The Afghan women had not expected to hear a knock at the door. No one ever came to see them.
Bibi quickly looked up, shifting her gaze from the dull surface of the desk she had been staring at all morning to see the other women, who had been milling about the small space for hours, frozen. They looked back at her with a similar mixture of fear, surprise, and concern. It was midmorning, and the sound of the wooden baton rapping loudly on the thick oak door echoed against the walls of the virtually empty room and cut sharply through the quiet.
The woman in charge of the group, the one known simply as Bibi, placed her pencil on the desk and glanced several times from the door to her fellow Afghan female police officers. The blank papers on her desk, the ones that should have been filled with time schedules and assignments, rustled in the small puff of air generated by her hijab.
They all stood still, listening for another sound from the front of the room, assurance that the first three raps at the door weren’t a mistake.
Pap, pap, pap! Pap, pap, pap!
Bibi paused just before reaching for the knob and took a deep breath.
She dipped her head to adjust her hijab so she could see more clearly through the eye holes in the cloth that covered her face. The sun was shining brightly through the windows in the hallway, creating a halo effect above the head of the woman with the olive skin whose face Bibi could hardly see. It took her eyes a few moments to adjust from the darkness of her room with the covered window.
The guard who knocked on the door moved slightly to Bibi’s left, and the dark brown eyes of the woman in front of her slowly came into focus. So did the scarf that covered the woman’s head. It was plain, not offensive. Its loose fit revealed that it had been tied in a hurry. The knot wasn’t centered, causing the front of the scarf to slant and the sides to reveal a good amount of the woman’s dark hair. The dark material was slack under the soldier’s chin. The entire, hasty contraption barely touched the collar of this mysterious woman’s uniform. Bibi noticed the small black insignia near the top of the woman’s garb—a dull oak leaf at the center of her chest where the two sides of her uniform’s jacket met.
Bibi stepped back, instinctively hiding herself behind the door. She had seen a uniform like that only once before, and it was worn by men, not a woman. The memories she associated with that camouflage and its attached insignia made her limbs feel weak, her body defenseless. Taliban insurgents had shot at several men in her village and beheaded her two older brothers. Large tires attached to American military Humvees and MRAPs barreled down her street. Military men inside beige vehicles yelled at one another before some jumped out, others continued driving, and all had their weapons drawn. Some fired shots. The day after that raid she decided to leave her husband and children behind and make her way to Zabul headquarters to become a police officer. As she stared at the soldier standing in front of her now, she tried to calm her nerves.
Bibi noticed the guard looking straight at her. Impatient, he pushed the door open, and Bibi stumbled back. Rodriguez hesitated before entering, as if she were waiting for a signal. She made eye contact with Bibi, smiled, and then moved slowly over the threshold and sat in one of several small chairs placed around the room.
The Afghan women watched the stranger.
Rodriguez shifted in her seat, and the chair’s legs scraped against the floor, uncomfortably cutting into the silence. Rodriguez’s translator, an Afghan female, sat down. The major looked around the room, taking in the black curtains and small lamps on either side of the window. Then she looked straight at Bibi—who felt the stares of the other Afghan women behind her—and the officer smiled. The soldier couldn’t tell, but the Afghan women were not smiling back.
Bibi watched the woman’s smile fade. Then she saw her lips move and heard words come out that she couldn’t understand. The Afghan woman sitting next to the soldier, the one who was dressed in the same protective gear as the major, translated:
“Hi. My name is Major Maria Rodriguez.”
She waited for a response from Bibi. When she heard nothing, she continued: “I’m an American soldier, a police officer, and I’m here to help you. I would like to help you in any way I can.”
Still nothing. She looked at each female in the room for some sign that they understood why she was there. Three women sitting to the left of Bibi shook their heads in affirmation. Rodriguez pressed on.
“What is it that you need? What do you feel is lacking?”
More silence. Rodriguez looked again to the woman who appeared to be in charge of the group.
After a few moments she heard a shaky but determined voice. Bibi’s arms, which had been crossed over her chest, quickly flew into the air as she spoke.
A translation of the terse message followed: “Nothing. We don’t need anything from you.”
The soldier’s smile faded. Her mouth tensed as it closed.
“So you are happy with the way things are? Do you feel like you are able to do your jobs as members of the Afghan police?”
No response.
Unsure of what she was missing, the soldier remained silent.
Bibi watched Rodriguez wring her hands. Her palms were beginning to turn red.
The provincial governor and security force officials had paid little attention to the Afghan women since they had been stowed away in the room above his office. They had not worked. They had not been properly trained to do anything. Though a much larger group of women had finished about two months of police academy training to become officers, the standards hadn’t amounted to much. Some of the women were based in a different police unit that worked with females in the community and was geared toward investigating incidents of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment. But by the time Rodriguez showed up, about 90 percent of the thirty who participated in the classes had abandoned police life, unable to take the threats lobbed at them from the Zabul community. As soon as the Afghan women showed up, men began calling police headquarters with threats to kill, bomb, and behead the women if they continued to work. A woman working in any capacity was a violation of Taliban law, but to be a police officer, a position of authority and power, was even more deserving of torture and punishment. The female officers were called sluts. They had no uniforms. No weapons. No place to sleep. There were rumors spilling through the community that the female police officers were prostitutes and that male officers were sexually abusing them. Still, Zabul police headquarters was the safest place for the few women left to escape massive poverty and Taliban threats and fighting. The last thing her group needed, Bibi thought, was to be labeled needy women complaining to an American woman who might report them to the governor. They had made too many sacrifices, run too far.
Another officer named Bibi had deceived her husband in order to work. When he found out she was a police officer he divorced her. She told him that she quit, even though she continued to do the job. Satisfied that she was no longer an officer, her husband decided to remarry her. If she was found out, the consequences for her could be dire. Working was important enough for her to continue without her husband’s approval, trusting that her fellow female officers would maintain her secret.
Concealing jobs from their husbands wasn’t easy. She likely hid the money she made and gave creative explanations for her absences when she had to be gone for extended periods of time. Although most women slept at homes in town, women who worked in secret took the extra risk of returning home as often as possible so they didn’t arouse their husband’s suspicions.
After nearly an hour—during which eight women, in a very small, nearly empty room in the middle of Afghanistan, sat and said very little to one another—Rodriguez rose to leave.
Her Afghan companions stood, and as the soldier walked toward the door Bibi sped ahead of her to open it. Rodriguez extended her hand and said thank you.
Bibi slowly drew her hand from behind her burqa. As her hand touched Rodriguez’s, she felt what she could only think of as relief to see the major go.
After she locked the door Bibi returned to her desk to once again shuffle through blank paperwork. One woman began rearranging chairs; another scrubbed down the walls and wiped scuff marks off the floor. Another woman followed with a broom to sweep up the dust that had fallen from the bottoms of Rodriguez’s boots. They fell back into the routine of anonymity—one that was previously disconcerting but now seemed, somehow, comfortingly familiar.
Rodriguez knew that Thacker would be ending his meeting with the governor soon, so instead of walking into the governor’s office, she waited outside the closed double doors. She kept running through that first meeting with the Afghan female police in her mind. She thought about how uncomfortable she felt sitting in that cold chair. She wondered why the women were so hesitant to answer her questions or to pose ones of their own. And she reveled in the fact that, despite the poor communication, just getting the meeting—with women who were erroneously thought of as incapable—was a win.
As Thacker exited the building, Rodriguez followed, walking beside him along the path back to his office. The colonel stopped in front of the little white box that hovered at eye level and punched in the key code. The gate opened. Rodriguez waited for the right moment to announce her plan to meet again with the six women hidden in the upstairs office of the provincial governor’s building. As she closed the gate behind her, she asked for permission to bring the entire FET.