally toppled the last Communist ruler out of Afghanistan and marched into Kabul, it was not just the triumph of the Afghan people against the foreign invaders but the conquest, finally, of Kabul (and its culture) by the countryside.”
One of the first orders of the new mujahideen government was that women should be veiled in public. In August 1993, the government’s Office of Research and Decrees of the Supreme Court went a step further by issuing an order to dismiss all female civil servants from their posts. The decree stated that “women need not leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case, they are to cover themselves completely; are not to wear attractive clothing and decorative accessories; do not