cantonments and conferences

The UN and western embassies have cordoned off a big chunk of town, in fact the same area where the British set up their military cantonment during the 1st Anglo-Afghan War and which is now call Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood after the man who personally killed the British Envoy in 1841. Karzai has conferred the Ghazi Wazir Mohammad Akbar Khan Medal on successive US military commanders and ambassadors; I wonder if they appreciate the irony.



You pass the Iranian and Turkish embassies on a road that Google says is called Jade-e Solh (Peace Street) but that the only street signs I've noticed in the whole city label as Ankara Caddesi (in Turkish), and then reach blast walls and a heavily defended gate. Past the guards and you have to go down a long corridor, essentially a kill zone covered by heavy machine guns, before you reach the UNAMA compound.


At UNAMA they were in fact the most friendly and helpful of government people I've consulted about my research. So far my research has consisted just of social networking, trying to meet the people who know the right people who were working on the dam development project I'm studying back 4 years ago during the period I'm studying. And so far I have little to show--the turnover of international staff of government agencies and NGO is even faster than I had expected. Surprisingly it seem like journalists are the only ones who have been working on the same long-term projects for years--the Afghan government people and employees of aid organizations I've talk to have also shuffled around from office to office every few years.

The previous couple days I stopped in at the Second Conference of Islamic Cooperation for a Peaceful Future of Afghanistan at one of the 5-star hotels here. Maybe a hundred people, mostly clerics, had been invited from provinces across the country with a few foreign guests and a number of defectors from the Taliban. The only panel I listened to in it's entirety was the one on women's issues. All the panelists followed the line that Islam, real Islam (and what constituted real Islam was unsurprisingly the biggest point of debate of the conference), is the fundamental basis for women's rights and violence against women and denial of their education is un-Islamic. The first and only male speaker said something to the effect of We all know and say the first names of the Prophet's wives, but how many of us know the first names of each others wives (apparently it's a dishonor to have other men say one's wife's name)? Do we think we're better than the Prophet?
Since it was a gather of a bunch of preachers, the question-and-answer sessions were mostly just answer sessions, and the answers to the panelists of the women's rights session were mostly hostile. One mullah said that he thought the panelists were too vague about what they meant by violence against women, because after all if a woman was disobedient her husband had the right to refuse to sleep with her, and if even that didn't work, to beat her. Another cleric said that whenever there was violence against a woman there was actually another woman behind it, most likely the husband's wife or mother. He started to give an example of how foolish women stirred up trouble: in his town a woman wasn't letting her daughter marry because she was holding out for a better bride price and it was creating tension between families. One of the female speakers cut him off rebutting that if it was the case that women were thusly ignorant and foolish it was the fault of men for denying them a good Islamic moral education. That silenced him. A cleric from Al Azhar seminary in Egypt had the final word on women with a long argument in Arabic that nobody understood because there weren't translators on hand to give Arabic-English or Arabic-Persian or Arabic-Pashto simultaneous translations over our headsets.



Women came up again when they debated what revisions to make in the official statement of the conference, which was done by rough consensus--they would ask for a show of hands over who objected to an article or it's wording and if a bunch of hands went up they would go back to revising without counting who was in the majority (which I think makes much more sense than majority rule). One of the female speakers proposed an article specifically on concern over women but the counter-argument that won out was that many of the articles talked generally about society and violence therein and it went without saying that women were a part of society. The angriest debate in the revision session was actually over the confusing grammar of a sentence that read something like "we are concerned that violence and....will contribute to an increase in violence and discord..."


During one of the tea breaks I sat on the floor with a recently defected Taliban commander from Kandahar who was talking to a female Indian grad student through a translator. He claimed that he had left the Taliban because it was the Pakistanis directing them, though he had only defected last year after 17 years as a military commander so there must have been more to the story than a suddenly realization that Pakistan was using the Taliban as a proxy, but he was sticking to this safe talking point.
He joked that India and Afghanistan should partition Pakistan between them. Later the Indian grad student told me that the former Talib had confided in the translator that he felt hatred her when he first saw her because due to her dark skin he'd assumed she was Pakistani or Kashmiri. Apparently she's always reassuring people that she's from India and not Pakistan--just goes to show how nationalism very much trumps any kind of pan-Islamic sentiment among most people around here.