afghanistanvisit to demand he treat their daughter with dignity. If they are powerful
enough and the offence serious, they may even remove the woman from
the in-laws’ home until the matter is settled. In cases of serious disputes,
arbitrators may be appointed to reconcile the two parties and, as a last
resort, in-laws may publicly shame a particularly brutal husband. Peer
and family pressure, as well as the loss of face, means that divorce is not
widespread and wealthy individuals, who for some reason are dissatisfied
with one wife, will simply marry a second one.
Western discourse on gender issues in Afghanistan often disregards the
substantial progress made in women’s emancipation over the hundred or so
years. It also forgets that less than a century ago in many Western nations
the idea that ‘a woman’s place was in the home’ was commonplace, nor did
women have the right to own property in their own name or to vote. In
Afghanistan too the struggle for women’s rights has been a slow and painful
process with many regressive steps. However, it is worth noting that at the
beginning of the twentieth century all women had to wear the full veil in
public and very few women ventured outside of the family compound. The
state employed no women in the public sector, nor were there any primary
schools for girls. Yet by the time President Da’ud was toppled in 1978 the
state employed thousands of women in the health service, education, the
civil service and in the police. There were dozens of girls’ schools through-
out the country, many women held tertiary degrees, had the right to vote
and seats were allocated to women in parliament. Under the Communist
regimes from 1978 to 1992 gender policy was even more liberal. Even the
Islamizing government of President Rabbani permitted women to work and
study. In this context the Taliban’s harsh gender policies and brief reign was
an aberration. As for the American and nato intervention of 2001, rather
than instigating a major cultural revolution for women, by and large they
reinstated Islamists who held very similar views on the gender issue as the
Taliban. This had made major reform of woman’s rights more problematic
though the presence of foreign agencies and nato has restrained some of
the more extremist ideologues embedded in the current government. Even
so, institutional prejudice against women having a public role continues to
surface not just in everyday life, but within state institutions.
The British colonial encounter with Pushtuns, or Pathans, on India’s
North-West Frontier led to much emphasis on pushtunwali, or pukhtun-
wali, and these tribes’ presumed state of perpetual conflict, summed up
in a frequently quoted proverb, ‘a Pushtun is only at peace when he is at
war’. By and large, British officials inherited the Mughal prejudices, for the
Mughals, like the British, were frequently at war with the Pushtun tribes.