AFGHANISTAN: Afghan Women Fear New-Found Freedom Will Disappear

Nine years after religiously conservative Taliban fighters forced women into hiding, many have emerged from the shadows.

Today, women are visible everywhere on Kabul's dusty roads, on their way to work and school, striding past donkey carts loaded with key limes and pomegranates, making their way past Toyotas and SUVs.

Yet secret peace negotiations under way with the Taliban could mean a reversal of the freedoms that Afghan women have come to enjoy.

Consider the Rayed family. One recent day, Farida Momand took her 14-year-old daughter, Miriam, to the park to play badminton, as young men stared in the park.

Women in a park? Unheard of a decade ago.

Miriam's father, Labib Rayed, and her brothers joined in the game, watching out for her mean backhand. Rayed calls her "a fierce competitor."

"If we lived in America," complains Miriam, "that would be a good thing."

"Let's hope it will soon be a good thing here," her father says.

What Rayed, 53, does not tell his daughter is that he fears things will get worse for her in Kabul, not better. He worries about what will happen when U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, a withdrawal scheduled to begin in January.

They fear such a development could determine whether they are forced into exile in Pakistan.

In 1996, when the Taliban took over Kabul, Farida Momand was a promising young pediatrician on the faculty of Kabul Medical University. Her husband was a spokesman for the Northern Alliance, which fought unsuccessfully to keep the Taliban from power.

In 1997, after death threats, the Rayed-Momand family fled to Pakistan. But in November 2001, when the U.S. military helped liberate Kabul from the Taliban, the couple returned with their 5-year-old twins, Miriam and Mustafa, and two younger sons. The family settled into a fourth-floor walk-up apartment with no water or electricity, and Momand and Rayed had no income. But they were determined to be part of a new, democratic Kabul.

Miriam, along with thousands of other little girls once denied an education, enrolled in school. Her mother, along with thousands of other women previously forbidden employment, got a job -- as a faculty lecturer at the medical school.

Momand at first was a rare sight walking down the street with her face showing among a sea of blue burqas. But progress for women traveled as rapidly as the new electric current lighting up the capital. Now, in Kabul, fewer than 10 percent of women wear the burqa, instead loosely draping scarves that show their faces and a wide swath of hair. On the university campus, some women don't cover at all.

At the medical school, Momand was elected to represent female university students and employees. For several years, she advocated for women at the school, getting them promotions and a lounge, and investigating claims of physical and verbal abuse. Though the program eventually fell apart for lack of government support, female students and employees still come to her for help. Women, once excluded, now make up 35 percent of medical students.

Momand, 45, dean and the college's highest-ranking female, gets teary when she recalls getting accepted to medical school in her early 20s. When the university posted the list, she rushed home to tell her father, who twirled her around the room, shouting that she was his "pride and joy."

Miriam, ranked first in her class, talks of being a surgeon. Mustafa wants to be an engineer. Rayed works as director of cultural affairs for the Afghan army. And Momand is in line to be the first female chancellor of Kabul Medical University.

"The jug is broken, the wine is spilled," Rayed says, reciting an Afghan proverb. "How could we go back? How could we let that happen to women?"

When the Taliban left Kabul on Nov. 13, 2001, the voice of female journalist Jamila Mujahid was among the first on radio. Shocked listeners had not heard a woman in over five years. "People called me sobbing with happiness," she says.

Now, Mujahid owns the Afghan Women's Radio Network and edits the women's magazine Malalai. While she is resolute that the women of Kabul will not accept Taliban control again, she concedes that the fighting must end and that negotiations with the Taliban must take place for the sake of peace.

One afternoon in late autumn, Shukria Barakzai, 38, is at home instead of in her office in parliament, having just finished several months of negotiations with Taliban "super-mullahs" from around Afghanistan

"What the Taliban super-mullahs told me and what I passed on to President Karzai is that they're tired," Barakzai says. "They don't want a star from the sky. They don't want money. They don't want to keep girls out of school. They just want to live and be left alone."
Barakzai lists what the 70 super-mullahs say they want for the Taliban: "Off the U.N. blacklist, release from jail if not convicted of crimes, representation in government on the peace council, and prosecution of government corruption."

They also demanded, she says, that all foreign troops leave Kabul. And one more thing: Most of them don't want women to work.