CHAPTER 9

THE LIONESS

If you see an injustice being committed, you’re not an
observer, you’re a participant.

—June Callwood

“I’LL BE LATE FOR SUPPER as I have a meeting at the Serena Hotel with the Norwegian foreign minister.” The casual comment from Sima Samar to her family when she left for work on January 14, 2008, gave no hint of the horrible events that would unfold that day or that she would be caught in the middle of a terrorist attack when the Taliban pulled off a well-planned, carefully executed assault on the famed Serena Hotel, the one place that was supposed to be categorically safe.

When Afghans sat down to dinner that night, shocking headlines led the news in Kabul and around the world, claiming the target of the attack was the Norwegian foreign minister, the man Samar was meeting. The secretary-general of the United Nations issued a statement, claiming that the attack was revenge for Norway’s assistance in ousting the Taliban along the border with Pakistan, but no one in Kabul saw it that way. The diplomats and foreign aid workers said the brazen raid was an announcement that foreigners were now the target: foreigners and Afghans who do business with them—such as Samar.

As chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, Samar is often asked to meet with foreign delegations. But her presence signifies more than the courtesy of international diplomacy. She is the Lioness, the woman who dared to thumb her nose at the Taliban, who took the women’s quarrel to the outside world during the five miserable years when they were thrust back into the Dark Ages, a passionate human rights advocate who names and shames the war criminals, a tough-minded broker who steadfastly promotes the need for change in Afghanistan. She won’t be cowed: not by religious fanatics, not by warlords, not even by President Karzai. It’s a costly position for a woman to take in a country whose citizens disavow gender equality, a country governed by a president whose power hardly extends beyond the city centres, and whose warlords, insurgents, and fundamentalist religious leaders would like to see her dead.

This is a woman who has not been able to go for a walk, go shopping, or meet friends in a tea house for six long years. She leaves the sanctity of her home only to go to work, and never without protection.

Samar was driven to the Serena Hotel, which calls itself “an oasis of luxury in a war-ravaged city,” in a bulletproof car with her three bodyguards that January afternoon. They checked in with the guards at the gate and manoeuvred their SUV through the anti-terrorist cement blocks that ring the circular driveway to the main entrance. It was a sunny day, but minus twenty-five degrees, so there was no lingering at the door: Samar went directly into the hotel to her 5:30 P.M. rendezvous, in a room on the lower level, with the seven-member Norwegian delegation. She recalls the meeting as nothing out of the ordinary, at first: “We were discussing security in the country when we heard the first explosion. The sound was dull and, after all, we hear these explosions a lot in our country, so I thought it was far away and wasn’t worried.” Thirty seconds later, she heard the rat-tat-tat of automatic machine gun fire. “I knew it was close. Then the second explosion shook the room—I thought it was on top of us, maybe the floor above.”

In fact, the terrorists, dressed in police uniforms, had stormed the gate of the Serena and shot the guards, and as they made their way to the door, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the driveway, acting as a decoy to give the terrorists time to get inside the hotel. A second suicide bomber detonated his explosives in the lobby of the hotel, while the gunmen followed a hallway downstairs to the exercise room where foreigners were known to work out and began firing as soon as they burst through the door.

Inside the meeting room, a man from the Norwegian Embassy barricaded the door. A waiter assigned to serve at the party, who doubled as a security agent, told everyone to get down on the floor. Then Norwegian bodyguards arrived with their guns drawn and instructed Samar and the delegates to get under the large, long table in the middle of the room.

“We all crouched under the table. I thought it was fighting between the security operators or maybe a terrorist attack.” While huddled with the others, she called her driver to find out what he knew. “It’s really bad out here,” he said. At first, he thought they had been hit by a rocket. The tire was punctured and shrapnel had taken chunks out of the side of the armoured vehicle. It took a few minutes before he realized that the debris on the windshield was body parts and that this had been a suicide bomb. “Stay in there, keep yourself safe,” he told Samar.

“There’s still a lot of shooting. No one knows where the gunmen are now.”

“Everyone under the table was on a cellphone,” says Samar. They were moved to the bomb shelter, which turned out to be the hotel kitchen, about fifteen minutes later, and joined about 130 others brought from the lobby, the coffee shop, the sauna. One man was wrapped in a towel. He had been in the sauna when the gunmen opened the door. He literally dove out the window naked, then found his way through the hotel garden to a soldier, who took him to the kitchen and gave him a towel. Another man was crying. He kept lamenting the deteriorating security in the country, saying, “We didn’t ask for a palace, just a piece of bread.” Samar tried to calm him down. She had also noticed piles of linen in the hallway as they were hustled to the kitchen and had decided they would make a good place to hide if it came to that.

They were kept in the shelter for about four hours while soldiers searched the premises, until they could be sure the attack was over. Seven people died, six more were badly wounded. It was 10 P.M.. when Samar was escorted out of the hotel. She went directly to her car, which was now part of the crime site and could not be moved. A police officer drove her home.

WATCHING THE EXTENDED FAMILY wait for a mother, wife, daughter, or sister to return was like being witness to the trials and ills of the last thirty years in Afghanistan. Samar’s daughter Tamanna, seventeen, is trying to be calm but blinking her eyes incessantly and starting at every phone call. Samar’s mother, Khorshid, who doesn’t know how old she is but guesses she is in her late seventies, is a devout woman who prays five times a day and knows her daughter is the target of extremists. She mumbles her prayers, clutches a scarf to her mouth, and walks silently into the room and out again, hoping for news. Samar’s husband, Rauf, a handsome, debonair man who runs Shuhada, the NGO that Samar started in 1989, talks to the men who guard their house and phones contacts, trying to get a handle on the unfolding events. Her half-brother, Ahmed Ali, the son of her father’s second wife, who had come to Kabul with her as her chief of staff when she was named to Karzai’s cabinet in 2001, acts as command central: He is on the phone with Samar and then her bodyguards, her office staff, and government security, trying to piece the information together. And her brother Wahid fingers his worry beads, sits cross-legged on the floor with the others, and glances up whenever a cellphone rings.

Dinner is served without her, and as everyone gathers around the dastarkhan (the plastic cover placed on the floor, around which the family gathers for meals), the only sound to break the silence is that of spoons scraping on bowls and cellphones ringing. This roomful of people, who have seen relatives and friends wiped out by the turmoil of the last three decades, tonight live through the agony of waiting. The dinner platters are cleared away, Samar’s plate kept aside, pots of tea filled again and again, until at last the gate opens and the Lioness comes home.

The next day she says, “Somehow I wasn’t very afraid. My mouth wasn’t dry. I was calm during the whole thing. But then, I didn’t sleep all night, and today I think it must be post-trauma stress, as I feel scared.” There was no time to process the trauma because she found herself receiving calls from literally hundreds of well-wishers, most of them performing an Afghan custom called qurbani. While it is normally an offering of food or money to the poor, during celebrations such as Eid ul Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, qurbani is also performed when someone has been saved from death. All day long, they came to her office at the human rights commission and to her home in Karte-se carrying naan, leading sheep to the door (at last count, five days later, there were eight), and bringing packets of money. “It will be distributed to the poor,” she explains. “It’s a kind of safety tradition that keeps the evil eye from you, and gives the sheep or the bread in your place.” Not a woman to be dewy-eyed over tradition, Samar is nevertheless obviously touched by the outpouring of affection and concern. “Almost every friend has called. So has Vice-President Khalili and most of the cabinet ministers, to say they are happy that I’m safe.”

But in the safety of her home, she confides that although the attackers were dressed as policemen, one of them actually was a policeman, and the police who came to rescue them were drunk. “We know these things are happening,” she says. “The protection and security of the people is the state’s responsibility. But we can’t trust the legal system, and no one is accountable so there’s no justice.” She blames corruption, nepotism, and a lack of commitment from people who benefit from the system the way it is.

This isn’t a post-conflict country. We are in conflict. And it’s not just the Taliban. It’s no longer clear who to blame. Imagine how people feel after seeing what almost happened to me when I’m so well guarded. They think if they just go out to clean the street, they’ll end up in pieces.

Dr. Sima, as she is known to Afghans, is the ultimate been-there-done-that woman. She bucked the system and fought her own family so she could go to school and become a doctor. Her father had two wives and produced four children with one, eight with the other. Sima grew up witnessing the competitions and consequences of polygamy, as well as the unequal treatment of women and girls, and dedicated her life to changing the status of women in Afghanistan. She fought the Soviets, the mujahedeen, and was the Taliban’s most hated woman when she kept her girls’ schools and women’s health clinics open despite the Taliban threat to kill her.

I have been following her as a journalist for eleven years. Her reputation came before her when I was seeking an interview with someone who would talk about the Taliban during my first assignment in 1997. But I was warned: “She could be killed for talking.” Our interview began in the arrivals lounge of the airport in Quetta, but she was due back at her clinic, where she was scheduled to do abdominal surgery, and suggested I join her. Pretty impressive, I thought: a women’s rights activist, caught in the calamity of war, scrubbing up to go into the operating room. That wasn’t all. She had to dash home after the surgery to get the supper started. Back at the clinic, she filled me in on the consequences of a medieval theocracy taking the reins of power. A lot of those consequences were sitting on benches at the clinic waiting for treatment: Women who had been beaten or worked nearly to death. Women who had been refused medical help because of the Taliban edicts and were now perilously close to being too late to benefit from it. Women who were pregnant with an eighth, tenth, or fourteenth child they were too exhausted to care for. Women who could not get pregnant and risked being relegated to slave status, while their husbands took second, third, and fourth wives to ensure male progeny. It was like a list out of the Middle Ages. But even here, she dealt with the many women’s ills with a gentle hand and told stories that made everyone laugh. There was a conspiratorial attitude, solidarity, and a sense of humour that spoke of survival.

After a full day of arguing with the United Nations to get her share of donated wheat for her girls’ schools, writing prescriptions, and performing surgery, she went home and made yogurt from scratch, prepared kabuli, the traditional Afghan dinner of spiced rice heaped over boiled lamb, and turned a pot of spinach into a delicious paste to serve to her extended family of fifteen. All in a day’s work.

One of the survival cards she holds is a razor-sharp sense of humour. My favourite Sima Samar story happened in Jaghori, in the central highlands where she grew up. The Taliban had told her to close her hospital. She refused. Then they stole the generator. Not even Samar can run a hospital in a town without power and no generator, so she had to close it down. A few days later, she was working in a clinic nearby when a Taliban soldier threw open the door and barged in, pushing an elderly woman in front of him. “She’s sick,” he announced. “Fix her.” Clearly even the Taliban knew Samar’s reputation as a first-rate doctor. She examined the old lady, realized she had tonsillitis, and told the soldier, “Leave her with me overnight, come back tomorrow.” She started a course of antibiotics for the woman, chatted with her, and made sure she had a comfortable place to sleep. When the Taliban soldier returned the next afternoon, she sat him down and said, “We have a problem. You have my generator. As it turns out, I have your mother.” They made a trade. She was back in business.

After 9/11, Samar became one of five deputy prime ministers of the interim government, and the first-ever minister of women’s affairs. But the fundamentalists who saw her as a threat to the status quo were toiling behind the scenes of the newly appointed government, seeking ways to discredit and dismiss the woman who was demanding reform. She had been interviewed and photographed by an Iranian newspaper while she was in Canada receiving the prestigious John Humphrey Freedom Award from Rights and Democracy in December 2001. In the interview, she criticized the Taliban interpretation of sharia law, a reproof widely agreed on by Islamic scholars, and the accompanying photograph showed her without a head scarf.

The extremists pounced in June when she was elected vice-chair of the Loya Jirga by fifteen hundred delegates who had gathered from all over Afghanistan to prepare the country for a two-year transitional government that would follow the six-month interim government and lead towards a nationwide election. The leading Islamic party, Jamiat-e-Islami, proclaimed that she had criticized sharia and had bared her head in public. They said Samar was the Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan (referring to the novelist who incurred the wrath of Iranian fundamentalists when he published The Satanic Verses) and issued a fatwah calling for her execution.

The United Nations took her into protective custody. The reformers, especially the women, held their collective breath. The Lioness had been caged, not by the illiterate Taliban but by educated men, some of them graduates of Harvard and Oxford, some of them members of the government’s cabinet who wanted her silenced.

The chief justice at that time—the redoubtable Shinwari— waited for the chips to fall before deciding whether to send the case to trial. Everyone at the assembly, and in the diplomatic community in Kabul, knew the real issue was the progress Samar was making for women and girls. But the anti-women warlords made it clear that they would not cooperate with the government if it didn’t back off on women’s rights.

When Canada’s foreign minister, Bill Graham, heard about the debacle, he had a visa issued for Samar and told the United Nations he would make sure she was welcomed in Canada if they could fly her out of the country. Legions of women from all over the world lined up to support her and offered her safe haven in half a dozen countries. But she knew that leaving during the tumult would be a voyage of no return, so she stayed and fought the charges. With Samar in protective custody and Canada asking questions, the stalemate in Kabul was getting messy. Then, in a deal with the devil, President Karzai caved in to the pressure from extremists. Samar was dropped from the cabinet, the transitional government took office, and the case against her was stayed.

The first time I met her, in March 1997, Samar said, “I have three strikes against me. I’m a woman, I speak out for women, and I’m Hazara, the most persecuted tribe in Afghanistan.” Now she was the object of attack because she was demanding and getting change for Afghans and challenging the impunity of powerful men. When she was made chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, those who saw her as a threat in government may have rued the day they finagled her undoing. As human rights chair, she is tackling everything from women’s rights and tribal law to government corruption and transitional justice (that is, justice adapted to societies transforming themselves after a period of pervasive human rights abuse). The commission seeks recognition for victims and promotes peace, reconciliation, and democracy for all Afghans. She treads the rough waters stirred up by warlords and religious extremists, and tacks her way through policy at the United Nations as well as the Karzai government.

From the outset, her mission statement was “no peace without justice.” But bringing war criminals to account in Afghanistan is a complicated concept. There is not even a word in the Dari or Pashto languages for transitional justice. During the Bonn Conference in November 2001, participants said war criminals, and those guilty of crimes against humanity and gross violations of human rights, should be excluded from the interim government that the conference was mandated to create. There was also a discussion about forbidding the newly formed government from issuing an amnesty to any of the known perpetrators. But the wording never made it to the document that was signed on December 5. The only reference to human rights in the Bonn Agreement was the commitment to establish a human rights commission. Samar says everyone presumed that the mandate of the commission would include examining past crimes, but it wasn’t put in writing.

Subsequently, President Karzai himself called for a truth commission “to ensure the people will have justice.” Samar doubted he would keep his word but leapt at the opportunity to fling open the doors of the Soviet, mujahedeen, and Taliban past and expose the crimes that everyone in the country knew about but hardly dared mention publicly for fear of reprisal. She consulted with Pakistani jurist Asma Jahingar, who was the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing at that time, and with Louise Arbour when she became the high commissioner of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Then she sent her team across the country to interview six thousand Afghans about the events of the last twenty-five years. It took eight months to gather the evidence—a difficult and dangerous task in the midst of the ongoing conflict—and in January 2005, the report, “A Call for Justice,” was given to President Karzai by Samar and High Commissioner Arbour together. It began with an overview of how Afghans arrived at this place:

More than a million people lost their lives and almost the same number became disabled in the course of the war, as a result of antipersonnel landmines, indiscriminate bombing and rocket attacks by the former Soviet Union and the regime backed by them, and attacks by armed militia groups, including the Mujahideen and Taliban. Thousands of people were put in jail for their political beliefs and tortured. Thousands of children lost their family members and their fathers. Afghanistan’s streets are now full of orphaned children who must beg to survive. More than seven million people were forced to leave their villages and towns and take refuge in Iran and Pakistan.

The miseries of this period of conflict cannot be described in words. One can only feel the pain by listening to the cries of widows, orphans and other victims around the country.

The report made international headlines with the shocking claim that 69 percent of the population had suffered human rights abuses. These were “staggering statistics in comparison to any other conflict in the world,” said Arbour. The report focused on a four-step action plan: firstly, to acknowledge the suffering of the Afghan people; secondly, to ensure credible and accountable state institutions and to purge human rights violators and criminals from state institutions; thirdly, to seek and document the truth of what had happened; fourthly, to promote reconciliation and improve national unity. The conclusion called for: “The promotion of peace, reconciliation, justice and the rule of law in Afghanistan, and the establishment of a culture of accountability and respect for human rights.” The timeline for accomplishing the action plan was three years.

Samar knew that the concept itself was unheard-of in Afghanistan and that it needed careful explaining, lest the enemies of the report use it to sway public opinion. The commission prepared a detailed statement explaining transitional justice and made it as widely available as possible, sometimes using radio broadcasts to read it to a mostly illiterate population. Samar wanted the public to understand that transitional justice is a question of more than just criminal responsibility; it also is an important step towards reconciliation and the restoration of peace.

The document stated plainly that a transitional justice strategy should include “truth-seeking, victim recovery, re-integration of the deceived and perpetrators in the society, reparations, the preservation of peace and stability, the strengthening of democracy and the rule of law and the administration of justice.” It says in part:

Transitional justice is often misunderstood as addressing questions of criminal responsibility only. As a first step, transitional justice strategy aims to realize peace and national reconciliation, to restore co-existence and co-operation, to heal the wounds and pains of the victims and to re-integrate the citizens into a peaceful life in the society. Reparations, healing of the physical and psychological suffering and re-integration in the community of citizens, whose social relationships have been damaged, are all attempts that go beyond concepts such as court, prison and revenge and run counter to them. Efforts to promote the culture of forgiveness, affection, brother-hood and sisterhood and to strengthen the solidarity between the country’s today and tomorrow generations, constitute the principal foundation of the present Action Plan. The positive experience of countries that have passed bloody crises show that the transitional justice strategy should balance a variety of goals including truth-seeking, victim recovery, re-integration of the deceived and perpetrators in the society, reparations, the preservation of peace and stability, the strengthening of democracy and the rule of law and the administration of justice ...

As in the earlier report, “A Call for Justice,” the document on transitional justice called for action in four key areas: symbolic measures such as acknowledging the suffering of the victims; institutional reform such as establishing accountability institutions; truth-seeking and documentation by, for example, recording past events in a historically accurate manner; and reconciliation, which could include reparations and working to restore the people’s trust in its government and institutions.

The commission also called for bold action against war crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity, saying that “the commission of such crimes does not fall into the scope of amnesty on the basis of the principles of the sacred religion of Islam and internationally accepted standards” and clearly noted that “special attention must be given to ensuring the active participation of women in the process.”

Then Samar waited. The government was silent. The report sat on the president’s desk, gathering dust. Rumours circulated about the names in the report—some of them cabinet ministers, others close associates of the president. Ministers Rabbani and Fahim, member of parliament Sayyaf, speaker of the house Qanuni, and the grandson of the king were among those said to be named. Leaked versions of the details in the report started turning up in newspapers. For example, when Amanullah Gozar, a former mujahedeen muscleman and alleged war criminal, was appointed chief of police in Kabul, people whispered that he was on the list of human rights abusers in the transitional justice report. (He was actually fired less than a year after being appointed to the post.) There were suggestions that even if the government wanted to act on the report, they didn’t have a functioning judiciary to deal with the cases that would be brought before the court.

Samar continued the wait, steaming with indignation, concerned about the consequences of burying the facts, and wondering whether the government’s initially welcoming reception of the report was all smoke and mirrors.

Then in March 2007, President Karzai declared an amnesty to all former combatants and those accused of war crimes and violations of human rights, as long as they agreed to abide by the constitution and the laws of Afghanistan. Six months later, he took tentative steps towards adopting the action plan, but it was mostly by shuffling provincial governors, friends, and relatives of people in power from one post to another.

Samar concedes the judiciary presently in place in Afghanistan could not manage trials of war criminals, and that letting the guilty go free after a botched trial would be worse than not charging them. But she hasn’t given up the task, saying she has no other choice but to continue the struggle. “It’s six years now [since the government was formed]. We had high expectations, maybe too high, that have not been fulfilled. People are tired of waiting for these promised changes.” She has support for her call for accountability. A new initiative, A Platform for Citizen Initiative in Truth and Justice, got off the ground soon after the amnesty announcement, and in Louise Arbour’s report on Afghanistan to the United Nations in January 2008, the high commissioner said:

Human rights and its defenders have come under attack by those who view human rights as a Western-imposed concept, as counter to local religious and cultural traditions, and as a luxury that Afghanistan cannot afford. Yet, insecurity in Afghanistan generally emanates from failure to address ongoing human rights concerns and violations, including to effectively address past violations. During my visit to Afghanistan, I found Afghans from all walks of life claiming their rights to food, shelter, education, livelihood, health, justice and physical security. The creation of new institutions to protect human rights should not be perceived as an attack on traditional systems but should seek to complement and build upon their strengths.

Then she added:

Regrettably, progress in implementing the Action Plan on Peace, Reconciliation and Justice, adopted by the Government in December 2005 and slated for completion by end of 2008, has been extremely limited. Significant political opposition to transitional justice in Afghanistan, exemplified by the adoption by Parliament of the National Reconciliation Charter or amnesty law in March 2007, seriously undermines the Action Plan.

Samar addressed an international conference at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre six weeks before Arbour’s report and challenged the participants to speak out on the taboo topics of Afghanistan:

You can’t have a democracy without women. It’s good that they are in the parliament, but how many women can make a decision about how many children they’ll have? The speaker of the house doesn’t believe in human rights. Who’s talking about that? We have freedom of expression, but the media outlets are mostly run by Iran, warlords, and jihadists. You have to speak out, be with us.

Back in Afghanistan she addressed the Human Rights Day event, also known as the National Memorial Day of Victims, a gathering that included President Karzai, and said in part:

It has always been that innocent people of this land have paid a big price due to the unsafe situation. Their sacrifices are not in vain and have captured the attention of the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. For this reason, the government has created this day to honour the memory of victims of human rights violations. But the celebration of this day cannot reflect the will of the people and victims through commemoration while there is no commitment for justice and no demand for justice.

She called for an end to “the culture of the powerful escaping the laws of the land.”

Like a bad odour, the government’s inaction wouldn’t go away. And Samar reminds her audiences everywhere she goes that there can be no peace without justice. On April 23, 2008, her commission took another step to keep the justice issue on the front burner and called on the government and the international community to extend until December 2009 the period in which human rights violations and war crimes committed in the years prior to 2001 can be addressed. “The action plan has not been implemented effectively and according to its own goals; therefore we want it to be extended at least until December 2009,” Farid Hamidi, a commissioner in the AIHRC, told IRIN news in Kabul.

Human Rights Watch picked up the torch by criticizing President Karzai and the international community for doing little to bring war criminals to justice and instead following a policy of “reliance” on powerful warlords allegedly involved in past crimes.

Samar has waited a lifetime for justice in Afghanistan. The finish line continues to elude her.

IT IS STILL DARK WHEN SHE PREPARES to leave for Kunduz, the city in the northeast quadrant of the country that is opening a new human rights centre on January 21, 2008. The centre is seen as a symbol of progress, but coming on the heels of the attack on the Serena Hotel just one week previously, the trip to Kunduz is measured through a sniper’s scope, a suicide bomber’s vest, an insurgent’s preference to wipe the human rights program out. The night before her scheduled departure, she is told that weather conditions have forced a change of plans; the plane they are to take to Kunduz can’t land due to heavy snow, so they will take a helicopter instead, which means her bodyguards can’t go with her. The three men, who have been her protectors ever since she came to Kabul in 2001 to take her post as minister of women’s affairs, are apoplectic. They know the risks: With tips from the United Nations, they have aborted a dozen attempts on her life. They are adamant: she can’t go to Kunduz without them. They hatch a plan to leave almost immediately, make the ten-hour drive through the snow to Kunduz, and be there when she arrives. They will stay while she cuts the ribbon to the new human rights centre and makes a speech, and once she is safely in the helicopter, they will make the ten-hour drive back to Kabul. The drama plays out at nine o’clock at night. She is on the phone to the United Nations, begging for a seat on the helicopter for one of her bodyguards, who are awaiting the decision with an eye on the menacing weather and an all-night drive. Finally, a seat is secured for one bodyguard, and they revert to plan A, which is to have her at the airport for an early departure.

A flashlight beams off the wall of the dark upstairs hallway while she rushes to leave before dawn, packing a piece of naan and a bit of cheese in her purse, swallowing a cup of tea, stopping quickly in her sleeping daughter’s bedroom. There is no power in the house because the grid for Kabul is only activated four hours a day, from 6 P.M. to 10 P.M., so it is cold; so cold you can see your breath in the house. The windows are thick with frost, so only the blur of red brake lights and the beam of the headlights on the car that waits for her outside are visible as the vehicle pulls away from the walled compound, with three machine gun-toting bodyguards and a woman who won’t step back from the forces that threaten her work. Her mother walks like a ghost down the hall, whispering prayers for her safety. The tension is palpable.

There is a siege mentality throughout the country in these post-Serena days. Even the United Nations is in lockdown: Staff cannot be outside their offices or their homes. Evacuation plans have been reviewed, checkpoints established, just in case the place collapses and the international community needs to beat a hasty retreat. The strain is evident everywhere. At dinner in the home of three employees from the international community, the conversation takes the form of comic relief in a discussion about the current state of affairs. While Mozart plays from the computer on the sideboard, a bottle of Beaujolais is passed around, and juicy pomegranates are served for dessert, the conversation switches from the attack at the Serena (“Pass the sugar please”) to the difficulty of working during a lockdown (“By the way, did you feel the earthquake last night?”) to the revised evacuation plan. It is like watching a movie. Diners explain that the woman among them has a burka to wear, and the men have salwar kameez (traditional tunic and pyjama-like pants) and pakol hats with which to disguise themselves. They have an old wheelbarrow stashed in the backyard that they would use to carry what they can, their computers, for instance, wrapped in ragged linens. And if the unspeakable happens—an all-out attack—they will simply walk away, knowing the guards who are at their gate this night will have been the first to bolt. They will mix in with masses of people on the street and head to a secret rendezvous, where they can use the ID cards tucked in their pockets to secure safe passage.

There is a lot that is surreal about Afghanistan during the cold snowy winter of 2008. On this same day, the Shiites are observing Aushura, a four-day festival that marks the murder of the grandson of the Prophet fourteen hundred years ago. The mullahs are wailing into their loud-hailers, thousands of men are parading in the street, beating their bare backs with sticks, many of them bleeding, most of them weeping, all of them recreating the angst and revenge of yesteryear. They disrupt the traffic, draw condescending stares from the Sunni Muslims who don’t mark Aushura, and weave through the huge, black-draped scaffolds set up along the parade route.

To add to the confusion, the opening of the third session of parliament coincides with the final day of the wailing, chanting, and self-flagellation of Aushura. Security is heightened, if that is possible. And over at the Turquoise Mountain Foundation office, Rory Stewart weighs the consequences of the attack on the Serena Hotel and says, “If there are two or three more coordinated attacks like this one, the international community will leave.”

The good news of the day is that Samar has safely returned to her office. The helicopter couldn’t land in Kunduz because of the weather, so she is back at her desk, this time planning a trip to Darfur because she is the United Nations’ special rapporteur for Sudan, an interesting additional assignment for a woman whose plate is overflowing with human rights atrocities in Afghanistan.

Her report card, six years after the world came to her doorstep to search for Osama bin Laden and promised to get this pariah state back on its feet, is this: Security is worse. It improved for a while, but as the promised changes didn’t happen and the insurgency picked up speed, the ranks of thieves, hooligans, and terrorists increased. Employment is better. Women who can find jobs are back at work, although they are poorly paid. The school situation has improved. Notwithstanding the fact that girls’ schools have been fire-bombed, teachers murdered, and night letters dropped to warn parents against sending their girls to school, about one-third of the girls are at school. But now the education system needs fixing. The training of teachers and the methods of teaching have to be improved. It is fair to say that access to health services is a little better in urban areas. But violence in the home is worse, although the increased number of incidents could be due to a newly established reporting mechanism. The observation of human rights is somewhat better, but girls and women are still in jail for the crime of being raped, running away from their abusive families, or having a boyfriend. And the police still can’t be trusted by women. Poverty is the same or maybe a little worse. When the international community came to town, prices for everything from food to accommodation rose.

“There’s an expression here that says, ‘You can’t reach Mecca by running,’” says Samar, referring to the hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims with means should make. “It will take more time to bring change to Afghanistan. There are places here where people have never seen a car, where whole families live in the same room as the animals, where men sell their wives. We need champions for women.”

In a style I’ve come to expect as vintage Sima Samar, she is sewing a jacket while she rattles off the report card for Afghanistan. Actually, she is not exactly sewing: she is ripping apart a beautiful embroidered three-quarter-length coat that she bought in India. I enquire—somewhat flabbergasted as she snips off the sleeves and, using a pair of sewing shears, cuts fabric away—about what on earth she is doing to this exquisite jacket. “It’s too big,” she says in her so-what? style. “But you don’t have a pattern or a measuring tape,” I object. “I know what size it needs to be,” she says and asks someone to turn on the generator so she can use her sewing machine. She slips the sleeves into place, runs them under the needle, and fifteen minutes later puts on the jacket that indeed fits perfectly.

This is a woman who has given the max to her country, first as a country doctor, treating people who had never had medical help in their lives. She travelled by foot, by donkey, and sometimes on horseback to cure their many ills. Then she defied the Taliban at every turn. When they came to her clinic and threatened to kill her if she didn’t close it down, she didn’t even glance up from the prescription she was writing and said, “You know where I am. I won’t stop what I’m doing. Now get out of my clinic.”

Her commitment to the human rights of the people of Afghanistan has come at an enormous cost. Her first husband, Abdul Ghafoori Sultani, a physics professor at Kabul University, the father of her son Ali, the man she married so that she could escape her family home and go to university, was disappeared by the Russians. She doesn’t know what happened to him after they took him away that dreadful night. Questions still haunt her: What did they do to him? Did he suffer? Was it long? Where are his bones buried? She knows there is a mass grave near where she presumes the Soviet soldiers took him, but so far, permission has not been granted to open the grave, not even for the human rights commissioner.

She is the recipient of fifteen international awards, including the Profile in Courage Award that recognizes displays of courage similar to those John F. Kennedy described in his book Profiles in Courage. It is given to individuals who, by acting in accordance with their conscience, risked their careers or lives by pursuing a larger vision of the national, state, or local interest in opposition to popular opinion, pressure from constituents, or other local interests.

A medical doctor, a chef, a seamstress, and the champion of women’s rights in a country that has historically denied women their place in society, Samar is as tough as the unforgiving country she grew up in and as loyal as the people she serves. When asked what she is most proud of, she doesn’t hesitate: “The girls who are graduating from the schools that I started,” she says. “They are the future.”