Glenn Sacks You can reach Sacks for
comment via email at glennjsacks@cs.com.
Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, after years of
unconscionably cruel treatment of women as well as general
barbarism, is finally in the world’s spotlight. Afghanistan
was one of the key battlegrounds of the Cold War but, sadly, what
was once unthinkable has now become quite clear: the U.S. was
backing the wrong side all along.
The Soviet army, led by the People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA), invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to save its allied
government from falling to rural Muslim fundamentalist rebels. The
rebels, known as the Mujahedin, were dubbed “freedom
fighters” by President Reagan and showered with billions in
U.S. aid.
Before the reform-minded PDPA took power in the late 1970s,
Afghan women were forced to wear the stifling head-to-toe veil, and
had no right to own property, go to school or divorce. The female
literacy rate was one percent and polygamy was common. Women were
considered non-persons in the eyes of the law.
The PDPA regime promoted education for girls, gave women the
right to divorce and own property, and reduced the bride price to a
nominal fee. It also distributed land to the impoverished peasants
and restrained the power of the mullahs, the Muslim clergy.
In response, the mullahs told the peasants that Allah would hang
them upside down in the sky for all eternity if they accepted the
government land grants and allowed women to be unveiled and to go
to school. Soon rural Afghanistan had exploded in a rebellion which
threatened to topple the PDPA ““ perhaps the only war in
modern history begun largely over women’s rights.
 Illustration by JENNY YURSHANSKY/Daily Bruin While
unpopular in the countryside, the Soviet-backed regime had many
supporters in Afghanistan’s cities. Urban Afghans had seen
that in the adjoining Muslim regions of the USSR ““ regions as
backward as Afghanistan until the Soviet era ““ tremendous
progress had been made in eliminating illiteracy, reducing infant
mortality, improving living standards, and raising the status of
women. Many urban Afghans saw the USSR, for all its flaws, as a
model of progress for their country.
According to Professor Val Moghaddam, director of women’s
studies at Illinois State University, “human rights reports
have had to concede that women had higher status and more
opportunities under the reformist, left-wing government.”
Moghaddam cites one such report saying that under the Communist
regime of the 1980s “women accounted for 65 percent of the
7,000 students at Kabul University, and the government sponsored
literacy classes for the 90 percent of Afghan women who were
illiterate.”
I met several pro-PDPA Afghan women when I was in Eastern Europe
in the mid-1980s. These women, who were in Eastern Europe studying
to be engineers and doctors, spoke movingly to me about the many
positive changes the PDPA had made for Afghan women. All of them
wanted to learn as much as they could and then go back to their
horribly backward country and try to help lift it up.
It is painful to think of those young women now and realize that
many are shivering in fear under a veil somewhere in Kabul, a
Taliban soldier patrolling the street nearby, ready to suppress any
attempt by them to live a normal life.
When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pulled Soviet troops out in
early 1989, it was widely predicted in the Western press that the
Afghan regime would collapse within months. It didn’t happen.
At key battles like the bloody siege of Jalalabad, Afghan army men
as well as women in volunteer militias fought side by side and
defeated the Mujahedin. The PDPA government held out until 1992,
when rebel groups finally seized the capital, Kabul.
Many of these rebel soldiers, along with Afghan refugees from
Pakistan, later came to form the Taliban, which took over most of
the country in 1996. What has followed has been a nightmare worse
than anything the PDPA ever could have brought to Afghanistan.
One picture taken shortly after the Taliban takeover says it
all: a trembling woman covered in a head to toe veil, her face
completely obscured, sobs as she speaks with a Western reporter.
Who is she? An impoverished peasant? A homeless woman? No,
she’s the recently removed chief surgeon at the
country’s largest hospital!
Many in the West now hope that Afghanistan’s fractious
“Northern Alliance” opposition, perhaps with U.S.
assistance, can unseat the Taliban.
However, they too are Muslim extremists and, while probably less
noxious than the Taliban, they leave little hope for Afghans,
particularly Afghan women.
The Soviet/Afghan war was a brutal conflict with atrocities on
all sides, but the Soviet-backed regime, for all its faults, was
the best opportunity Afghans ever had to form a modern,
comparatively humane society.
Arms in hand, courageous Afghan men and women who believed in
progress and female equality fought to stop the darkness of Islamic
fundamentalism from falling over their country. They needed the
West’s help, but we were helping the other side.