ZABUL PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN, AUGUST 2011—Maria Rodriguez’s smartphone beeped and then vibrated. The soldier to her right turned her head sharply and looked down at the major’s cargo pocket. The phone did it again: Ping! Buzzz! Bzzz! Buzzzzzz! The major’s cell phone was the only thing that had made a sound in the room for the fifteen minutes since the four FET women had taken a seat.
The female members of the Afghan Police Force were on the other side of the room in their burqas—some colorful, others black—sitting in two neat rows of three each, waiting for something to be said.
A FET member cleared her throat, turned to the translator, and instructed her to ask, “Are you happy with the work you are doing? Would you be open to more training?”
Rodriguez leaned slightly forward in her seat.
The entire FET turned from the translator to look at Bibi, who was sitting in the middle of the first row.
The American soldiers had been introduced to Bibi and the other five women who worked in the small office. Rodriguez tried asking the first questions of the day:
“How are you?”
“How has your week been?”
“How has the police work been going?”
She spoke before anyone sat down, thinking the innocent inquiries could, unlike the last visit, help the women open up. They didn’t. It was hard to find safe questions to ask of women who lived in a world that teetered between war and shattered hopes for progress—to be able to work without threat, walk down the street without being watched, and vote without fear.
The women had already brought small changes to their eight-by-ten world. For some, the space was a safe haven from abuse. Others had outsmarted their husbands to escape their villages despite declining infrastructures, which had worsened under the Taliban and made it nearly impossible for men to leave communities and find and keep work. The major was trying hard not to rock the comparatively safe domain the women had created for themselves.
Rodriguez could have guessed the answers to her questions. They had likely done no police work that week. In fact, they hadn’t done much of any since they had come to Zabul. She knew this because she had inquired with the provincial governor about the duties and responsibilities of the Afghan female police.
If Rodriguez had visited police stations in Afghanistan just two generations earlier, she would have likely encountered very different women—ones who were more independent, who were being treated as equals, and who had been given proper training and full police responsibilities.
The first woman to become a police officer in Afghanistan joined the force in 1967. And women continued to openly serve on police forces until the 1980s, when political conflicts had changed not just the ruling party in Afghanistan but also the treatment of women in urban areas where they held down jobs and had dressed, voted, and lived very much like their Western female counterparts.
Today poor training isn’t isolated just to policewomen. Until 2010 men on the Afghan National Police (ANP) force also received little to no training, according to a 2013 Oxfam report. A large percentage of male officers were recruited and assigned to a police station with the promise that training would come later. Unfortunately, later for a good deal of these men never came.
But lack of police knowledge didn’t keep male officers off the streets. The general “recruit, assign, train later” approach, used not just by the Afghan government but also by international forces working with them, led to gruff relationships between communities and the officers who were supposed to protect them. In 2010, 2,777 civilians were killed in Afghanistan. That number surpassed the civilian death toll of any year since the war had started. And 10 percent of those deaths were at the hands of Afghan security forces.
In some villages police used their status to intimidate and control the local population and were described as “another gang.” Men who were considered members of Taliban extremist groups one day became members of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), a subset of the ANP, the next, giving legitimacy to extremism, terror, and control. Local police factions sometimes recruited and then abused children from their communities.
By 2005 US forces took the lead in training Afghan policemen—and had provided billions to the Afghan Security Forces Fund. The goal was to prepare Afghan forces to take over once American troops withdrew. And although strategic and tactical training improved by 2010, the year that training became mandatory, skills needed to develop community policing largely hadn’t. The majority of the eight-week officer training course for the ANP was devoted to weapons training and other combat aspects of security; very little time was spent teaching productive ways of communicating with the public. The training course for the ALP was even shorter.
But when it comes to getting and holding down jobs, any jobs, in Afghanistan, men are given priority over women. And as difficult as it’s been for the country to get male police officers properly trained, the difficulty in getting female police officers trained and recruited has been even greater—and institutional discrimination has been one of the tools used to keep women out. Low literacy rates, for example, are a problem throughout Afghanistan—only about 31 percent of adults can read. That rate is even lower for women, with an average of about 17 percent. Yet literacy requirements are more stringent for female police recruits than for males. And while rumors of sexual misconduct forced women on the Zabul police force who trained with Bibi to quit, assault at the hands of male police officers in other provinces throughout Afghanistan went beyond rumor and became all too real. Anecdotes of women being sexually abused were present in many northern provinces when the female police force was initially revamped in the early 2000s, according to Oxfam worker Klijn’s report “Women and the Afghan Police: Why a Law Enforcement Agency That Respects and Protects Females Is Crucial for Progress.”
And the mechanism for reporting sexual misconduct in some provinces at that time was nonexistent. In other provinces it simply failed. Women can only make complaints to other women. So in provinces such as Panj Sher and Nuristan, where there were no female police officers two years after Bibi had been recruited in Zabul, women in abusive relationships or who had been raped had no recourse or concept that laws existed that could have helped save their lives.
The American military was making great efforts to improve the skills of male police recruits, but it was women like Rodriguez who took it upon themselves to ensure that their American FETs were making equal efforts to train Afghan women. Those women would be needed to continue the vital work that female soldiers provided to push back the Taliban. Female police officers would be needed for night raids, to inspect other Afghan women in suspected Taliban safe houses who may have held evidence of future terror attacks, and for ensuring that male insurgents, who often tried to disguise themselves as women in an effort to avoid being inspected at checkpoints, were caught.
Rodriguez knew the history of female police in Afghanistan.
Each time she walked into that room their struggles fueled her determination to return female forces to the accomplished units they once were.
This time, when she was greeted by the stiff grip of Bibi’s handshake, the Afghan woman turned to the translator and threw out a few words: “You ask how it’s been. It’s been normal. The same way it’s always been.”
Now seated, the American soldiers and Afghan female police officers faced one another as if on opposite sides of a scrum.
Rodriguez stared intensely at Bibi. The soldier leaned forward slightly in her chair, extremely anxious to find out the woman’s answer to whether her group would be open to more training.
Bibi stared back and said nothing.
A buzz and din from Rodriguez’s right cargo pocket echoed again through the room.
The soldier to Rodriguez’s right scooted her chair forward and shifted her body weight to give her right hip a break.
A few minutes later the translator crossed and uncrossed her legs.
They all sat in uncomfortable silence.
Rodriguez glanced toward the covered window and asked, “Do you ever open the curtains?”
“No.”
Rodriguez glanced at her watch and saw that nearly an hour had gone by since they had entered the room.
She turned to her team of women, pointed at her watch, and nodded toward the door.
Rodriguez stood, and her team followed.
The FET walked down the long stairwell from the second floor to the first in silence. They exited the building and quickly switched their head coverings for the Army-issue caps required outdoors.
After several minutes of standing on the dirt-covered walkway, one of Rodriguez’s soldiers broke the silence. She wondered out loud about the purpose of the meetings and whether the women actually wanted to be helped. She wondered if the FET’s time on Sundays wouldn’t be better spent helping other women in Afghanistan whose circumstances were much worse.
Despite the barrage of questions that followed from her team, Rodriguez never doubted her plan.
She remembered when she stood just a few feet away and had a similar conversation with Thacker—only the roles were reversed. That day, as she followed the commander on the dirt path to his office building, Thacker took on the role of patient listener. Rodriguez pressed him about bringing up the condition of Afghan female police officers with the provincial governor and Afghan security force leaders. She had sat through several meetings with Thacker and the provincial leader but still had no idea where the women were and what they needed. He gave her the best advice she would ever receive in Afghanistan.
“Change,” he said, “takes time.” The best weapon in winning the political and cultural war, she remembered him explaining, would be patience.
The lieutenant colonel’s words echoed through her mind as she told her team to hang in there. She reassured them that the Afghan women would eventually open up. She told them that the two groups would find a way to connect. “Things take time,” she heard herself saying.
“The key here,” she added, “is patience.”
As darkness fell over the desert horizon Rodriguez returned to the FOB. The sun had almost completely faded when she looked over her shoulder and saw, in the distance, near the edge of the FOB, beyond the makeshift playing fields and beside one of the watchtowers, the sand’s orange reflection. Looking at it every night gave her some sense of stability. No matter what may have happened on any given day, that glow was always there.
Later that night she reached into her pocket and took out a photo of her kids—torn along the edges, slightly creased in the middle. That photo had been with her through multiple deployments. Her daughter will always look to her the way she did in that picture: five years old, with wild, tossed black curls and a wide smile. Her little boy was three, his straight hair sticking to his forehead.
As she emptied her pockets she wondered what she and her FET would talk about the following Sunday with the Afghan women. The hours of silence in that office—small, hot, sticky—may soon take a toll on her team’s confidence, morale, and desire to help build the police force.
Before she went to sleep Rodriguez pulled a thin blanket up to her waist and tried, as she did every night, to put the worst parts of the day behind her. Learn from each day’s struggles and begin anew. The next morning she would rise early to try again. But for right now it was lights out.
THE AFGHAN WOMEN had grown used to American military women coming to see them. Bibi had helped the five other women on her team arrange the few chairs in the room. They lined them as neatly as possible—not to encourage conversation, but not to discourage it.
So she sat, just as she had during the last three Sunday meetings, in a wooden chair at the center of the first row. Her arms were crossed in her lap. She sat in front of the woman she had been told to call Rodriguez.
Bibi watched the major look around the room. To the major’s right, the soldier who had asked a question the last time was saying something to the translator. The Afghan translator turned to her fellow countrywomen and asked, “Do you have children?”
This seemed to be the first question that sparked a genuine interest in Bibi. She quickly looked up and shifted her gaze between Rodriguez and her colleagues. The major saw, for the first time in Bibi’s eyes, what she could only interpret as a smile. The very tops of her cheeks appeared to plump, forcing her lids to close slightly. She stood, reached under her burqa and into her pocket: “Yes! I have two. A boy and a girl.”
She pulled out a photo of her kids—smiling, standing side by side, each in bright blue, red, and gold outfits. They squinted as they looked up at the camera, standing in front of what looked like a small, brown cave. The photo’s edges were fraying, its center slightly creased. The girl looked as if she was six, the boy four.
“I do too! I have a boy too. And a girl,” Rodriguez said as she reached into her right cargo pocket.
She felt the tattered edges of her photo slip through her right fingertips as she handed it to Bibi, who looked down at the small photograph and chuckled. She pointed out how similar their children were in age and size and appearance. Rodriguez thought the same as she felt the crease of Bibi’s photo and its soft edges. Other women on both sides reached into their pockets for pictures of their sons and daughters. Soon they had abandoned their cold chairs for what had become shared neutral territory in the office’s empty center.
She could tell that some of the Afghan women, just like herself, had been away from their kids for some time. Each small rip in the photographs told a story of regret—of the times when decisions to fight or run meant tracing the outlines of smiles on paper instead of touching flesh and bone. They were brought together not just by the fact that they had children but because they knew the pain caused by not being around them.
They talked about morning routines that used to be filled with cooking breakfast for their kids and evening routines of cooking their mothers’ dinner recipes for their families.
After a pause in the chatter Rodriguez shared a traditional Spanish recipe.
The rice, she said—looking at her translator—should be cooked just under done. It should be yellow rice. Then you add meat—Rodriguez cupped her hands in front of her, moving them from left to right as if placing chicken and sausage into a frying pan.
Bibi listened and soaked in every step, motioning with Rodriguez. She shook her head in understanding as the interpreter described adding the peas and corn. Bibi’s eyes grew with a tinge of familiarity. She clapped her hands in recognition.
The dish was very similar to one many considered the national dish of Afghanistan, Bibi explained. It was called Kabuli pilau, she continued, which included rice, lamb, and vegetables, all in one pot.
All the women smiled, and Rodriguez felt comfortable enough to circle back to one of the first questions she ever asked.
“What is it that your group of women wants? What do you need?”
Bibi, who had just stopped talking, looked at Rodriguez. “We want to work,” Bibi said through the translator. “We are here. We’ve risked our lives to be here. We’ve left our children. We want to be able to be police officers. We need uniforms.”
Rodriguez reached out to Bibi and gently touched her forearm.
“We’ll do the best we can to help you,” Rodriguez said, just before she rose to leave.
Bibi, now filled with hope, sped ahead of the major to open the door for her and her team. This time she was the first to extend her hand. She looked Rodriguez straight in the eye and said, in broken English, “Thank you.”
On this day Bibi was not happy to see the FET women go. She feared that her tight-knit team of women, who had already started restoring the small wooden chairs to the far corners of the room to sweep and mop the floors, would go back to being ignored, hidden. Bibi locked the door behind Rodriguez and walked back to her desk, where she began shuffling through paperwork.
FOB LAGMAN, 1 A.M.—Rodriguez sat at her desk and flipped on her computer.
She waited a few minutes for her children and ex-husband to pick up the Skype call in California, where it was 1:30 P.M.
The internet access on the FOB was unreliable. Her children waved and yelled, “Hiii!” Their voices sounded slightly tinny, like they were in a tunnel. Their small hands moved in stops and starts, the bad connection slowing down the image, as they moved them in midair.
Her daughter spoke first.
“When are you coming home? What are you doing?”
She could feel how much her daughter missed her, and she wanted to hug her.
Tears rolled down her face when she answered her daughter’s questions. Her son waited for his turn to speak, looking at his sister attentively, knowing he had to be patient. He was young and learning about patience. His sister was, in her own way, teaching him quickly.
He decided to help his sister’s line of interrogation: “Are you in Monterey?”
He looked up at the world map that covered nearly an entire wall in the den, just above the computer. He pointed to the thumbtack that marked California and the other that marked Afghanistan.
“Mommy, they aren’t that far apart,” he declared, unable to calculate miles or conceive that distances beyond what he could see with his eyes actually existed.
She reached out and touched the screen as he devised a plan to get in the car and drive to her. Chris sat in the background, his image a bit smaller than theirs.
“Well, I’m a little bit further than Monterey,” she said.
Chris spoke softly, breaking the awkward silence, telling her it’s okay. And he reassured the kids as they looked back, asking what was wrong.
“Everything is okay,” he said once again. His voice was soothing. He saw his job as one of sounding board and encourager. He was there to nudge when needed, which was often.
The children started getting antsy. Her son was grabbing his feet. Her daughter allowed her mind to wander. She looked away from the screen to a picture on the wall behind her. They were done. They waved good-bye and ran off to play. It was only 1:45 P.M. in California.
She watched their little bodies leave the room. As soon as they were out of earshot, Rodriguez’s tears really started to flow: uncontrollable sobs that made it hard for her to speak or breathe.
Chris moved closer to the screen. He waited for her to speak, wanting to do his best to prop up her wartime efforts. He’d been through three tours in Iraq. He knew what it felt like at the end of the day to want to cry. He didn’t. Rodriguez communicated better. She shared her fears and concerns and ugly cries freely with him—the one person around whom she could be completely herself. He admired her ability to be strong and soft at the same time.
The week had been an especially tough one.
Two Special Forces soldiers tried to force their way into her detention facility, Rodriguez explained. As she spoke to Chris, her chest was still heaving, but she could just manage to get the words out through her tears.
They threatened her and the noncommissioned officer (NCO) on her team—the woman in charge of running the day-to-day operations of Lagman’s detention facility, which had three small cells, each holding one detainee, and a small front office.
When the women weren’t performing FET duties, protecting detainees was one of their main concerns. And after prisoner abuse and torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib, detention facilities all over the world were under extra scrutiny. If a detainee had a scratch that wasn’t documented and treated immediately, Rodriguez had to answer for it.
No one could interrogate anyone in their facility without the proper paperwork, which the Special Forces soldiers did not have.
The two men, both over six feet tall and a couple hundred pounds, had towered over Rodriguez’s five-foot frame, she explained to Chris. After their divorce he was still her best friend. Remembering the incident, the tears were still flowing.
They threatened to kick down the gate and grab the detainees if the women didn’t unlock the facility. Rodriguez glanced at the M9 pistols on their hips and felt for hers for reassurance. Without blinking she stood her ground against the two men, all the while not feeling nearly as confident as she was projecting. She was terrified. They could break me, she thought as she barked back at them, like a twig. She sent her NCO to get the brigade executive officer.
“If you try to break into the facility, we have the authority to shoot,” she told the men. “No one is authorized to walk into this facility and do anything to these detainees without the proper paperwork.”
“Do you think you’re going to stop me?” one of the men said as he walked closer to Rodriguez. “You’re not going to stop me.”
The brigade officer turned the corner and walked toward the facility. The men left almost immediately.
She stood strong and never let tears show during her workday. Do that, and the military will eat you alive. But at the end of her day Chris was her comfort.
“Stop,” Chris said. “Dry your tears.”
She wiped her face.
“You are the tallest five-foot-tall woman I know,” he said. “I’m scared of you. Everything you’re doing, you’re doing right. Don’t let them change you. You’re one of the strongest women I know. I would follow you into war any day.”
She smiled. The tears began to subside.
Chris’s smile slowly faded. “You really are great,” he added. “The kids are lucky to have you as a mother. The Army is lucky to have you as a leader. I was lucky to have you as my wife.”
She took a deep breath. He always said exactly what she needed to hear.
She pulled herself together before walking out of her office. She wiped her face clean and waited a few moments for the puffiness in her eyes to go down.
Her confident stride was back as she walked to her bunk.