In November 1999, my mother died. Her long decline into the clouded confusion of Alzheimer’s disease was over. Thankful for Ray’s emotional support, I flew to New Zealand immediately to help my brothers, sister and sisters-in-law arrange her funeral. All of us felt the strange conflict of sorrow at losing our mother and relief that she was now at peace. On the morning of the funeral, the weather was damp and overcast in my home town, cooler than it should have been for the southern springtime. As we gathered in the cemetery around the gravesite my mother would now share with my father, the clouds parted and a bright beam of sunlight shone down on us, just as the casket was lowered into the earth. I like to think it was my mother’s way of saying goodbye and reassuring us that she was happy. I may not believe in the various human definitions of God but I’ll be surprised, and more than a little annoyed, if there isn’t an afterlife. I tend to view death as setting out into completely uncharted territory on the greatest journey of all.
I regretted that Ray never had an opportunity to meet my mother, and I looked forward to the time when I could introduce him to the rest of my family. That opportunity came up sooner than I expected. As an avid fly fisherman, Ray had often talked about wanting to fish for trout in New Zealand’s renowned lakes and rivers. With an English friend, Gordon, he had tentatively been planning such a trip even before we met. No way, of course, was I going to let him do a fishing trip to my home country without me. In February 2000, Ray and I met up with Gordon in the South Island, and the three of us spent a week fishing in the Rakaia River area.
Partway through that week, I left the two men fishing and flew to Auckland for a couple of days. I had decided to buy an apartment. The America’s Cup yacht races were in full swing on Auckland’s Waitemata harbour, with an intense battle taking place between the defending New Zealand boat and the Italian challenger. New apartment buildings were under construction in the waterfront area of Auckland’s downtown, known as the Viaduct Basin. I chose a one-bedroom apartment in an unfinished building overlooking the harbour and the America’s Cup marina. A water view was an absolute requirement for me – and this was a view that could not be built out by future construction. I did not know how often I would get to spend time here, but I trusted my instincts that having a place of my own in Auckland was the right thing to do. During the second week of our trip, Ray and I travelled around the North Island, visiting my family and sightseeing together. We went to Waitarere Beach and also managed a day of fishing at Lake Taupo and the Tongariro River.
Soon after our return from New Zealand, Ray received word that a forthcoming addition to his ‘family’ had been born. A few weeks later, we drove two hours west of Rochester to pick up Ray’s new hunting dog, a German short-haired pointer he named Rakaia. It was impossible not to fall in love with Rakaia at first sight. With silky ears far too big for his head and sprawling paws too big for his chocolate-brown body, he alternately slept and squirmed in my arms all the way back to Rochester.
Ray had owned hunting dogs all his life, but his most recent, a ten-year-old Brittany spaniel named Mac, had died from cancer just before we first met. I knew Ray had mourned the loss of Mac, and nearly a year had elapsed before he felt ready to take on the care and training of another dog. Growing up in New Zealand I was used to having dogs around, but my career and travel commitments in the United States had never allowed me to consider owning a dog of my own. I was delighted at the arrival of Rakaia in our lives and touched that Ray had chosen a New Zealand name for the puppy.
By the summer of 2000, Ray and I had both made up our minds to leave our jobs with Bausch & Lomb and Xerox respectively. We wanted to move west. Ray hoped to find another corporate job in a community that offered easy access to great hunting and fishing. I wanted to explore the possibility of creating a company of my own, a business that would allow me to spend time in New Zealand as well as with Ray in the United States. We decided we would target several Western cities and move to whichever one resulted in a good job for Ray. I figured that, once I knew what business I wanted to start, I could run it from any city, although I had a preference for somewhere with frequent short flights in and out of Los Angeles Airport. High on our list was Portland, Oregon, but we were also open to Phoenix, Reno, Sacramento or Boulder.
My decision to leave Xerox coincided with the offer of a more senior strategy role in the company. Perhaps if I had been offered the company’s top strategy job I would have stayed, but Anne Mulcahy, whom I liked tremendously and who would soon become Xerox’s first female CEO, could not guarantee when that position would become open. My intuition told me that it was time to move on with my life, and I advised Xerox I would resign in June of that year.
Leaving my job freed up my time to become more involved with global women’s rights issues. I continued my participation on the board of CEDPA in Washington DC, and was able to travel to Egypt with other board members to visit the organisation’s field operations there. In Egypt, CEDPA works in villages and towns to promote general hygiene and health, especially reproductive health. Through culturally sensitive programmes, CEDPA’s staff and partner organisations work with families to encourage girls to attend school, to postpone their daughters’ marriages until adulthood and to discontinue the dangerous practice of female circumcision. I was particularly intrigued with CEDPA’s ‘positive deviants’ approach to change. This innovative programme identifies women who have already rejected circumcision for themselves or for their daughters, and then recruits these ‘positive deviants’ to help other families in their communities make the same choice. Such women fully understand the cultural norms and the pressures to conform to tradition. This makes them able to offer much more credible encouragement and influence than an outsider could.
During the early months of 2000, I also became more actively involved in trying to support Afghan women in their fight against repression by the Taliban. My awareness of this had been triggered by the 100 Heroines Project. One of the recipients of the Heroines Award was Dr Sima Samar, an Afghan physician who was organising medical care for women at refugee camps in Pakistan and who was putting herself at great risk to provide health care for women in Afghanistan.
The situation for women in Afghanistan was beyond belief. I could not understand why so few Americans, especially women, showed any real interest or concern about it. Even among some of my women friends in Rochester there was a mistaken belief that the repression of Afghan women was part of that country’s traditions and culture. Few people had any awareness of the origins of the Taliban and its ongoing political support from Pakistan. The Feminist Majority was one of the few women’s organisations in the US that seemed to be paying attention to Afghan women. Through lobbying efforts, it had persuaded President Clinton to stop American oil companies from doing business with the Taliban and was influential in the United States’ refusal to recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan’s lawful government.
Through an Internet link, I discovered that NEGAR, an organisation of women based in France, was planning a conference of Afghan women to be held in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, at the end of June 2000. I contacted NEGAR and offered to help with the conference. Thanks to the generosity of my friends and neighbours, I raised enough money to send two Afghan-American women to Dushanbe and – using my own funds – attended the conference myself.
It was a remarkable gathering of Afghan women from Europe and the United States, as well as many Afghan refugees living in Tajikistan. A few women were also able to travel secretly across the border out of Afghanistan itself. In addition to about 250 Afghan participants, 30 non-Afghan women (including several Americans) also attended. We wanted to help in any way we could and to demonstrate our support. A highlight of the conference was a speech by Khalida Messaoudi, an Algerian feminist and member of parliament, who attended under tight security. Her courageous battle against fundamentalist forces in Algeria had prompted many death threats against her. Massaoudin’s brilliant oratory and her heartfelt words of encouragement and support electrified the audience – myself included.
In many ways, it was probably one of the worst-organised conferences I have ever attended. Yet, in spite of the enormous barriers to pulling it off, the organisers achieved their objective. The Afghan delegates created a powerful document, the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women, written in the Pashto and Dari languages. Working closely with Nasrine Gross, an Afghan from Washington DC, I assisted in translating a French version of the document into English. The wording was based on existing documents such as the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and the Platform for Action, which came out of the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing. Sitting on some steps in the dimly lit hotel lobby, Nasrine and I worked until long after midnight on getting an English translation ready for distribution to the press the next day. Fortunately, I can read French better than I can write or speak it. In the course of translating, I also contributed an extra couple of phrases to the original document, and the Afghans agreed to those additions. It seemed a tiny contribution, but I felt privileged to be able to assist these women in their efforts to take back control of their rights and their country.
Following the conference, I travelled with eight other delegates – four Afghan women who had not seen their homeland for twenty years and four journalists, one of whom was a man – into the Northern Alliance-controlled area of Afghanistan by helicopter. I anticipated a military helicopter similar to the one that had evacuated me in Yemen. When we reached the military airport in Dushanbe and I laid eyes on the Northern Alliance helicopter awaiting us, it was all I could do not to turn around and get back in the car. The rotary-wing aircraft sitting on the tarmac was the most dilapidated, patched-up, sorry-looking excuse for a vehicle I had ever seen. It didn’t help to know the Northern Alliance had originally had five helicopters but was now down to two because the other three had all either crashed or been shot down in the past two years. The odds were not good, but I knew the Afghan women were counting on having an American in the delegation. I followed the foreign correspondents and Afghan women towards a miniskirted woman in uniform who checked our passports and visas. My visa for Afghanistan had been issued by the Northern Alliance diplomatic representation in Washington DC. As with all but three countries in the world, the United States did not recognise the Taliban government and there was no official Afghan embassy in America.
Taking a deep breath, I climbed the half-dozen metal steps into the helicopter. Half the interior was occupied by a huge yellow fuel tank painted with a skull and crossbones. The floor was covered with several well-worn oriental rugs. I suspected their purpose was not so much decorative as to insulate us from the wind penetrating holes in the fuselage. A single parachute – of Second World War vintage – hung on the rear wall. A battery, wired to God knows what, rested on the floor next to the fuel tank. The only faintly reassuring factor was that the only man in our group had been a parachutist in the French military and he seemed willing to get on board. In addition to the nine of us from the NEGAR conference, several Afghan families and dozens of boxes of cargo were crammed on board. The door closed and the helicopter lifted into the air. My fate was sealed. Feeling apprehensive rather than truly afraid, I decided to rely on Muslim philosophy. Insh’allah – as Allah wills.
The dry, golden-brown fields and river valleys of southern Tajikistan soon gave way to the dramatic mountains of Afghanistan. Between the harsh jagged peaks of the Hindu Kush mountain range were streaks of lush green valleys. I could understand how small communities might remain completely isolated within each of these valleys, developing their own customs and even distinct dialects, rarely encountering any stranger – even from the adjacent valley. At one point, we suddenly lost altitude. A tense conversation between Afghan passengers and a crew member was translated for me. ‘Don’t worry,’ one of the Afghan women told me. ‘They are just dropping below the mountain ridge on our left because the Taliban have Stinger missiles in the next valley over.’
‘Great,’ I thought. ‘I survive Yemen only to get shot down by American technology we supplied to the Taliban.’ Halfway through the two-hour trip, the helicopter made a scheduled stop at the town of Taloqan. We landed in a football field, scattering children and goats to the sidelines, and I caught my first glimpse of women shrouded in bright blue burkas. The two family groups disembarked and several men in military uniforms boarded in their place. As we took flight again, I noticed that one of these soldiers kept his face turned away from us. He was crying. I guessed that he was leaving his family behind to go and fight with the Northern Alliance, or perhaps someone close to him had just died. Later in the flight, I noticed one of the Afghan women speaking to him, and he seemed glad of the consolation.
I was amazed by the beauty of the Panjshir Valley. A powerful river flowed between the steep mountains, a life-giving force for the fertile fields lining its banks. For the Afghan women, it was an emotional moment to set foot on home soil for the first time since they had fled the Russian invasion. A welcoming committee of men in traditional Afghan dress escorted us in four-wheel-drive vehicles to a nearby village. We stayed for three days in the family home of Ahmed Shah Masoud, the Northern Alliance military commander. Masoud himself was at the front lines 30 miles away in anticipation of renewed summer fighting against the Taliban troops. The house was large with a number of spacious, although sparsely furnished, bedrooms. I knew I was not at the Hilton when I opened a closet in my assigned room and found it stashed with about 20 Kalashnikovs and old Lee Enfield rifles. I only needed a coat hanger.
Each day we visited as many villages and schools as we could, meeting with women and girls, and sharing news of the conference. Copies of the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women were shared with teachers and village women. We visited the refugee camps, located on the most barren land in the valley. It was heartbreaking to see families protected only by simple tents formed from sheets of blue plastic and held in place with rocks. Many of them would still be living in the same conditions when winter arrived and buried the camps under three feet of snow. A few larger tents were used as classrooms. The children, separated into tents by age and gender, sat on the dirt floors reciting their lessons. They had no books, not even paper or pencils. Their teachers were grateful for the writing materials one of the Afghan women had been able to bring. I walked through the camp accompanied by an interpreter.
Whenever I stopped to speak to women and men, they asked me the same questions: why has the world forgotten about us? Why does America not do something about the Taliban? Why does America not stop Pakistan from attacking us? I told them part of the truth: newspapers in America are full of many crises in the world. Millions of people are displaced by wars in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Kashmir and the Congo. Afghanistan is just one disaster among many competing for the world’s attention and assistance. Should I have told them the rest of it – that most Americans hadn’t a clue where Afghanistan is or why there had been a war going on there for 20 years? Should I have told them that, while their situation was desperate, most of the international aid to Afghanistan was going to the Taliban-controlled south where people were starting to starve to death from the drought? Should I have told them that America would not care as long as the situation in Afghanistan did not directly affect them, that America becomes involved in any country’s problems only when American interests are at stake? I did not say these things. What good is truth when it destroys hope? On the second day of our visit, the summer offensive broke out on the plains separating the Panjshir Valley from Kabul. The fighting was about 30 miles from us. We had planned to visit some schools in the Northern Alliance territory outside the valley, but, as we drove toward the narrow canyon separating the valley from the Shomali Plains beyond, the stream of new refugees turned into a flood. Listening to the journalists interviewing some of the exhausted and terrified women, I learned their villages had been bombed the night before. They had fled in the darkness with the few belongings they could carry, walking with their children and babies to seek refuge inside the Panjshir Valley. There was no possibility of us venturing further that day and our vehicles turned back, joining the slow convoy of refugee-laden trucks making their way laboriously through the valley.
Under such circumstances, it did not surprise me that these Afghan women were more concerned for their immediate safety and finding food for their children than with their human rights. Even inside the Northern Alliance-controlled Panjshir Valley, free from the edicts of the Taliban, I noticed that the women all wore burkas when outside their family compounds. Women did freely raise their burkas to reveal their faces when they needed to tend a child or select vegetables from a market stall – a gesture that would have earned them a severe beating, if not arrest, under Taliban rule. When strong winds scoured our faces with sand and grit, it occurred to me that the idea of the burka, with its mesh to look through, might have originated as a practical way to protect faces and eyes from blowing sand. Without sunglasses and a scarf to protect my eyes and face, I might have been tempted to borrow a burka myself. Only when it became a garment forced on all women to control them and obliterate their public identities did it become a symbol of oppression.
I later expressed this view to some of the European women who attended the conference and was taken aback by their hostile reaction. My suggestion was deemed politically incorrect by certain feminists. One of them commented that we could not afford the slightest public admission of the burka having a legitimate role. Such a comment would be quoted out of context by Taliban supporters. Perhaps that concern was justified, but I always feel disappointment when those who fight for freedom suppress any views but their own. It reminded me of how certain American politicians advocated punitive trade measures against New Zealand when that country, seeking to be nuclear-free, denied entry to any nuclear-powered ships. The whole point of freedom is to ensure nations and individuals can make their own choices about how they want to live. Being free to choose only what suits the advocates of freedom is hardly freedom at all.
Seeing the day-to-day struggle Afghan women faced to stay alive made me wonder if our Western concepts of women’s rights were an absurd luxury in this context. Was it a waste of time to fight for women’s rights when even the most basic human needs of food, clean water and shelter from the cold were not being satisfied? Then I realised that the war that left them hungry and cold was their only possible resistance to a regime that denied them education, employment and the right to vote. The Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women was not irrelevant to these women: it expressed the underlying reason they continued in their struggle to survive, even if many of them could not read it for themselves. The declaration did not tell Afghan women not to wear a burka or a scarf. It claimed their right to make that choice for themselves. My small efforts in support of rights for women in Muslim lands were my own counter-terrorism efforts. They were my way of striking back against men like Abu Hassan and Osama bin Laden, whose philosophies deny women any roles beyond caring for homes and children. Such men are a persistent threat to American women also – not only because we are American but because we are women.
Late on the afternoon of our third day, our delegation was taken to a small jail in the Panjshir Valley where the Northern Alliance held a few dozen captured Taliban prisoners. The Northern Alliance was keen for the journalists in our group to speak to these prisoners because most of them were Pakistanis. The role of Pakistan in funding and arming the Taliban was not widely understood by the rest of the world. In the eyes of anti-Taliban Afghans, their struggle against the Taliban was essentially a struggle against an invasion of their country by Pakistan.
We arrived at a walled compound and were shown into a large reception room lined with sofas. Tea and cookies were brought in and placed on several low tables. After about 20 minutes, a dozen men shuffled into the room accompanied by several armed guards. They sat down on the floor in front of us looking resentful and suspicious. Only one guard remained in the room with the prisoners. The security seemed minimal, and I looked around at the open windows, making a mental note of my escape options. In the crowded room, it seemed one of the Taliban could easily have grabbed the lone sentry’s rifle and held one of us at gunpoint. I find I consider these possibilities, and think about contingency plans, more readily now that I have ‘hostage’ on my curriculum vitae.
In a somewhat chaotic process, the journalists and Afghan women fired questions at the prisoners. Some of the dialogue was translated into English but much of it remained in Pashto or Dari. I followed what I could, fascinated to be within arms’ reach of actual Taliban. Their stories were typical enough. They had been recruited from various madrassas and training camps in Pakistan, and had signed up because they believed in creating and defending pure Islamic states where Muslims could live according to Sharia law. The conversation was not limited so much by language as by the apparent inability or unwillingness of the prisoners to express any original thoughts. Their reply to any question was that they were fighting to make the whole world a true Islamic state because this was what Allah wanted and what Allah expected of them. When asked why women should be forced to wear burkas and stay at home, the Taliban men replied that it was for the women’s own protection and it was required by Islamic law. Our delegation pointed out to them that the Koran does not forbid women to go to school or to work, but they refused to consider any view other than the indoctrination they had received in schools and training camps in Pakistan.
It was all very familiar stuff – the same story I had heard from Abu Hassan and his followers in the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army. I find the belief that their God needs them to restore his rules on earth to be breathtaking in its arrogance. It’s an extraordinarily egotistical position, after all, to believe that an all-powerful God needs your help. Not that Muslim extremists have any monopoly on such arrogance: some Christians feel the same duty to help their God impose his rules on entire societies. It seems to me that if a god – of the Christian or the Islamic variety – had even a fraction of the powers attributed to him, he would hardly need human help.
I have met many fundamentally good people who believe they are called to do God’s work, and I admire them for what they do. Yet, I suspect such people are humanitarians at heart and would do good in the world regardless of their religious convictions. Those who use religion to justify acts of violence are a different breed. I remain sceptical of whether any of these men, Yemeni kidnappers or Taliban prisoners, really believe what they are saying. Do they truly think that this is what their God wants, or does religion simply provide the angry and ignorant man with an excuse to wage war and the cunning leader with a pitch to recruit him? I felt nothing but contempt for these Taliban prisoners. I wanted to spit on them.
The morning after that meeting we were to fly back to Dushanbe. The Afghan women had been very hopeful of meeting Ahmed Shah Masoud, but the outbreak of fighting made that seem unlikely. Then, as we were packing up, we received word to gather in the living room. Masoud was here to meet with us. The moment he entered the room, I sensed his enormous charisma. Tall, dark and handsome, he was impeccably dressed in a pressed khaki jacket with his trademark wool cap worn at a jaunty angle. He listened attentively as the Afghan women explained the conference they had organised in Dushanbe and presented him with the declaration. He asked some questions and showed real empathy for our concerns. I watched him closely and could readily see why he had become so revered by his troops and civilian supporters. Masoud then signed the declaration to express his commitment to restoring the rights of women in Afghanistan. We were each presented with a small Afghan rug before Masoud departed as quickly as he had come. I had met the Lion of Panjshir, perhaps Afghanistan’s greatest hero. During the meeting all of us had taken numerous photographs of him. Masoud would die in just such a meeting the following year when two suicide bombers, in the guise of journalists, triggered a bomb hidden inside a camera on 9 September 2001 – two days before Americans would finally begin paying attention to Afghanistan and, by default, recognising the plight of Afghan women.
I was relieved to return to Dushanbe, not so much because I wanted to leave Afghanistan but because I had promised Ray I would be back in Rochester in time to accompany him to a family reunion his mother had organised in Hawaii over the week of 4 July. Not wanting him to worry, I had not mentioned that I might travel into Afghanistan after the conference. As it was, my flight from Dushanbe to Moscow arrived early enough for me to connect with an American-bound plane that same day, and I arrived back in Rochester a day earlier than I had expected.
‘So, how was Afghanistan?’ Ray asked me slyly, as we drove away from the airport. It turned out that he had tried to call my hotel in Dushanbe a few days earlier and was told I had just left with a group going into Afghanistan.
‘Are you annoyed that I didn’t tell you beforehand?’
‘I wasn’t surprised. I think I half-expected you would go there. What’s important is that you are home safe.’ I showed Ray the photos of the helicopter that had transported us into the Panjshir Valley. He just shook his head, giving me one of those ‘you must be crazy’ looks.