PANJWAI, AFGHANISTAN, JANUARY 2012—On her first day there the man leading her military unit’s briefing—an Army officer who had been living and fighting in that district for nearly his entire tour—told Rodriguez that her FET plan to bring women from the village outskirts to the district center would never work. The women, he said, would never show.
In Panjwai District, once the epicenter of Taliban recruitment and the cradle of the insurgency’s birth in Afghanistan, women never left their homes. Taliban law forbade it.
Rodriguez had just left Zabul, a province where so many of the women had been strong enough to endure death threats and brave enough to leave their homes and work with her to build a police force that slowly gave them the power to jail men. In some cases those men were the very operatives threatening to kill them. Villages teeming with Taliban in Zabul taught Rodriguez how to make the impossible possible. Afghan women, she knew, were stronger than most American military men understood. But now, in Kandahar, the challenges were greater.
During one of her first FET missions in Panjwai—one that sent her through a local village—Rodriguez paused along the dusty district road on which she and her team had been walking to talk to a village elder.
The major tried, as often as cooperation allowed, to gain the support of tribal elders—traditional village leaders who were a large part of conflict resolution and often set the tone for local progress more than elected officials. Engagement from elders—even if negative—allowed her to measure the possibility of and, in some cases, ensure success during certain kinds of FET missions.
Much of her team’s achievements in districts like Panjwai—where their goal was to reach local women—was based on the reactions women saw among their village elders. Leaders who were outspoken and talked about building a more progressive village and Afghanistan were the most willing to risk their lives to make progress happen and, by extension, to work with the American military. Women in those villages often felt safer attending FET meetings and classes at district centers. They were willing to learn how to build small businesses and followed through on using grant money that allowed them to make and sell handmade goods in district shopping centers. They felt that it was their right to push back against Taliban laws restricting their lives.
The major also learned that, at times, elder support could backfire. In villages where women didn’t trust leadership or had witnessed behavior that made elder motivations questionable, walking up to a village female with an elder credential actually made women turn away or stop speaking entirely. It was hard to know ahead of time which response she was cultivating when she stopped to chat with these men who had very little outward political power but wielded great force in the social advancement and day-to-day operations of the villages the Army major was trying to penetrate.
Rodriguez took a chance during that first patrol on the man with the gray beard whose back was hunched as he sat cross-legged and invited the soldier to converse.
The major slowly lowered herself onto the rug and crossed her legs as she sat across from him. She asked her translator to explain that she wanted to invite women in his village to a series of classes. She would offer the Saturday workshops at Panjwai’s district center, which was only ten minutes from the American military’s FOB. He attentively watched the major as she spoke. “The goal would be to enable women to make an economic contribution to your village,” Rodriguez said, “and to sustain their households. How receptive,” she asked, “do you think village women would be?”
Slowly the man leaned forward and explained that there were already women in the village who were anxious to work. He agreed that education was key to improving their lives.
The elder’s support reaffirmed what Rodriguez already knew—that women in Panjwai, like women throughout Afghanistan, longed for a strategy to fight back. Rodriguez thanked him and prepared to rise. The old man reached out to her, “Before you leave,” the elder said, raising his right hand and pointing a crooked forefinger down the dirt road, “I want you to go to that house.”
His direction led her to another dirt road that looked like so many of the rest.
The major nervously walked up to the small mud home that sat at the center of the neighboring compound. She hadn’t been in the district for long, and approaching an unknown location was always a risk. But she could hear the din of feminine laughter echo through the open doorway and into the alley between the house and the wall that separated the compound from the outside world.
The women inside were sitting on rugs strategically spread across the floor. They invited Rodriguez and her team to sit and have tea. Rodriguez asked the women if they knew the village elder and told them that he had recommended she talk to them. The mothers, who had introduced themselves and their children between sips of tea, sat in a circle, with Rodriguez, her interpreter, and her FET closing the loop.
The American military wants to offer courses, the major explained, to help women find work, learn how to turn hobbies into livable wages, and to boost the village’s economic empowerment.
Silence.
Rodriguez looked at the woman directly in front of her for some sign of interest or understanding. She shifted her gaze to the woman on her right. Then her left. She was reminded of the resistance she experienced during her first meetings with the Afghan Female Police in Zabul. An internal dialogue kicked in that told her to hang on. Find another way in.
“What do you like to do? Do you like to sew? Grow vegetables?”
The woman directly in front of Rodriguez finally spoke up. She sews, she said. She makes small products and sells them through a man she knows in the local market. It would be better, she said, if she had more material. She wants to be able to make and sell more.
The few days Rodriguez had been in the province hadn’t produced much useful information for her. Her team’s encounters with women had been infrequent. She feared that her branch of the FET program might be scrapped.
But her FET report that evening would be full of information that could benefit American intelligence. She surmised that the area was gaining stability. Women were selling goods at the local market, and there was at least one vendor who supported female economic development. The Taliban is around, but this village, she concluded, seems less afraid of the insurgency.
The intelligence Rodriguez gathered that day was a predictor. The patterns of behavior found among those women supported what happened a year later when villagers throughout Panjwai joined American and Afghan forces to push the Taliban out of the district for good. The series of 2013 uprisings were the most significant of the war not simply because they resulted in a Taliban defeat but also because they proved how internal shifts in power could help defeat the insurgency. The victory, led in part by Panjwai’s own citizens, is also a symbol of American strategic success. Tactics used during the uprisings were dictated as much by internal Afghan forces as they were by outside US and NATO leaders. Average folks from a district in the conservative south were able to return an area that birthed Afghanistan’s most dangerous killers back to its pre-Taliban roots.
Rodriguez pinned up a sign, one of many she was posting all over local villages, announcing what the FET’s Saturday courses, workshops, and gatherings would include: information about grant programs for small businesses, instructions on hygiene and child care, opportunities to work on and develop sewing projects.
Then she waited.
Rodriguez and her FET sat inside the gates of the district center most of the first Saturday after her classes were announced, waiting for a woman, any woman to show. No one did. The following week yielded only ten, and the words of the officer who conducted her in-brief began to echo through her mind. Her evening reports were nearly void of information on female engagement.
Just before the third weekend of Rodriguez’s push to bring classes and opportunity to women in Afghanistan’s Panjwai District, its governor, Sayed Fazuldin Agha, who was known for working out peace strategies between insurgent fighters, made an announcement on the local radio station. Women, he said during a program that resonated throughout all villages across the district, should take advantage of the classes offered at the district center. Economic empowerment for women brings them one step closer to freedom.
After the announcement a suicide bomber crashed a vehicle, which was laced with explosives, into a moving car that carried Agha, his two sons, and two guards. All six men were killed; ten others were injured. Agha was working too closely with the American military, the Taliban said, according to a report by the Long War Journal.
Two days later fifteen women walked up to the gate at Panjwai’s district center, ready to follow through on the governor’s last rallying cry. Rodriguez had hoped for more. Frustrated, she walked from the front gates, down the alleyway, and into the building in which classes would soon start, leaving it up to her FET to search those women and any others who might trickle in.
Five minutes later a member of her team radioed for assistance.
“Major Rodriguez,” she heard a voice coming through on the receiver attached to her belt, “we need you.”
She made the trek back down the alleyway. As she turned into the open space of the courtyard just beyond the dark, narrow walk, a sea of blue met her eyes. The small crowd of fifteen women had turned into fifty.
Quickly Rodriguez joined the few women on her FET detail at the gate trying to search as many women as possible before allowing them into the space. She had only secured one translator for the event. She had no one to watch the women’s children, whose high energy and curious laughter began to dominate.
Soon fifty women turned into more than one hundred.
Two months after Rodriguez landed in Kandahar the vicious acts of an American soldier in an Afghan village shocked the world and gave the Taliban an excuse to pull out of negotiations.
On March 11, 2012, after a night of drinking, Sergeant Robert Bales walked a mile from his FOB to Panjwai, a district in the southern province that was a former Taliban stronghold. He was alone, off duty, and armed. In the pitch black he walked from home to home, knocking on random doors. When families didn’t answer, he forced his way in, backed innocent civilian men, women, and children into corners, and executed them, many with just a single shot to the forehead. He killed sixteen people that night, covering some with blankets and setting their bodies on fire.
In the days that followed, Afghans dragged the charred blankets to Kandahar Province’s Camp Belambay to protest the soldier’s actions.
That incident had followed another, during which NATO and American forces set one hundred Korans on fire at Bagram Air Base.
Not only did the Taliban use the slaughter in Panjwai and the act of religious aggression by a few US troops as opportunities to step away from a possible end to conflict, but Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai also responded by limiting the reach of US forces. He ordered all troops pulled from outposts and requested that Americans remain on bases.
The peace agreement, had it happened, would have come near the end of Rodriguez’s deployment and could have given the women she was working with a possible foothold into equality. Similar chances for negotiations would be tossed aside twice more in the next two years.
Karzai pulled out of 2013 negotiations because the location posed a threat to Afghanistan. The Taliban opened offices in Doha, Qatar, for the June 19 talks, calling the location the “Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan”—the same thing terrorists called the country when they controlled its capital—and flying the Taliban flag out front.
On the table were three demands from the United States: that the Taliban end its insurgency in Afghanistan, that it publicly disavow al-Qaeda, and that it recognize the rights of women.
Although the Taliban had slowly been losing military and political power in the country’s major cities, the terrorist threat to women throughout most of Afghanistan was still strong. And by the end of 2013, the FETs and community activists were pushing voting in the April elections as the best way for women to exercise power and eventually regain lost rights.
Lack of safety was one of the main issues keeping women from registering across the country and keeping both men and women from going to the polls in the most rural areas.
A delegation from the National Democratic Institute (which included US Ambassador Karl Indurfurth) released a report to the Afghan people in December 2013 assessing the country’s preparation for the 2014 presidential and provincial elections. According to the report, registration for women in those areas was especially low because of poor education and the security concerns that prevented female elections officials from conducting registration drives. Just one-third of the 3.2 million voters registered since May of 2013 had been women.
The registration process was complicated even further by the fact that Afghanistan had no national list of registered voters, making it easy for precincts to issue multiple voter registration cards to the same person. And those multicard mistakes paved the way for voters and elections officials to manipulate outcomes. In rural areas, where voter turnout was especially low and candidates could win with as little as 1 percent of the vote, it would take only a few residents who were double or triple registered to determine the makeup of the next provincial council. Efforts by the Independent Election Commission (better known as the IEC) to create a national list that would link eligible voters to specific polling stations were stymied.
During the 2009 national elections the Taliban killed at least one candidate and threatened to kill residents who dared walk out of their homes to go to the polls. And by early 2014 it was clear that Afghan military and police forces had not significantly improved. According to Afghan generals on the ground, the country’s forces weren’t ready to secure the nation from terrorist threats without help from US and NATO forces, which had already begun turning security leadership over to Afghanistan.
In January 2014, just three months before the election, Karzai refused to sign the Bilateral Security Agreement, which stated that US forces would stay in the country beyond 2014 if the Taliban didn’t come to the negotiating table and that the president invited the United States to leave after 2014 if negotiations didn’t happen.
The head of Afghan forces, Lieutenant General Murad Ali Murad, publicly disagreed with Karzai’s suggestion that the country could survive Taliban retaliation without American troops. “We will have challenges and problems when it comes to the equipping and training of the Afghan national army,” Murad said in a BBC report. “We don’t share the view that Afghanistan will slip back into civil war, but we need more support and resources so we can deal with the threat posed by the insurgents especially during elections.”
In the run-up to national and local elections the US posture in Afghanistan had certainly suffered major setbacks. Taliban forces had not returned to the negotiating table. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had announced that the country’s combat mission would be coming to an end. Troops, instead, would be tasked with providing security for a country that had lost trust in the US military and whose leader called for American forces to limit their activity to forward operating bases.
As citizens prepared to go to the polls—against a backdrop of continued Taliban aggression and calls for an end to fraudulent election practices—an Afghan woman named Jamila was waging her own revolution. And a once-reluctant FET leader became her second in command.