Woman’s Candidacy a Jolt to Rural Afghans

Massouda Jalal, the only woman running for president of Afghanistan, is a tough sell in this former stronghold of Osama bin Laden, where a woman’s place is still in the home.

Most men in the staunchly traditional Pushtun region of southeastern Afghanistan don’t want women to vote, let alone have the choice of casting their ballots for another woman. Jalal, a doctor who dares to appear in public without a heavy burka veil, disgusts many men here.

So she sent one of her two running mates, Mir Habib Sohaili, to look for votes in Khowst province, where U.S. and Afghan forces are still fighting, and dying, in a counterinsurgency war almost three years after toppling the Taliban regime.

Incumbent President Hamid Karzai is the front-runner among the 18 candidates in the Oct. 9 presidential election. For all the candidates, campaigning in the rural regions -- where conservative religious values run strong and anti-election violence remains a constant danger -- is an eye-opening challenge.

Under Afghanistan’s new constitution, the next president will govern with two vice presidents. Candidates have chosen running mates with an eye to ethnic balance. Jalal, a Tajik, picked two men -- a Pushtun and a Hazara -- for her ticket.

In his struggle to convince doubters that a woman is worthy of leading the nation, Sohaili cited Sharia, or Islamic law -- or at least his more liberal reading of it.

“Sharia and our constitution both say a woman and a man have equal rights to take part in politics as the wife of the prophet did,” said Sohaili, a former mujahedin with a thick white beard.

“For the first time in the 5,000-year history of Afghanistan, a woman is taking part in the elections and a woman is trying to become the president,” he added. “This is also the first time that women are allowed to vote.... This is very exciting for people. And this is also shocking.”

A delegation of stern-faced local elders and clerics seated on the floor of Sohaili’s cramped hotel room looked skeptical. Old ways die hard.

In much of the Pushtun heartland, as in large parts of rural Afghanistan, candidates are campaigning to win the support of powerful local shuras, or councils, not individual voters.

Once the council members decide to back a candidate, they tell villagers to do the same. And that’s what they’re likely to do, not because a gun is at their heads, but because deferring to the wisdom and authority of local leaders has been the Afghan way for centuries. Forty minutes’ drive from the town of Khowst, in the village of Tala, families scratch out a living in small cornfields, and by selling firewood that spills down from the mountains with each spring melt. They gather it after the flood passes and the riverbed dries to dust.

Haji Gharib Gul, 45, greeted a visiting reporter at the weathered wooden doors of his stone-and-mud home. He admonished the children to keep them closed so that the outsider did not get a glimpse of a passing female inside.

Gul allowed his son to register to vote, but not the family’s women, and he was proud of it.

“In the Pushtun areas of Afghanistan, like Khowst and Paktia, it is very shameful for us to let our women get out of the house,” he explained. “So they will never get a voting card. And we men hate a woman who goes out. So how could we vote for a woman who is walking around and speaking on TV, and meeting other men?”

About six weeks ago, before the election campaign had officially begun, elders in the area’s shura ruled that Pir Sayed Ishaq Gailani was the best choice for president, Gul said.

Gailani is a veteran mujahedin commander from the war against troops of the former Soviet Union, which occupied Afghanistan from 1979 until its defeat a decade later. He comes from an aristocratic family that says it is descended from the prophet Muhammad.

Members of the shura “all gathered here and then decided that everyone should vote for Gailani because he is a holy man and he is a good man,” Gul said.

He added: “We don’t know who to vote for ourselves. It is our elders who decide. We don’t do so on our own. But Karzai is also a good man. He is the king now and he is a nice man, so he is a good second choice.”

A total of 270,501 voters have registered in Khowst province. That’s less than 3% of about 10 million registered voters nationwide.

But election organizers acknowledge that, because many Afghans have obtained more than one voting card, Khowst’s share of the final vote may be larger. Voters’ thumbs will be marked with indelible ink after casting their ballots to prevent anyone from voting twice.

Women make up 44% of registered voters in Khowst province. That matches the nationwide average, surprising even the optimists who expected only about 30% of Khowst’s women to get voting cards, said Pir Sayed Shah Triziwal, a U.N. provincial field coordinator for the election.

To make it easier for men to allow women to register in the conservative Pushtun areas, election officials agreed to protect female modesty by waiving the requirement that the voting cards bear their photographs.

How many men and women actually turn out at polling stations may depend on how seriously they take threats by the Taliban and the Al Qaeda terrorist network to kill anyone who does. The warnings are issued in “night letters,” leaflets scattered in the streets or pinned to doors in the darkness, for Khowst residents to find after the 9 p.m. curfew lifts each morning.

Triziwal pulled a recent night letter from beneath a pile of papers in his inbox. It was issued under the name of Al Qaeda and made eight points, among them: People should stay away from television sets “because if you watch TV then you will die as a nonbeliever.” The letter warned Afghans that non-Muslims had come “to destroy your religion and your country.”

“This is our most important message: Any mullah or teacher who helps these nonbelievers will be killed and if they take voting cards they will also be killed,” the leaflet said.

“Tell this message to all your villagers, that they must not take voting cards and they must not vote, because voting is the act of communists.”

It was signed “Long life to Jalaluddin Haqqani,” the former Taliban commander in Khowst and a senior figure in the ousted regime. U.S. forces have tried several times to kill Haqqani, including launching airstrikes on his house in Kabul, the capital, during the 2001 war against the Taliban.

But Haqqani is apparently alive and fighting, along with his ally from the war against the Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former recipient of covert U.S. aid who is now battling American forces in a loose alliance with the Taliban.

Khowst is also where Bin Laden opened his first base when he moved to Afghanistan in 1996. U.S. cruise missiles struck the camp two years later, but Bin Laden escaped. He remains a hero to locals.

Triziwal, a Muslim cleric and former Afghan army brigadier general with a henna red beard and an irrepressible laugh, shrugged off the dire warnings as a feeble attempt to stop what he saw as democracy’s inevitable victory in Afghanistan.

“This is my country. That is why I take the risk,” he said. “People have come from America to help us, so how can I not help my own country? This election will bring big changes in Afghanistan.”

A joint organization of U.N. and Afghan officials is responsible for conducting the presidential poll, and Triziwal said election officials in Khowst were working closely with U.S. troops to make voters safe.

About 20,000 Afghan police officers, trained by U.S. and German forces, will have the main responsibility for guarding 5,000 polling stations on election day, Jean Arnault, the U.N. secretary-general’s special envoy for Afghanistan, told the Security Council in August.

U.S. troops have promised to support the police with road and helicopter patrols to protect Khowst province’s 509 polling stations, Triziwal said. The Pentagon is sending more than 1,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to bolster election security.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries have peacekeeping troops in less than a third of Afghanistan’s 33 provinces, and most of those contingents are small provincial reconstruction teams, leaving large parts of the country vulnerable to bandits, warlords and insurgents.

Triziwal has put a lot of faith in a more traditional method of maintaining security.

Before voter registration began this year, he met with village elders from across the province and asked them to sign guarantees for the security of the elections and Afghan and foreign staff who supervise them.

That put the elders’ honor on the line, and by centuries-old Pushtun tradition, once a man promises to protect someone, he must be willing to die to do so.

“Since I am an old person I have used my experience -- and old tricks like this,” Triziwal said, letting loose another belly laugh.