The three groups of women stood in front of the provincial governor’s headquarters watching Rodriguez. The major’s boots wore a light path in the slightly ruddy sand as she paced the small portion of grounds they occupied. She walked slowly to ensure that each woman could clearly see what she was doing.
Burqas fluttered to the major’s left as the six members of the Afghan Female Police (AFP) tried to keep up with the demonstration—a lesson on FET tactics. Although they were anxious to learn, many of these women had no formal education; others had left school when they were eleven or twelve to get married and hadn’t been in a classroom in years. Rodriguez kept that in mind, thought quickly as she spoke, and tailored the lesson accordingly, closely watching the reactions of Bibi and the others on the AFP team. Although there were two other groups of women there and the major considered the session a joint training exercise, it was the AFP that Rodriguez had to be sure she reached.
As she walked to her right, Rodriguez passed the American FET and approached the Romanians, women who were members of a much more progressive military than the US Army had ever been, one that, as far as she could tell, viewed females as combat soldiers equal to their male counterparts. The joint training exercise was the first the major had conducted. She kept her FET in the middle of the two groups; she wanted them to be ready to jump in and help whichever side needed it the most.
Rodriguez rummaged through one of her cargo pockets as she explained: “Before searching any individual, including children, properly fitted gloves are vital.” The latex glove made a snapping sound as she pulled it over the palm of her hand. “Make sure,” she continued, “to pull each glove over your wrist and onto the outside of your uniform. Don’t tuck the glove inside your uniform.” She called a member of her FET out of the group. The woman stood in front of Rodriguez and held her arms straight out to the side. Rodriguez quickly demonstrated the proper way to pat down an adult woman. She told the women to ensure that they felt along the waist, under bra straps at the collar bone, and down each leg. “Make sure to explain each step of the process before you begin,” Rodriguez said. “These things sound simple, but doing them incorrectly could ruin relationships with the very women we’re trying to save.”
The trainees partnered up, practicing the tactical strategy on one another, each woman pulling out a pair of gloves as she explained the pat-down procedure to her partner.
Rodriguez stood and watched, her back to the provincial governor’s headquarters.
It also wasn’t lost on Rodriguez that as she was training the Romanians—a group of women who had full combat equality—she was probably showing them a lot of what they already knew. But Rodriguez regularly consulted with and for the soldiers, who were also stationed at FOB Lagman. That was reason enough for the Romanian unit to participate: they were examples for Afghan women of how far progress for their gender could go as well as inspiration for American women that combat equality was possible. The first time she met them, she was impressed, to say the least.
About a month into her mission she walked into their section of the FOB and found a group of women who regularly left the base without the aid of men. They quickly set and carried out their own missions. Their male counterparts fully respected and appreciated the women’s military work.
For this first of several training sessions the Romanians sent only a handful of FET members, their least experienced, which seemed appropriate.
As Rodriguez turned slightly to the right to walk by the group of AFP women and toward the American FET, she caught a glimpse of Bibi, the woman she had grown closest to of the six Afghan female officers. Rodriguez stopped to observe her, compliment her quick ability to pick up the training, and give her a few pointers. “Always pat in circles,” she said. “Take your time. Remember that sometimes you’re trying to feel for something as small as a cell phone memory card.”
The women didn’t even have uniforms or weapons yet, but they were eager to train, especially Bibi, who made up for the timidity of some of the others on her team with her sense of determination. In the face of bomb threats and calls from men who promised to kill women who stayed on the force—incidents that prompted several members of the AFP to quit—Bibi remained unfazed. Perhaps that’s because she had already experienced some of the worst of what the Taliban had to offer. The insurgent group had beheaded two of her brothers. Being a police woman was the only thing that brought a sense of stability to her once-overwhelming life. And as she was training to fight back against the Taliban, it was working to rebuild itself across the country.
BY 2010 THE Taliban had made Zabul Province one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan.
“This region and neighboring [provinces] are the cradle for nurturing of and killings [by] the Taliban,” said Marwais Noorzai, who took over as police chief in Zabul province in 2015. “Bin Laden is not dead. He [through others] is working to make this region insecure.”
Noorzai’s bin Laden metaphor is a powerful one. As ringleaders of terror like Bin Laden (who was killed by US Navy SEALs in 2011 after he was found hiding on a compound in Pakistan) die, their political and social destruction lives on. Poverty, unemployment, and other disadvantages breed future generations vulnerable to the apparent power and comparative wealth that terror groups like the Taliban offer. Desperate and life-threatening circumstances make joining insurgencies a viable option.
“People have no source of secure income, nothing to do,” Noorzai continued. “These terrorist groups come and give them money, train them, and use them as their forces.”
In 2011 Zabul was ripe with those ills—especially in the province’s Khak Afghan region, known as one of the most dangerous in the entire country. It was notorious for kidnappings, murders, and rapes. In some ways the country has gotten worse since the United States pushed the Taliban out of Kabul, Noorzai said during a phone interview from Zabul police headquarters. Although the Taliban’s power and numbers have dwindled—due, in part, to the efforts of women like Rodriguez and Bibi—other factions like the Islamic State (ISIS) have seen the Taliban’s shrinking numbers as a weakness, an opening for them to begin to take over territory. Fighting between ISIS and the Taliban would come to define areas like Khak Afghan and others on the outskirts of the province and would soon force women like Bibi to work only in Zabul’s district centers.
“Khak Afghan”—which translates to the “soil of Afghans”—“is the center of terrorists in the region,” Noorzai explained. “We’ve always had insecurities here due to all of these things. We can’t have a lot of [police]women. The situation is too bad for women to work. Women are not really capable of fighting against these… fighting against this strong threat.” But none of Zabul’s officers—not just the women—have been fully capable of cutting off the strong terrorist threat.
By 2015 Zabul still had one of the smallest police forces in the country, with only four thousand officers. Just fourteen of them were women. Helmand Province had ten thousand officers, around forty of whom were women. But greater numbers in other provinces haven’t given policewomen a greater ability to protect themselves against threats from inside or outside departments. In 2013 the two highest ranking women on Helmand’s police force were assassinated. One of the women, according to a report in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, had received death threats from her brother who, on three separate occasions, tried to kill her. The most damaging mark left by the Taliban’s once-powerful hold across the entire nation is not just its laws instituted to keep women at home and uneducated but the idea that a man—any man—could justifiably use whatever level of violence he deemed necessary, up to and including death, to keep women from working. A large number of men still saw any grab for work by women, no matter how noble, as a grab for power and, by extension, a threat.
“Where we have people we need to have police,” Noorzai said. “[Most] people think of women police as something positive and something good. Still, problems exist because of very low levels of education in the area, especially in the outskirts. We have barely an educational system working there. What we have to do is work on people’s mentality. We have to provide education and make them understand. Lack of education is the root of all of the problems we are having here.”
Female officers in Zabul still didn’t have their own sleeping quarters in 2015. Police officers in Afghanistan traditionally sleep and live in barracks near police headquarters during the week, even if they are married and have families who live elsewhere. On the weekends they travel home, spending a little over two days with their spouses and children before making the trip back to work. The fourteen women on Zabul’s police force were squeezed into two rooms during the week—one at security forces headquarters and another a few miles away at a center that investigates drug use and trafficking issues. They had no separate bathroom facilities.
And the lack of power on the part of female officers in Zabul was felt even more during the sputtering restart of all-female police forces in the early 2000s. Stories of sexual assault were rampant among more remote forces in the north and in southern Afghanistan. Noorzai’s response was that “such things do not exist.” But the report by Klijn, the Oxfam worker, proved that those things did exist.
Noorzai’s denial—and the denial of other police chiefs throughout Afghanistan—that sexual assault existed is part of what allowed male police officers to get away with the crime for so long. Women who wanted to report misconduct had nowhere to turn. And there was no formal protocol within police departments to press charges against a male officer. Female police officers who complained to their police chiefs were often told to stop making trouble. If those same women tried to lean on the police force’s women’s issues department and use the same route available to civilian women, the reports sat on desks for months at a time with no investigation. Men did not take complaints seriously, and women were too scared to push for investigations to be moved forward.
By the time Rodriguez left Afghanistan in 2012 female police at least had a protocol for reporting abuse. But, still, not much was done. Some of the women who left the department did so because of rumors that men on the force were raping and sexually abusing women. The number of those that turned out to be true in Zabul is hard to know. But in more northern provinces the anecdotal evidence Klijn collected was irrefutable. Women on police forces were raped and harassed.
DESPITE THE DIFFICULTIES, Rodriguez remained determined to train her women.
And trying to get women into uniforms in a city where most of the men who lived there were working against the advancement of the province’s female police force was much harder than Rodriguez had expected.
Her first job was convincing the man who controlled the province, Naseri, that policewomen were vital to fight the Taliban and that they couldn’t do it without uniforms. And in order to do that, she had to again play the waiting game, at which she had become very adept.
The following Sunday, the week after the Afghan women spent a long training session absorbing FET strategy, Rodriguez sat, as she had nearly every Sunday morning since her arrival in the province, far from the provincial governor.
The provincial assistant walked around her, as he always did, to serve the men in the room first. The aroma of Afghan chai hit her nose as she followed the assistant’s quick pace and looked around a room that, no matter how many times she sat in it, still carried an opulence.
She thought of Bibi and the women in the stark office above her, hidden from view.
During a lull in the conversation Rodriguez scooched to her left and stretched her body as far as she could, managing to reach Thacker. She dropped the small piece of paper, which she had hastily ripped from her notebook, into his hand. On it was written one simple word, which she had, with very little effort, managed to turn into a challenging question. Thacker unfolded the piece of paper to find the familiar inquiry: Uniforms?
She had asked about them several times before, after the first meeting she’d had with her AFP recruits. All in good time and patience were the mantras she kept repeating to herself—familiar phrases from Thacker that had allowed her to get through these meetings without resenting the lack of progress. But now that the women were training, surely it was time. Surely they had waited long enough.
Thacker glanced back at Rodriguez. This time she refused to give in to patience and time. Her unit would be leaving Zabul in about a month, and the last thing she wanted was to leave the women with one of their primary goals—one of the first priorities they openly shared with the FET—unfulfilled. She met Thacker’s look with an equally long glance and smiled.
The colonel turned back to Naseri, and Rodriguez waited for her moment to speak.
Five minutes later she stood directly in front of the provincial governor making her case.
She repeated a line she found herself saying often: “The women are ready, sir.”
Naseri clasped his palms together and sat them on his desk.
“They want to look like police officers. They’ve started training.”
Naseri leaned forward and asked about the extent of their training: “How were they doing? What had they learned?”
She explained the search techniques the women had been taught and that they would be taught to make a proper arrest and perform all the duties that the American FET now conducts. The thought of women being trained to take over when the American military finally left the country for good seemed promising to Naseri.
A few days later they arrived—dark blue, black-buttoned uniforms in neatly folded piles on a wooden table in the conference room just to the right of Naseri’s office. Black headscarves were softly folded on top of each pile. Large, dark sunglasses were nestled to their right. Those glasses, though the smallest piece of the uniform, were the most important. They would help cover the women’s faces, taking the place of burqas. But, more important, they would help to hide the officers’ identities, protecting them, their husbands, and children from threats.
The female police had been invited to join the provincial governor in the conference room, something that had never happened before. When the time came they took their time walking down the stairs, cautious about what such an invitation could possibly mean. Rodriguez stood, a large smile across her face, in front of the table, waiting for the women to arrive.
When they entered they looked first to Rodriguez. She nodded at the uniforms.
Each picked up her uniform and headed to the bathroom to change. Moments later the women returned to the conference room, eyes beaming. The pants, cut for men twice as tall, swallowed any sign of a feminine shape and sagged around the ankles where they were tucked as far as they could go into black boots. The folds of their standard black headscarves billowed around their necks where the women had pushed them underneath collars that were a bit too wide. For the first time the six officers stood with their backs straight and tall, their hands by their sides.
A few days later Rodriguez stood on the ruddy sidewalk that encircled the provincial governor’s office supervising another training session. The major smiled, reveling in the progress and in the uniforms, which crinkled at the waist underneath the pressure of the thick black belts that were the only things keeping the pants in place. There were moments when she doubted that the six Afghan women, who were now learning things like the proper way to use handcuffs, would make it out of that small room. The progress was limited, but Rodriguez felt, in those small moments, like she and the Afghan women on those grounds with her had moved mountains.
It was a fitting end to one of her last weeks in Zabul Province. Her unit was packing up and moving further south. Rodriguez had made progress on the training and uniform front, but getting civilian women to leave their homes and travel to district centers over the next month in a new province would prove a much harder task. Taliban control over southern provinces was still strong, and women still lived in fear.
By the time the major left Zabul the AFP were patrolling with the men in their units and conducting full-body searches. The women had found purpose, and Rodriguez had accomplished the broader goals she set for herself even before that first meeting with the provincial governor. She had been silenced, isolated from her colleagues. But her FET had, at least for the moment, circumvented the structures that so frequently diminished ambition among two very different groups of women in Afghanistan.