Afghan General On Canadian Troops

An interview in Macleans:

To understand why Fawzia Koofi, deputy speaker of the lower house of Afghanistan’s National Assembly, describes her country’s current turmoil as its “golden age,” it helps to know what her life was like before the fall of the Taliban.

In 1996, she was a 21-year-old medical student in Kabul with a seemingly bright future ahead of her. In September of that year, the Taliban captured Afghanistan’s capital and forbid women from getting an education. “I had nothing to do but get married,” she says in an interview with Maclean’s during a visit to Canada with five other Afghan women parliamentarians.

Ten days after her marriage, the Taliban arrested Koofi’s husband, Hamid Ahmadi, for the crime of marrying Koofi, whose father was a member of parliament during the reign of King Muhammad Zahir Shah. A local Taliban commander at the jail threw rocks at Koofi to keep her away from the prison. Her husband, Ahmadi, was tortured and kept in freezing conditions, which led to him contracting tuberculosis. He was released after three months. Koofi fled with her husband to Badakshan, a region of Afghanistan controlled by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. But Ahmadi’s sickness was terminal. He died several years later, leaving Koofi to raise two daughters on her own.

“That made me stronger,” she says. “It made me think about politics and working against fundamentalism and against people who impose their ideas on women in the name of Islam. That’s how I came to politics.”

Koofi returned to Kabul after the Taliban were overthrown and successfully ran for office as a representative of Badakshan province. She also enrolled in law school and will soon graduate.

“These are golden years for many reasons,” she says. “First of all is the fact that we have a democratically elected parliament.  We have 68 women in the lower house. We have the international community’s attention. This is an opportunity for us to build our country.”

Koofi doesn’t gloss over the problems that Afghanistan is facing, not least of all rising insecurity and the growing reach of the Taliban. “I’m not optimistic. I’m realistic,” she says. “With all the good things that are happening in Afghanistan, we face challenges. Fundamentalism is in a growth process. You have certain characters within the government even that do not believe in democracy. There are fundamentalist figures that have influenced the government. Those are the threats we face in Afghanistan, but we have to keep going.”

Women politicians face unique challenges. Some of Koofi’s fellow parliamentarians don’t even want to sit under the same roof as her, believing that doing so violates sharia, or Islamic law. And in a patriarchal society, women seldom have the money and power that tends to help political careers. On the other hand, Koofi says, women politicians in Afghanistan are developing a reputation for honesty that is earning them the support of voters.

Koofi believes that Afghanistan’s government needs to be much more decentralized to take into account its ethnic and geographic diversity. She’d also like to see the creation of the position of prime minister. In the meantime, she says, her country’s biggest challenge is the Taliban’s resurgence. She blames this primarily on the support the movement gets from Pakistan and abroad.

“We cannot afford to support democracy in Afghanistan and dictatorship in Pakistan,” she says. “Now, you have 37 countries in Afghanistan. With 37 countries, we are not able to defeat a small group of fundamentalists because the links [to extremists in Pakistan] have become very strong.”

Koofi points to the lawless, tribal areas of Pakistan, largely inhabited by Pashtuns, the same ethnic group that comprises most of the Taliban. Much of this territory, which borders Afghanistan, is beyond the formal control of Pakistan’s government and many Taliban recruits originate there. She says the Pakistani government needs to move into these areas – not just to hunt down extremists, but also to economically and politically integrate the people who live there into the Pakistani state.

Many analysts and politicians – most notably Jack Layton of the NDP – have suggested that the Afghan government should attempt to negotiate peace with the Taliban, especially its more moderate elements. “We don’t reject the principle of negotiations and discussions and talks,” Koofi says, “but it’s very important to make a definition of what we mean by moderate Taliban.” She says that there are “small commanders here and there” who can be integrated into Afghanistan’s democracy, just like any other citizen. But she cautions that most of these minor warlords don’t have much influence.

The Taliban’s top leaders might be powerful, Koofi says, but they are so opposed to Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy that she sees little room for negotiations. “Mullah Omar, Taliban leaders linked to al-Qaeda, they have their own constitution – the constitution of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They don’t respect our constitution. They don’t respect our values and the democracy that we have created over the last five or six years. They don’t respect women’s rights at all. So how do we share power?” 

Koofi is aware, of course, of the debate in Canada over this country’s future involvement in Afghanistan, and she is careful to be diplomatic when discussing the topic. She hopes Parliament will vote to extend Canada’s mission in Afghanistan until 2011, and then “we will talk about it.”  She stresses, however, that the fight against Islamist extremism in Afghanistan is one with international repercussions.

“Before September 11, we were shouting in Afghanistan that we were the victims of terrorism, but the international community was saying it’s a civil war. Well, the extension of that civil war came to the twin buildings. That’s when the international community realized, ‘OK, the Afghan people are suffering from terrorism. Now we have to help them.’ If you don’t help Afghan people fight terrorism today, tomorrow, those same terrorists will come to your own border.”

“The Canadian public is pessimistic because you lose your soldiers in Afghanistan. Canada has lost 80 soldiers. This is absolutely understandable,” she says. “But in the meantime, we are building the police. We are building the army. The situation in Afghanistan is worth this sacrifice.”