Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Human Rights
Issue 6 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Monday, November 22, 2010
The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights met this day at 1:35 p.m. to examine and report on the role that the Government of Canada may play in supporting the promotion and protection of women's rights in Afghanistan after Canada has ended its combat operations in 2011.
Senator Nancy Ruth (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Welcome to our witnesses appearing via video conference in the United States of America to the Senate of Canada. I am Nancy Ruth, the chair of the committee, and this is the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights, which is authorized to examine and report on the role that the Government of Canada may play in supporting the promotion and protection of women's rights in Afghanistan after Canada has ended its combat operations in 2011.
On camera, for those who are listening on various feeds, we are pleased to have David Cortright, Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame; and Sarah Smiles Persinger, a research associate at the Kroc Institute. The time is yours until 2:30, so away you go. Tell us what you think.
David Cortright, Director of Policy Studies, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, as an individual: Thank you, madam chair, for this invitation to speak with your committee about this very important and timely issue. Earlier this year the Kroc Institute began a research project to examine how Western governments can support Afghan women as we begin to draw down the number of troops and as the Afghan government engages in reconciliation with the insurgent groups. As we know, since the invasion of Afghanistan, there has been tremendous focus on this issue of empowering Afghan women. President George Bush declared Afghan women liberated, and since then, this goal of empowering women has become a quasi-official policy goal.
Over the last nine years, there have been some changes and improvements. Afghan women and girls have made some significant gains, especially in the areas of education, personal income and employment, and in political life — all things that were denied during Taliban rule.
Today there are more than 7.3 million Afghan children in school, 37 per cent of them girls, compared to only 900,000 boys in school in 2002. Hundreds of midwives have been trained to provide maternal health services not previously available. As we know, 25 per cent of the seats for members of the Afghan parliament are reserved for women. Many other gains could be cited.
However, these gains have become eroded and more precarious as violence in the country has increased since 2005- 06. Schools have been closed in the south and southeast because of the violence. Girls' schools and students have been attacked because of the insurgent war on education. Health clinics have been closed because of the abduction and killing of health workers. Insecurity has generally limited women's participation in public life and in the political process.
We are at a critical turning point in the war, and the idea of reconciliation has grown increasingly compelling as we look for an exit, but at the same time, this possibility of reconciliation has created that dilemma for us because the Taliban and insurgent groups have dismal, horrific records on human rights in the past and they have shown an abusive posture towards women. The challenges are huge, and our research has tried to tackle them to see how Western governments can continue to support women's progress as we roll back the military engagement.
For this purpose, we conducted more than 50 interviews with policy-makers, diplomats, officials from the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, and, most important, Afghan women. My colleague Sarah Smiles Persinger travelled to Kabul earlier this year to conduct these interviews and engage with Afghan women, and I will have her now present the report's findings.
Sarah Smiles Persinger, Research Associate, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, as an individual: Thank you, senators, for having us here today. I was in Kabul in April and May of this year, and I tried to interview as many women as I could. I spoke with female parliamentarians, activists, health workers, NGO — non-governmental organization — workers. All of the women I spoke to are deeply worried about the reconciliation process.
So far the United States and NATO have said that insurgents seeking reconciliation must renounce violence, sever links to al Qaeda and respect the constitution. The Taliban has in turn called for the withdrawal of foreign troops, an overhaul of the constitution, the implementation of sharia law, and the re-Islamization of the Afghan state. The women I spoke to are concerned that some of these demands may be conceded to in backroom deals with insurgent groups to the detriment of women and girls. In the past, for example, the Taliban has requested control of territory. They would like to control X amount of provinces in Afghanistan, and already we are seeing restrictions being reimposed against women in Taliban-held areas.
The women I interviewed are concerned that if Taliban or insurgent leaders are granted full positions in the government, for example, they may seek to overhaul the constitution through a constitutional lawyer jirga and scrap the clause in the constitution that stipulates gender equality, something Afghan women's organizations fought hard for when the constitution was being drafted. Already we see the Parliament is dominated by conservative forces, namely ex-mujahedeen warlords and conservative clerics.
The women are concerned that if insurgent leaders are appointed to the justice or education portfolios, they may seek to change the curriculum, scrap subjects like science and information technology or close co-educational private universities and schools that currently offer the best education in Kabul.
They are also concerned about the call for sharia. The women I interviewed have no problem with sharia law, and already the Afghan legal system and legal code draw heavily from it. However, they have a problem with Taliban-style sharia law, which draws as much from Pashtun customary law, or Pashtunwali, as it does from sharia, and they see it as explicitly discriminatory towards women.
The women are concerned about transitional justice and about impunity being granted to known human rights abusers. They are also deeply worried about the prospect of civil war if foreign troops are withdrawn precipitously, given the instability and weakness of the Afghan central government and the inability of the Afghan security forces to provide security for civilians at this stage.
Despite all the concerns they raised, the majority of the women I spoke to do support a peace process, because they recognize that women and girls are really suffering as a result of the conflict. As Mr. Cortright mentioned, since the uptick in the insurgencies since 2005-06, many of the gains that women and girls have made have been eroded in the face of rising violence.
We have just launched a research report, which is available online. As our report details, hundreds of schools have been closed, predominantly in the south and southeast, because of the insecurity.
One female parliamentarian I interviewed, Sahera Sharif, a parliamentarian from Khost province, which is a conservative, predominantly Pashtun province in the southeast, said that nearly all of the schools for girls in her province are currently closed, aside from the handful in the provincial capital of Khost City. She said there has been a complete breakdown of law and order in Khost. They were without a police chief for eight months; no one wanted to take on the job. Five years ago, she could drive out to rural villages and visit schools where they were offering accelerated learning classes for girls. Today, she is afraid to walk around the streets of the provincial capital.
Another woman I interviewed, Sarah Halim, a midwife from Khost, said her husband has pulled her seven-year-old daughter out of school because he is afraid she might be kidnapped or the school may be attacked. She was despondent about this because she does not want her daughter to be uneducated.
In a society where the honour of women is paramount, the insecurity has led to reinforced cloistering of women by their families. A British report published last year quoted a group of women in Kandahar who said their lives today are no better than they were during the Taliban time. They cannot leave their houses to get an education or to earn a living. I also spoke with a number of women who were coming under pressure from their families to quit their jobs and stay home because of the insecurity.
We see as well that anger towards the military occupation has risen. There has been a backlash towards the women's rights discourse, which is seen by many Afghans as a Western and alien intrusion into Afghan culture. Afghan women exercising leadership abilities are often called anti-Islamic Western agents, worse still prostitutes, and they are subject to threats, intimidation, even physical attack. A number of high-profile women have been assassinated in recent years.
All of the women I interviewed acknowledged that it would be impossible for women to consolidate the gains they have made in the last nine years in a militarized environment. Because of this, they support a peace process, but they want assurances that they will not be the victims of a peace process, that it will not come at their expense.
Looking ahead, the challenge remains: How can governments such as Canada prevent this from happening?
In our research, we have attempted to tackle the various concerns that the women have. First, the security situation is critical. Progress for women is impossible in a militarized environment, but it will also be impossible in a security vacuum. To provide for the protection of civilians, our research report recommends the deployment of a UN-led interim security force when troops are withdrawn. Mr. Cortright will speak more to this recommendation.
Mr. Cortright: We know that our president and now the NATO leaders have committed to a transition, but this must be done very carefully to avoid a security vacuum. One idea we have heard a lot about and that we propose is an interim security force that would operate under the auspices of the UN and that could be deployed as the ISAF forces are gradually withdrawn.
Taliban representatives have suggested the deployment of a Muslim-led protection force, and they have pledged not to attack such a force. This could be a factor that ought to be examined. There is no such interim force we know of, but if the NATO powers, the U.S. and others were committed to helping to create such a force and if it could be introduced, it might provide some security assurance. It would have to be supported and trained by U.S. and NATO forces, but it could play an important role. Then the ISAF forces, as they withdraw, could themselves focus more on the training of Afghan forces and on civilian protection. The combination of these factors with a gradual disengagement of NATO forces and the introduction of an interim security force might be able to sustain a security environment that would enable these gains that women have achieved to be preserved.
Ms. Smiles Persinger: In our report, we also speak about the need for sustainable investment and aid in Afghanistan in the coming years. I think because development funding has in many ways been concentrated in areas where there has been fighting, our fear is that foreign governments may be tempted to withdraw and reduce their aid programs as they begin to withdraw troops. We really reinforce in our report that this would be a disaster for Afghanistan's future and would undermine the gains that women have made so far.
I imagine many of you have seen the report that CARE has put out; it has a number of great recommendations on this issue.
Looking to the reconciliation process, one of the best ways to prevent a rollback in women's gains is to ensure that women are meaningfully represented in all peace discussions and forums. So far, we have seen this year that Afghan women's organizations have had to fight hard to be heard around the various peace jirgas, the Kabul conference, all of these events that have occurred this year. While the Afghan government has shown a repeated disregard for including women in high-level decision-making forums around the discussion of a peace process, I think Western policy-makers have significant leverage here in terms of advocating for women's interests.
The commitment of U.S. and NATO policy-makers here is really uneven. The U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has exercised some impressive leadership in advocating for the rights of Afghan women, but the political will among other officials is less certain. With the policy-makers that I spoke to, there is a feeling that the issue of women's issues is soft; it is incongruous with security concerns. This definitely ignores the now widely acknowledged links between human rights and peace.
In our report, we recommend that governments like Canada should show leadership in insisting upon women's representation in peace forums, in the High Peace Council that President Karzai has put together to lead negotiations with insurgent groups and also in the Joint Secretariat for Peace, Reconciliation and Reintegration Programs, which is designing reintegration programs.
One way we have talked about in the report to exercise leverage on this issue with the Afghan government would be to tie funding for reintegration programs to women's participation. In January at the London conference, countries such as Japan and the U.K. committed money to a reintegration trust fund. So far $150 million, I believe, has been committed to that fund. The idea is that it will fund development projects in communities that agree to accept insurgents back into their midst. We recommend that future funding of this program should be made conditional on women's participation in all the high-level bodies overseeing the reconciliation process.
Our report also recommends that governments like Canada should prioritize support for Afghan women in public life by supporting Afghan women's organizations; facilitating exchanges for Afghan female parliamentarians, public servants, judges and lawyers; and providing long-term mentoring and training for female police officers, who are particularly vulnerable.
We have a number of recommendations, but one practical way to improve the profile of women in the Afghan government would be to ensure that all visiting Afghan delegations to Canada have women on them. It is my understanding that the U.S. Department of State is doing this already.
The last recommendation in our report relates to vulnerable Afghan women. The prospect of reconciliation is definitely very risky. As troops are withdrawn and political alliances shift, the danger of a rollback in women's rights is very real, and Afghans who have worked directly with the military intervention will be particularly vulnerable. We argue as well that Afghan women who have occupied leadership positions or are perceived to have been associated with western interests are also extremely vulnerable.
Given this, our report recommends, again, that governments like Canada consider giving Afghan women priority in any asylum programs that are established for Afghans, specifically women who face ongoing threats and attacks on their lives because of perceived association with Western interests. This may include women working for the government, aid agencies or in association with provincial reconstruction teams, PRTs, for example. Our research shows that the military intervention and this focus on women's rights by the West have made many Afghan women very vulnerable. Many women have been threatened and may face even greater dangers in the future as troops are withdrawn.
To summarize our statement, from the beginning and over the last nine years, many stakeholders in the West have had very high expectations about empowering Afghan women. Progress has been slow. As we have argued in this report, prevailing Afghan gender ideologies and misogyny cannot be changed overnight and cannot be changed by outside forces. Patience is necessary with a long-term commitment to support women into the future.
We believe that Western governments do have significant influence, and this should be used to improve security; preserve women's political rights, particularly through the reconciliation process; support Afghan women organizations that are actively working for change on the ground; and sustain programs for public health, education and economic opportunity that have tangibly improved women's live.
That concludes our opening remarks. We again thank you for having us here today.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Jaffer: Thank you very much for your presentation. I have many questions, but time is limited.
As you know, Canada has agreed to train Afghan national security forces in Kabul. In light of the remarks you have made, what should this committee recommend to our government to be part of that training package?
Ms. Smiles Persinger: There has definitely been a big push to try to recruit women into the police force, for example. It has been a very difficult process, and recruitment has been very slow.
One recommendation in our report is for the training and mentoring of female recruits as well as for gender- sensitized training for Afghan security forces. As we know, if women seek help from the police force, they are often exposed to further danger. They are molested when they go to the police, or the police refuse to investigate the concerns. There is a real feeling that domestic issues should be handled within families and that the police do not have a right to intervene in that area.
One of the big problems, which is a reason for the push to build up the security and police forces so quickly, is that they often do not receive great training. The training is only a number of months of weapons training. Gender- sensitized training is not non-existent.
That is one recommendation you could make.
Mr. Cortright: This fits with what we know in many other settings — that is, that security force training must include a strong human rights component. We cannot just give these service members guns and send them out unless they have a real understanding of the principles of the rule of law and human rights training.
There must be community mechanisms outside the security force itself. As we instill in many other countries, there must be a mechanism by which civil society civilian officials can monitor the performance of the security forces to see that they actually adhere to human rights standards.
Senator Jaffer: You speak about gender-sensitized training. That can be one hour or two days of training. You both have much experience in Afghanistan. Can you suggest any recommendations that we could make to our government on what this gender-sensitized training would look like?
Ms. Smiles Persinger: On human rights training, there is currently a contingent of German police officers at the elite academy for police in Kabul who are trying to set up a unit to train graduates in the main human rights principles. One big problem so far is that the interior ministry keeps blocking this plan. It is being stymied from within the Afghan government.
I am not an expert on police training or police methods, but to get this off the ground, there must be a big push to get the Afghan government on side.
Mr. Cortright: A model has been developing in Afghanistan itself for community review groups or boards to look at the performance of the police forces. There is some evolving experience there that we could share with you separately. We will find the reports and send them to you.
I was at a consultation recently where some civil society representatives from Afghanistan reported good results from a community board that could have a direct line of communication to the police headquarters and be able to report on the performance of the security officers.
Senator Jaffer: Will you send that information to Mr. Thompson, our committee clerk? I would appreciate that.
You spoke a lot about education and the education of Afghan women. We have heard a number of witnesses who have suggested that focusing on issues such as education and health will promote women's rights in Afghanistan in the long run rather than addressing women's rights directly, which may result in a backlash from those who view women's rights as Western values. Do you see this as a helpful approach?
Mr. Cortright: I think generally we have seen positive results in improving the availability of education. The more it can be put in that broader context that we want to make it possible for boys and girls to have educational opportunities, the more likely it will be more widely accepted. The same is true in the areas of health care. Improvements are being made, and health availability should be provided for all Afghan citizens. The more we can frame it as a general service in support of Afghan society, probably the more likely it will be accepted.
Ms. Smiles Persinger: There have been two strategies for trying to empower women in Afghanistan. One is the long- term welfare approach, with health and education. The second is affirmative action policies for elite women, and there we see women in Parliament, women's organizations.
I see that is a common criticism, and you definitely hear that amongst Afghans, that their society, their culture is not ready for this, for an aggressive women's rights agenda. At the same time, I think there is definitely a growing Afghan women's movement inside Afghanistan right now; it has been supported by international donors, but it is indigenous, and it predates 2001. Various women's organizations and women's NGOs have been working actively to try to change the position of Afghan women in society.
I do not think it is necessarily correct that it should be this complete hands-off situation where we do not want to be provocative, because there are women on the ground fighting for these issues, and it has nothing to do with Western meddling, so to speak.
Thanks to the support of international donors — for example, the work of the Institute for Inclusive Security — in supporting and giving training to women's organizations, women have made impressive gains, such as the clause for gender equality in the constitution and the quota for the 25 per cent of seats in Parliament reserved for women.
Therefore, I do not necessarily agree with that. However, yes, of course how international donors should go about this is always a sensitive issue. Are they seeking to try to change the society? Of course it always has to be done with sensitivity to Afghan culture and also in the context of Islam. Many of the women say we need to be pushing for change for women within that framework.
Senator Kochhar: Thank you, Mr. Cortright and Ms. Smiles Persinger, for the informative presentation you have given us.
My problem is that we are looking at everything from Western eyes. We are looking at democracy as we practice it. We are looking at law and order as we have them in Canada or in the United States. We are looking at the education system we have. That does not exist in Afghanistan unless we have a good educational system. I do not even know whether our Western values are applicable in Afghanistan.
You indicated there is 36 per cent or 37 per cent representation of women in parliament, which is about 14 per cent away from a majority. From what I understand, there are 68 women in the lower house among 249 seats, which makes it less than 25 per cent, and 26 out of 102 seats in the upper house, which makes it about 26.5 per cent. They are far below what you indicated to us. That, too, is there because of the quota system. If they ran free and fair elections, like we have in the Western world, they probably would not get even one seat. Recently five men were killed supporting one of the parliamentary candidates Fauzia Gilani. With this kind of fear, what woman would want to run in an Afghan election?
The basic thing is we have to educate men and women to understand their responsibility within their own culture. There is no culture that wants to harm others. If we leave Afghanistan and train them to take their own affairs in their own hands, do you realistically feel that it will sustain their society and that the Taliban will not overpower them the minute we leave? Actually, the Taliban are counting the days until we leave so they can overpower the existing system.
I am not asking any questions. I am just making comments, and perhaps I could have your reaction to my comments, please.
Mr. Cortright: I certainly agree that there is the danger that the Taliban could take over. Our report is focused on trying to develop strategies to prevent that. There is a natural balance of forces in Afghanistan that would favour the non-Taliban elements. The Northern Alliance, the Tajik-dominated elements, are predominant in the Afghan security forces, which are now up over 200,000. All the surrounding countries save Pakistan agree with the goal of preventing the Taliban from taking power in Kabul.
If we manage the military drawdown in an effective manner to take advantage of these natural balances against the Taliban, it should be possible to ensure that the emerging government is more broadly representative of all elements of Afghan society.
The Taliban represent some segment of the Pashtun population. They need some, say, but they should not predominate. I think we can arrange the power transition in such a way as to ensure that does not occur. That should be one of the principle goals of international policy, and I think it is, and it should be possible.
On some of the numbers, senator, the 37 per cent we mentioned is the percentage of schoolchildren who are female, girls. The 25 per cent — you are right — is the quota, the reserve number that is indicated for the percentage of women in Parliament. Right now, that is being successfully addressed.
However, there is a danger, as you said, as Western forces leave, whether that provision in the constitution will be preserved. Our report argues strongly that the governments of the donor states should use the leverage we have to ensure that that part of the constitutional arrangement is preserved so that women can have more of an adequate representation in their parliament.
Ms. Smiles Persinger: I want to make a comment on what you said about women in parliament and the reserve quota of seats. You said if that quota did not exist there might not be one woman in parliament. I do not necessarily agree with that. In the 1950s and 1960s in Afghanistan there were women in parliament, so it is not as if this concept were completely foreign. During the Soviet period as well, women were active in society. The Bamyan province, which has an arguably much more liberal position on women amongst the Hazara population, has a female governor, and she was elected on her support base, so that had nothing to do with the quota.
There are tremendous risks for women to participate in the political process, I think even more so than for men. Our report has a section on this issue. Women receive night letters threatening them not to run. The woman you mentioned had members of her staff killed. One woman in the last election campaigned in men's clothing so she could get around. The insecurity makes it difficult for women to campaign.
One positive factor is that the 2005 election period was a peaceful time, and a record number of women voted. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, there were 350 female candidates. The security situation since then has deteriorated significantly, and we know from the last election that turnout was low. Again, we see threats from the Taliban threatening to kill people who vote and threatening to kill candidates. At the same time, there were 413 female candidates during this election. That is a greater number than there were in 2005 when the situation was much more peaceful. That reflects the determination of some women to participate in the political process in the face of rising threats and violence.
Senator Baker: I have one general question for you, but I would like you to comment on each aspect of the question as it relates to Canada's role in the future in Afghanistan.
I have looked at your report and I have listened to you carefully. Is it your suggestion that Canada's role should be to support making funding conditional on women's participation in the upcoming peace negotiations?
Is it your view that Canada should support long-term aid projects, as you said, that support Afghan women? However, in your report, I think you are adversely critical of Canada in that you point out that one third of Canada's financial support goes to Kandahar. Could you explain that reference you made in your report?
Finally, you recommend that Canada support the granting of asylum to women who face threats against their lives for perceived association with Western interests.
Are those three recommendations that you are making as far as Canada's role in the future of Afghanistan is concerned?
Mr. Cortright: Yes, you have summarized them well. The long-term support for programs that are supporting social development, health, education and the like is critically important. That is a position Canada and all the intervening governments should adopt so that when the troop drawdown proceeds, we see that social and economic development assistance is increased, not decreased. It is critically important to sustain the gains that have been achieved.
When we talk about conditioning funding to get government support, we do not go into detail on it. Our general view would be not to condition long-term social economic aid; it should be supported. However, political aid that helps fund the actual Afghan government operations could be used in a conditional way to encourage the government actually to uphold these constitutional provisions.
In reference to the funding focus on Kandahar, it is a general trend that exists among most of the donor states. The funding goes where the fighting is. As the fighting diminishes, there is a risk that the funding will also diminish.
A further problem is that with the funding mostly concentrated in the south and the southeast, other areas of Afghanistan that have critical social and economic needs are neglected. That is a real issue among some Afghan civilians. They see it almost as a perverse incentive to engage in violence to get more support. Certainly, that is not the intention.
It all points to the need for a sustained program of large-scale social and economic support as the political transition and the military disengagement proceed.
Ms. Smiles Persinger: Those figures came from Oxfam; I quoted them from an Oxfam report, and I was assuming they were accurate. However, maybe you can inform me on the exact percentage.
On the issue of conditional funding, the recommendation in the report was to tie funding for reintegration programs to make that conditional. As I mentioned, a reintegration trust fund has been set up to fund development projects in communities that will accept back insurgents. The program is not clear yet, but that could be one point of leverage in terms of making funding for that. I do not know whether Canada has even agreed to commit to that fund. I think Germany, Japan, the U.K., Australia — a number of donors — have, but I do not know whether Canada has anything to do with it at this stage. That is not as relevant to Canada right now.
Certainly, the diplomatic relationship with the Afghan government and pressing this issue, the need for women to be represented, behind closed doors is very important.
On the issue of asylum, looking back to the war in Iraq, Australia agreed to accept 500 Iraqis to Australia when the troops were withdrawn, and America did the same thing. I do not know whether that occurred in Canada as well. These people tended to be translators and people who had worked directly with or had some association with the Australian embassy and Australian forces who were in Southern Iraq. It is early days now, but I would imagine that similar programs may be established as the clock draws down and troops are withdrawn. We argue that should be considered because we feel many women are incredibly vulnerable, and given their vulnerability in Afghan society, they should be given priority if those programs for asylum are established. That should be considered, if not now, then in the long term.
The Chair: What level of education and job skills would the women who might apply for asylum be coming to Canada with?
Ms. Smiles Persinger: I think there are all kinds of women. For example, among the women I interviewed, I spoke with one American woman who was a PRT commander in Nangarhar working closely with the director of women's affairs in Nangarhar province, sponsoring a number of initiatives. Basically, the Afghan government does not fund the department of women's affairs. The department is pretty much poverty-stricken. In a way, the people in the department beg for funds and reach out to the PRTs to support them with projects. This American PRT commander told me that this woman had received a number of death threats because of her association with the PRT and with the American military. I do not think this is just a one-off case. It is happening on a large scale.
Women who work for aid organizations are also threatened. Many women come under tremendous pressure from their communities and from within their families as well for working. For example, this woman who headed up the department of women's affairs in Nangarhar is an educated woman.
I know the question of what kind of immigrants is always a political issue, but often many of these women are in leadership positions, have education and have stuck their necks out.
Senator Ataullahjan: Some politicians talk about Afghani women being liberated; do you agree with that? When we talk in terms of liberation, are we talking about the Afghani women specifically in the cities? What about the women in the rural areas? Has anyone looked at them? In any of the studies that you quote, has anyone gone into the rural areas to see how the liberation has affected or impacted their lives?
Mr. Cortright: We do not use the word ``liberated.'' That is a word some of the U.S. political leaders have used. As our report notes, there have been substantial improvements in health care availability, education and other indicators in the lives of women. Certainly, our research has been based in Kabul, in the cities. We know that in rural areas there is less literacy and less opportunity to have access to health care and the like. The goal here is to improve the condition for women generally in Afghanistan. As we emphasize, some changes have been made, and we think it is possible, as the transitions occur, to sustain and hopefully increase the level of these programs.
Ms. Smiles Persinger: It is definitely a common criticism that not enough has been done for rural women. Elites in urban areas have been the chief beneficiaries of this focus on women's empowerment. The CARE report contained a number of good recommendations on the development side about ways to reach out to and help women in rural areas, for example through training. It is predominantly a rural society, and women are engaged largely in agricultural work. That CARE report talks about the need to reach out to women to give them extra skills in the area of agriculture.
I agree that the word ``liberated'' was intensely politicized and has certainly not reflected the reality of what has actually happened.
Senator Ataullahjan: In the history of Western development, every one of the rights that women enjoy has been taken, kicking and screaming, from a male majority. Given that it has taken women in Canada decades to win the partial rights that they have today, what do you think Canada can and should do to help Afghani women achieve true equality before the law and within their culture and society, beyond the notions of cooperation and dialogue with the existing authorities and incremental change?
Mr. Cortright: As we indicated in our report, we recognize that these changes cannot come quickly, and they cannot be imposed externally. In the West as well, as you note, it took many decades, centuries in some cases, for women to achieve greater opportunity and rights. That would certainly be the case in Afghanistan. We in the West can help. We can support the programs that have been identified as effective in raising socio-economic opportunities and in preserving the precarious gains that have been achieved in political representation. Small steps, if sustained over a substantial amount of time, will bring about improvement, we think.
Ms. Smiles Persinger: I agree. Change has been slow, and one of the key things that are needed is patience. We know that when we address the poverty of women, the society as a whole can be improved. Governments that have been engaged in Afghanistan need to make a long-term commitment on that development front.
The Chair: If I may, you talked about sustainable aid. Canada has just cut its aid to Afghanistan in half, to $100 million. You are talking about sustainable aid for long-term, patient change over 40 or 100 years or more; is this correct?
Mr. Cortright: This is not from a political representative, but, ideally, that level of aid does need to be sustained over the long term, focusing on the social, educational, health and other programs that have proven to be successful. That is what is required for long-term economic development.
Senator Andreychuk: You said that our efforts should be to aid, but when we first found ourselves with the UN-led and NATO-authorized involvement in Afghanistan, there was definitely a window of opportunity and an area of work for NGOs. The military was elsewhere, trying to secure the peace. We learned from that exercise that you cannot sustain security if you do not also do the development. The recommendations came from the United Nations and from NATO headquarters to coordinate. Wherever you would make a security gain, you had to follow up with the development gain.
Canada is changing its role in Afghanistan from a combat role to a non-combat role, and therefore there has been a shift in the type of aid. Forces are attempting to secure Afghanistan. That is the ultimate aim, because none of the development will take hold if there is no security. Do you believe that the aid and the military securing of areas is important as a first priority, before we try other aspects of aid?
Mr. Cortright: Both elements are necessary. You are right, senator. Security and development need to be together in order to succeed mutually. We have been advocating that, as the military disengagement proceeds, it should be done gradually and carefully so that security is sustained as we ramp up the development assistance.
There have been some problems. We know that development aid is best delivered by civilians, by NGOs. When it gets overly militarized, it becomes associated with the military mission, which can sometimes be problematic. We need to have both elements. Shifting to more of a political, non-combatant role does not mean that we abandon all security functions. A number of reports have advocated for fewer combat missions but more of an emphasis on civilian protection. Supposedly the whole core of counter-insurgency doctrine is to protect the civilian population. As the troops gradually disengage, their function should increasingly be both on training the Afghan forces and on ensuring that there is protection, especially for development projects, so that these two essential elements can proceed together.
Senator Andreychuk: I recently came from a meeting where there was a lot of discussion about the type of aid and what aid takes hold. One of the criticisms of Western aid was that it is less successful than the aid coming from other areas of the world, and there is aid coming in. The comment was made that we come with an agenda of what we believe they need, and we put it into Western terminology, which of course instantly turns people off. We use words like ``empowerment of women'' instead of ``involvement of women,'' and they instantly react to that.
For example, rightly or wrongly, a witness indicated that aid coming from Canada, the United States or Europe is not as successful, because we go and build a school for girls, which then marginalizes or threatens their family. They pull their girls out if they are not already abused in some way in that school environment. For example, Turkey will say, ``What do you want? A school?'' It may be a school for boys, but it will be in a rural area where those young boys will go to school and get a different kind of education or an education than what we may presume. In other words, it may be more international than we realize, and consequently, in the long run, as Senator Ataullahjan has said, it will take time to get to that point.
I am wondering whether you think our delivery systems of aid need to be rethought in more Afghan terms. Is there a civil society that has taken hold that is not based on a Western model or Western NGOs bringing in Afghan women or civilians? Is there a grassroots desire for security and peace and a change in their society that is being driven by the people themselves?
Mr. Cortright: I think you made some very important observations. It is so often true that aid serves the Western agendas rather than those of people in the communities. I was just at a briefing in Washington with some of the U.S. feminist organizations, and they were complaining that so much of the aid that comes from the U.S. goes to contracting companies. Sometimes the dollars stay in the U.S. more than they go to Afghanistan. Rarely do we ask the Afghan civil society and the communities themselves what they need. The programs that do so are more successful.
For example, with schools, sometimes schools come under a Western agenda, and they are more likely to be attacked. However, some programs that have been funded by private and government agencies first ask the community whether it wants a school. Greg Mortenson's programs, the famous author of Three Cups of Tea, not only ask the people in the community whether they want the school but also ask, ``Will you work on it? We will bring the materials, but you have to do the labour and run the school according to your community needs,'' and only when there is that community buy-in will they proceed. Those schools tend to survive; they are not attacked by the Taliban because the local community wants them and helps to protect them.
There are formulas that are working, and I am not sure whether where the aid comes from is as important as that the communities be involved, that the effort be grassroots oriented, just as you suggest, and try to cut out the practice of funding huge international contracting companies mostly based in the West and mostly run by men. Let us try to find ways to give support directly to communities and to the women therein.
Ms. Smiles Persinger: On your question about whether there is a civil society in Afghanistan, I think many of the Afghan NGOs have received backing and technical support from international donors. At the same time, they have grown themselves as well.
For example, the Afghan Women's Network is an umbrella organization that groups together all of the Afghan women's organizations across the country and has hundreds of members that have been very successful in lobbying around the peace jirgas and events that have occurred this year. They are very sensitive to being viewed as being backed by the West. They stress repeatedly that they are an Afghan movement and that they do receive funding from the international community, but this is a legitimate indigenous Afghan movement.
In that sense, yes, I do think there is a civil society. Again, many of these organizations existed before 2001. A number of women's organizations were running secret home schools during the Taliban time and working underground, so it is definitely not all being imposed by the West.
The Chair: Thank you both very much. I am afraid that is the end of our time for this panel, but thank you both for assisting us. We wish you well.
Senators, our next witnesses are Professor Cheshmak Farhoumand-Sims from Saint Paul University here in Ottawa and, by video conference, Carla Koppell once again, from the Institute for Inclusive Security.
Carla Koppell, Director, Institute for Inclusive Security, Hunt Alternatives Fund: Good afternoon honourable chairperson, distinguished members of the committee and other esteemed guests. I am honoured to be discussing with you Canada's role in promoting and protecting women's rights in Afghanistan.
Before I begin to do that, I would like to congratulate you on the release of your report on the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325. The committee's leadership as well as its analysis and insight are extremely important.
The Institute for Inclusive Security, which I direct, has been working with Afghan women since before the overthrow of the Taliban. Over the past decade, we have touched hundreds of Afghan women with programs to enhance skills, foster multi-ethnic cooperation and ensure a voice for women in international and national policy- making. Our programs have included cooperation with NATO to engage women in security dialogue; collaboration with the UN and the U.S. government to ensure women a voice in all decision making; and joint programming with the Afghan government to sensitize government employees to the rights, skills and needs of women.
It is with the foundation of that decade of experience that I come to you today to say that Afghanistan is really at a crossroads. While there is general consensus that a military solution alone will not yield success, there is not a well- articulated political and diplomatic strategy to complement the military push.
Compounding the challenge, I believe, is the fact that there is little to no understanding that women must be partners in any effort to restore stability and prosperity on the ground. Clearly, women's rights must not be bargained away in any attempt at reconciliation with the Taliban or other extremist elements, but equally important, I believe, women must be recognized to be critical allies in any effort to bolster moderate elements within society and build a shared national identity that is grounded in local history from tradition and advances democratic values.
Canada has a critical and unique role to play in advancing the status and role of women in Afghanistan, particularly through its focus on advancing security, rule of law and human rights. I would suggest four key emphases for Canadian efforts to address the needs of women. Each dovetails perfectly with the role articulated for Canada last week by the ministers of foreign affairs, national defence and international cooperation.
First, Canada should focus support for security forces on training to ensure attention to gender, women's rights and UN Security Council Resolution 1325, facilitating outreach and communication with women, and enabling the recruitment and retention of female police and military.
As the Canadian government has recognized, there remains enormous scope to enhance the skills of local forces. An emphasis has rightly been placed on training and capacity building. Within that focus, it will be critical that Canada ensure that attention to gender, women's rights and Resolution 1325 are explicit components of any and all training; guarantee that a gender perspective is brought to police reform; and build on successful experiences that Canada has with provincial reconstruction team outreach to women in places like Kandahar to foster systematic, professionalized outreach to women in civil society by local forces as well as NATO forces.
On a related subject, there is currently a tremendous dearth of women in the Afghan police and military, despite their critical importance in providing protection to female victims of crime and enabling household searches and investigation of female suspects. As of June 2010, there were only 1,100 female officers among 107,000 police. There were fewer than 1,000 female soldiers. To meet the needs of the Afghan population, these numbers must increase to at least the 10 per cent target currently set for women's participation in the security forces.
To help achieve set goals, the Canadian government should work closely with the Afghan national forces and Afghan women civil society leaders to increase the number of women recruited to and retained in police and military forces. Canada might, for example, support targeted recruitment campaigns for women and assess policies and practices to ensure their retention. Canada might also ensure that women benefit proportionally from its training assistance, a major component of the national strategy moving forward. Finally, Canada should track sex- disaggregated data on security sector reform, consistent with this committee's call for stringent monitoring and evaluation of progress implementing the national action plan for Resolution 1325.
The second focus of Canadian work should be on ensuring that the judicial reform efforts serve women. One component of Canada's forward-looking strategy in Afghanistan involves additional support to the justice system, particularly to enhance protection for women. No investment could be more important. Today Afghanistan's formal justice sector is broken, and women are largely marginalized within it. As of July 2010, 1,577 judges were reportedly on the bench. Only 119 of them, about 8 per cent, are women. While one of the nine seats on the Supreme Court is reserved for a woman, that seat remains empty.
Evidence abounds that the system is not currently serving women. A recently issued legislative decree makes it illegal for women to escape an abusive household and retreat to the home of a non-relative; that is, she is not permitted even to go to a domestic violence shelter. Similarly, there is a growing fear that the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act, which was passed in August 2009, will be dissolved notwithstanding the fact that it has already fostered capacity building for law enforcement agencies, legal aid, public awareness campaigns, and lobbying for mechanisms to combat violence against women.
At the same time, the international community has started to turn to informal justice mechanisms, that is, shuras and jirgas, as a means to an under-defined end. Yet, women are almost entirely excluded from participation in these informal judicial councils.
In working to ensure a justice system that serves all citizens, Canada should continue to build capacity within the justice sector focused on the application and enforcement of protections for women. We must emphasize the need to recruit and train female judges. We must engage in diplomatic efforts to ensure that the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act remains in place and support efforts to reverse the Supreme Court legislative decree.
Finally, Canada should seek means to ensure protection for victims of sexual and gender-based violence, notwithstanding efforts to increase the use of informal justice mechanisms and to reconcile with the Taliban.
A third prong of Canada's approach must involve honing, focusing and strengthening existing aid efforts and their effectiveness for women. Today, critically important components of the efforts of the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA, foster participatory peace building and reconstruction or seek to help women specifically. There is, however, scope to strengthen significantly the effectiveness of those programs. Laudably, the National Solidarity Programme has been among the most effective efforts to foster local ownership of and participation in reconstruction planning and decision making.
Unfortunately, where Canada has had a key role, the emphasis on involving women has been limited, and that should be corrected. Additionally, Canada's critically important gender fund and reintegration fund are sources of financial support, but the barriers to accessing those programs have proven formidable to many women's organizations, reducing Canada's reach. Were CIDA to provide greater assistance and capacity building to women's organizations on the ground that facilitate their use and access to important funding vehicles like these, it would more effectively foster women's empowerment in Afghanistan.
Finally, the fourth area in which I believe Canada can really lead is in promoting an inclusive, participatory peace process. More participatory peace building is urgently needed. A recent expert consultation that my organization organized with the Institute for State Effectiveness concluded that to forge a national identity, average Afghan men and women need to feel invested in reintegration and reconciliation. Yet, there is currently little effort to build a broad national peace process.
Canada has the potential to lead by providing financial and diplomatic support for a track 2 process involving consultations at the district, provincial and regional levels to allow citizen engagement in the political reconciliation process. Sex-segregated consultations could feed into a single outcome document for each region, allowing for broad national consultation and buy-in for men and women. Such an approach would allow women the political space to defend and protect their legally-enshrined rights. Finally, it would broaden the foundation for meaningful national state building.
Today, as the world seeks a road to stability for Afghanistan, we must recall that ensuring women's rights was a central rationale in ousting the Taliban. We must also recognize the tremendous strides that have been made in providing women access to health care, education, employment and fundamental human rights. That progress must be preserved and built on in the months and years ahead. The Afghan women with whom I work are incredibly brave leaders in government and civil society seeking to build a democratic state while protecting women's rights and interests. We must remember how critical they are to the international community's efforts in the months and years ahead. Without them, we will not succeed.
Cheshmak Farhoumand-Sims, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, Saint Paul University: I am delighted to be here and thank you very much for this kind invitation to appear before you to share some thoughts and experiences regarding Afghan women and how we can support their well-being and promote and protect their rights in the coming years.
I read with interest the transcripts from last week's meeting, and I greatly appreciated your genuine interest and commitment to Afghan women as well as the excellent and thoughtful questions and comments you made to develop a better understanding and appreciation of how we can best serve the interests of the Afghan population, especially the women of Afghanistan.
What I share with you today is based on eight years of experience researching women's rights in Afghanistan, and the impact that 30 years of conflict and 10 years of peace building and reconstruction efforts have had on their lives.
I had the privilege of working in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2008, providing training on the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, CEDAW, and UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, as well as conducting research on women's access to justice and conducting fieldwork for my PhD research looking at factors impeding the advancement of women in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
I hope what I share with you today will be useful. There is much to say; the time is limited; and I do not have all my voice. I will not be able to include everything in the presentation, but hopefully some of it will also come out in the discussion.
Afghan women's rights have been highly politicized as part of the military intervention in Afghanistan following 9/ 11. The liberation of Afghan women became one of the justifications for engaging in a military campaign to remove the Taliban and to root out al Qaeda. This has had a dual impact on international engagement in Afghanistan. On the one hand, it has allowed Afghan civil society to hold the international community accountable to its promises to Afghan women. On the other hand, it has contributed to the politicization of gender equality efforts as opponents to women's rights link these efforts to so-called Western imperialist objectives, completely ignoring the very genuine and grassroots commitments among Afghans themselves to promote and advance women's rights and opportunities with the understanding that a sustainable peace and development are not possible without this equality.
The international communities' engagement in Afghanistan and their methods of programming and policy-making have also contributed to these perceptions, but that is a subject for another day. The one thing I will point to that is particularly important is that the West's co-opting of the mujahedeen at Bonn and into the new Afghan political system has reinforced structures of patriarchy and has contributed to the decline of women's rights in Afghanistan. The former mujahedeen leaders, as illustrated in the Taliban-style edicts they imposed on women during their reign, have never been and are still not sensitive or supportive of women's rights. Their continued dominance has served to limit political and legal gains and in fact impeded progress, as was illustrated with the passing of the Shia Personal Status Law in 2009. Elements of this law not only contravene international standards for human rights, including Afghanistan's obligations under CEDAW and other UN conventions, but breach the country's own constitutional prescription for the protection and promotion of women's rights. They also represent very narrow interpretations of sharia law that many Muslims will argue do not reflect the letter or the spirit of jurisprudence regarding women's rights and status in Islam.
Efforts to advance the rights of women are not new phenomena in Afghanistan. They occurred in the 1920s and further in the 1950s and 1960s, right up until the 1980s. The Communist regime's aggressive compulsory literacy programs throughout the country, however, were particularly met with resistance and contributed to the armed resistance and refugee crisis. These years of insecurity and the civil war that ensued opened the door to the Taliban takeover, and you know what has happened since then.
Research and experience have shown the linkages between gender and equality and state fragility, making this work particularly important in conflict-affected areas. The advancement of women is a critical prerequisite to sustainable peace. Since 2001, there have undoubtedly been significant gains made for Afghan women by Afghans. You are well aware of the ratification of the CEDAW convention, the new Afghan constitution and women's increased participation in all spheres and sectors. Investments in education, micro-credit and other programs have seen visible results in the lives of Afghan women and girls, but as indicators confirm, our work is not yet done. Many factors undermine this important work.
These gains have been limited to the public sphere in many cases, and research confirms that women's status in the private sphere remains largely unchanged. As one report recently said, in patriarchal, patrilineal society, women must still contend with deep currents of Islamic conservatism and family and community disapproval for challenging gender roles. Increasing violence and insecurity and widespread disaffection with the Afghan government and the international military presence have also contributed to the backlash against women's rights.
This is of course a Catch-22, because on the one hand, the insecurity is limiting advancement of these objectives; on the other hand, women cannot consolidate gains in a militarized environment.
One of my biggest concerns right now is the impact on the future of Afghan women should the current talks result in the welcoming of the Taliban back into the Afghan government. As a peace and conflict researcher and practitioner, I value the importance of dialogue in peace. As a human rights activist, I believe that there can be no peace without equality and justice.
The Taliban who are currently in talks with the government of President Karzai have an ideological leaning that does not respect women's rights within an Afghan framework. Their narrow interpretations of Islam conflated with Pashtunwali to create a deeply oppressive code of behaviour, imposed on a population and particularly problematic vis-à-vis women. If Canada and its international partners believe that our insistence that women's rights be protected will be honoured by the groups engaged in these negotiations, I think this is rather naive.
I believe that women's rights will be one of the first things that will be sacrificed on the altar of peace, and we know that without women's rights there is no possibility of sustainable peace. I urge you to convey this to our government and to ensure that diplomatic pressure is brought upon the actors involved in the talks to ensure that Afghan women — gender-sensitive Afghan women — are included and fully involved at the peace table now, and continue to be involved throughout this process, and that any negotiated peace will unequivocally not result in limitations whatsoever on women's rights and opportunities and will not result in the reversal of the gains that have been reached.
Since it is inevitable that these talks are happening, I do feel that a gradual withdrawal, a gradual process that is linked to parallel diplomatic efforts to ensure that the gains are not lost, is vital and that a UN force should be deployed to provide civilian protection while things are transitioning and we ensure that the rights are guaranteed. Civilian protection has been lost in these efforts in the last few years to dire effect.
Against this backdrop, I have some proposed recommendations. The first is to invest in education. I cannot tell you how many Afghans I have spoken to in Afghanistan have said that the number one reason Afghanistan is in the state it is in is the illiteracy that has dominated, and that the number one solution to the problems they face is education. Men and women, old and young, would say, ``Our people are in this condition because we are illiterate, and when you are illiterate, you are vulnerable and at the mercy of the powerful.''
Education provides an enabling environment for everything else that we wish to take place. Without it, we cannot advance human rights, health care, democracy, civil responsibility. When I talk about education, I do not mean just primary education, which is where the investments have been focused, but also investment in secondary and university education so that Afghan youth can access these higher education systems.
Afghanistan has a dearth of human resources resulting from the years of conflict, which need to be rebuilt. This cannot be done with primary education alone. Currently, only a handful of young people have the family connections, the money and the resources to access higher education. These are largely urban-based elite. We need to open up the opportunities to a cross-section of Afghan youth from every province, region and ethnicity if we are to transform the future of Afghanistan. We must do this in a way that would enable young Afghan women to participate in higher education as well.
Second, I would like to point to economic independence. I believe that by focusing on small projects, we will have much wider and deeper impact. The way I look at it, large, expensive projects are largely to appease the public back home. This will not solve Afghanistan's problems. Our programming must respond to the on-the-ground realities and needs, not political priorities and objectives of donor states. The many local people I have met with and talked to who have worked with small projects will say that this allows them to develop a sustainable economic independence. We need to push for this. We need to provide opportunities for this but also focus on skills development and market access.
I will quickly share two small stories with you. The first I heard recently about a gathering, a shura, at which donor officials were gathered, meeting with community elders and pushing the idea of the importance of the dam that is being built in Kandahar. Each of the elders kept pointing to the fact that they need schools, wells and health clinics, and the donors kept saying, ``No, but this dam is a great project. We really need to focus on this.'' They were not really hearing what was coming from the community.
The gentleman who told me that story said one by one these elders began to leave the room, and the last one to leave turned around to one of the Afghans who was interpreting and said, ``We have bombed dams before. We can do it again.''
I think this illustrates the fact that we as donor communities need to listen to the community leaders; we need to listen to grassroots and see what their needs and their wishes are.
A second story I want to share with you is about a meeting I had with a group of women in Kabul, on the mountainside, who were participating in a small micro-credit program, which is incredibly effective and funded by CIDA. These women had started their own projects, including pickle making and curtain making. One woman had started a business cleaning the graves of people whose families were not able to go regularly to do this.
What I learned from that gathering is that as the women began to make their products, they provided their husbands an opportunity to sell the product at market. It involved their whole family. The husbands began to support their efforts. They saw a decline in domestic violence in their homes. Their home life became much more positive. There was more money for better food and schooling for their children. Therefore, when we target and support women through small projects, it has a wide-ranging effect.
The third recommendation is justice. My research in 2008 revealed that Afghan women are highly disadvantaged in their ability to access justice, both formal justice structures in the form of police, lawyers and courts, and informal justice in the form of local shuras. This needs to be rectified if we would like to see women's rights protected in the private and public spheres. Punishing perpetrators of civil and criminal offences is one of the mechanisms for ending impunity, combating degrading attitudes and behaviours against women, and showing Afghan women that their state is indeed committed to their well-being and protection.
The fourth recommendation is security. Security is an important enabler to the success of our efforts in Afghanistan. Insecurity not only impedes development but it also impinges on women's rights by hindering women's access to public space and the opportunities that lie therein. Parents are reluctant to send children, especially girls, to school, due to insecurity. Husbands enforce limitations on their wives' freedom of movement due to concerns for their security in an insecure environment. Activists cannot engage in their important work when they and their families are constantly under threat. You are aware of a large number of Afghan women activists who have been specifically targeted for their work in improving the lives of women and children and the entire population, for pushing gender boundaries in their work.
It is also imperative to include women in the country's security sector and provide gender-sensitive training to all sectors as required by UN Security Council Resolution 1325. Canadian soldiers have made a valuable contribution to the training of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. This training must continue but must also provide more emphasis on the particular situation and needs of women and how the Afghan police and the military can serve to promote the rights of women in their work.
I have also heard recently more and more talk about the arming of militia to fight the Taliban, what is referred to as community defence initiatives. This may appear convenient, but it will have negative ramifications. Recruits are barely vetted, receive little training and are often accountable only to the local commander. Far from helping to stabilize the country, they are likely to contribute to the growing instability.
Nader Nadery, a commissioner from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, has said:
Recent revelations of abuses by Iraqi security forces and militia — and the fact that we are already seeing abusive behaviour by militias in Afghanistan — should be sounding a warning bell. There is still time to get the right controls in place in Afghanistan. But NATO must act now.
The fifth recommendation is the inclusion of boys and men in all activities. Marginalizing boys and men at the expense of women does not work, particularly in Afghanistan. If boys do not have access to education, they will end up in madrassas. If men are marginalized from their traditional roles as primary breadwinners, they will not allow their wives to participate and gain.
The sixth recommendation is cultural transformation. I know from reading last week's transcripts that you are interested in the question of how to transform the culture and religious norms and attitudes that disadvantage women's rights in Afghanistan. I believe that culture is not static and responds to social realities. I do believe that when the conditions in Afghanistan change, the culture will naturally follow.
In the same way that Afghan culture and religious practice has become more conservative, narrow and patriarchal in the last 30 years due to the conflict and militarization, it can improve and change if education, development and security prevail. I will give a quick story here.
Oftentimes we hear about early enforced marriage in Afghanistan being a huge problem. When I spoke with families there, they said to me, ``Do you think that if we were not suffering from poverty that we would give a young daughter away? When you have 10 children, and you have to feed your family, and one of your children is ill, and the only way for you to ensure the survival of the family is to give a daughter away in marriage and use that bride price, what options do we have available to us?''
Education campaigns that use methods familiar and responsive to Afghan culture are also useful in disseminating information and raising awareness. We have seen great success, especially with the use of radio, theatre and poetry. We need to get influential people to buy into the idea that gender equality benefits the family, the community and indeed the whole country. A small number of influential people, both community and religious elders within each region, can truly make a lasting impact.
Finally, I would like to say that the Canadian media is not really bringing the reality of Afghanistan to the Canadian public. News items focus on the military at the expense of the incredible work that is also happening in an increasingly difficult context. Hence public opinion is based on incomplete information, to the detriment of policy-makers and the Afghan population.
My final plea today is to convey a strong message to our Parliament that we have made a promise to Afghans and to Afghan women since 2001. We must fulfill these promises, or our hard work and sacrifices of the last 10 years will have been in vain. Let us ensure that what is right for Afghans, and particularly for Afghan women, is done.
I look forward to your questions.
Senator Jaffer: I know we will be giving a lot of thought to what you have said. Ms. Koppell, you complimented us on our report on Resolution 1325. I hope you saw some of your recommendations in our report. We certainly thank you for the assistance you gave us on that report, and we thank you both of your presentations today.
In Kabul, we will engage in the training of Afghan national security forces. I would like to hear from both of you, because you are experts in this field. What kind of gender-sensitive training should we recommend to our government to provide? I am aware that first we have to start with training our own armed forces on gender-sensitive training. What gender-sensitive training should we ask that our forces receive? How do we transfer that to the Afghanistan armed forces?
Ms. Koppell: There are two pieces, one relating to forces from Canada and one relating to Afghan forces. There are some differences but also some similarities.
Three levels of training must take place with any set of forces. The first, as you correctly put it, Senator Jaffer, is sensitization to the legally enshrined rights, either national or international, to which they are accountable and the critical priorities and needs of women within the local context, and also to orient troops to what they need to be looking out for that is different between men and women.
The second level is operationalization, for which there are two components. One is around outreach and how that can be used to work with and communicate with women within the population, including appropriate strategies for engagement when dealing with different types of crimes; and the other is how Canadian forces in particular can do that in a culturally appropriate way.
The third level is related to investigation into crime and how to operationalize and move forward with taking these crimes seriously and providing either protection or investigation, including knowing how to look at crimes against women and violence against women, how to handle an investigation, how to handle witness testimony, knowing the burdens of proof, and how to move that agenda forward within a local environment.
A critical part of it is involving women in the training process. How can you bring Afghan women and international women into the conversation with Canadian troops and Afghan troops? We have been doing a lot of work with the U.S. military for their deployments abroad and how they work with contractors and how to ensure that before people rotate out they are aware of the local context. It has been interesting. We started working with Marines and senior police officers going out to train Afghan police to talk about issues related to international law and how to move this agenda forward on the ground in Afghanistan. We have seen that the level of interest is very basic, such as how to talk to an Afghan woman in a way that will be culturally appropriate. Is it appropriate to look her in the eye and shake her hand? Those basic kinds of cultural orientations allow Americans, in our case, to interact appropriately with the local civilian population.
Canadian Forces personnel should be prepared to better engage on the ground by starting with basic cultural orientation and progressing from there. Canada has some excellent examples. The work in Kandahar with outreach by female officers to the Afghan women in ways that were both culturally sensitive and appropriate and protected their security should be examined. Attempts should be made to systematize that approach and promulgate it more broadly. You have a good foundation to build on.
Ms. Farhoumand-Sims: Ms. Koppell has highlighted many of the important factors, especially emphasizing the cultural sensitivity and the culturally important nature of this work.
First, there has to be a buy-in on the part of the Afghan troops being trained so that they understand the importance of it. For many of them, it is off the radar. Where do women fit into all of this? A good friend of mine who has done a lot of work on security sector reform, whether police or army, has found that certain things, such as improving operational effectiveness, require a woman's presence to do the job that needs to be done. This is one way to make an entry point.
Second, we have to be extremely mindful of cultural and religious parameters that we can work with in Afghanistan. I would like to suggest one thing that would be extremely helpful: engaging individuals in the training who can provide a cultural or Islamic perspective. In Afghanistan, unfortunately, there is a real misunderstanding among the general public of women's rights in Afghanistan. The people feel that by asserting certain limitations on women, they are living up to their religious obligation. It would be incredibly important to find ways to rupture this misunderstanding and to show that Islam guarantees women certain rights and opportunities, including their participation in these sectors.
I also point to lessons that can be learned from what is happening in Iran and Pakistan. My experience from working in 2003 was that Afghan women were interested in the ways women in other Muslim societies were able to push the boundaries of gender. They craved that ability to link with women in Iran, Pakistan and Egypt who were using Islam to bring about rights and opportunities for themselves. It would be beneficial to engage those sectors. Iran is a particularly interesting case study because of the language. One of the languages in Afghanistan, Dari, is a dialect of Persian. Perhaps there are ways in which we could involve women in the military, in the police forces or in other Muslim contexts to present as role models for Afghanistan. Perhaps this would help Afghan women and encourage recruitment. Also, if Afghan men, especially those in the upper echelons, are able to see that this is happening in other Muslim contexts and is not contrary to Islam, in even conservative societies, it might open up some opportunities for us to gain a little ground in Afghanistan.
Senator Jaffer: Last Friday a speaker told a group of high school students in Richmond, B.C.: ``Yes, we are divided by colour or countries, but we are human, and we need to support each other to have a better environment and a better planet, free from violence.''
I am struggling with this. In keeping with the spirit of this statement, I would like you to say how we can challenge claims that Muslim values and Western values differ, an argument that typically implies that these values are contradictory in some ways. That is the bottom line. When we talk about rights, they are seen as Western values; but rights are universal. How do you deal with this on the ground?
Ms. Farhoumand-Sims: One of my areas of focus has been the implementation of CEDAW in Afghanistan. In the course of my research, one thing I found that was extremely interesting was that the push for the creation of a woman's convention did not begin in the West. It began with the women's movement in the Asian areas. Some of the women from Afghanistan were at the forefront of pushing for an international convention that supported, protected and promoted women's rights. That needs to be highlighted.
The discourse we are dealing with now is politicized. Muslims who know Islam well, such as Muslim feminists throughout the Muslim world, find ways to express these Western but universal values in culturally appropriate ways. If we begin to engage these voices and to allow them to be at the forefront, this would be extremely helpful.
This has been one of the problems in Afghanistan. In some ways, we have not allowed for Afghan women to be in the lead and for us to be in the back supporting them. For the opponents of women's rights, it is easy then to create the perception that these are Western, imperialistic, political agendas that are coming to Afghanistan, as I said my presentation. It quiets the voices that are on the ground pushing for this. Someone asked about civil society. If we are able to invest in the creation and in the strengthening of civil society in Afghanistan, in whatever means they feel is necessary for that to happen, that will allow those voices to then become much more prominent and then disengage from this notion of Western.
Ms. Koppell: I agree with everything that has been said. I would add that there an increasing amount scholarship on Islamic feminism. A recent book by Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations documented these indigenous, emerging voices within the Middle East and elsewhere on how to approach this topic.
There is also a real opportunity to let those who are local frame the issue. Three anecdotes draw this home and ought to be highlighted more in the dialogue around where Afghanistan is vis-à-vis women's rights.
First, it is important to note that in the most recent parliamentary elections there were more women running than ever. The number of women who were supported by male relatives and fully supported in their elections and actively campaigned for by men was increasing. You see elements of that transformation moving forward.
Second, when you examine the peace jirga that took place this past summer, the women advocated successfully for about 20 per cent of the delegates to be in the peace jirga. There were approximately 50 subgroups, and then the women were divided among those subgroups. What was interesting in those subgroups was the observation that moderate men were starting to push women into positions and roles of authority. They said, ``If you are going to have a chair, then maybe we should have a deputy female chair.'' You started to see bubbling up these voices that were Afghan voices and male Afghan voices who were voices of moderation within the country.
Third, and you see this around the world in traditional societies, often you need to frame the question: What are the rights that you want for your daughter? You then begin to see emerging some very basic things that men and women alike want for their daughters in countries around the world, things like education, which we heard a lot about earlier. There are important threads and means for embedding this discussion in the discourse that is local with local voices coming to the fore.
Ms. Farhoumand-Sims: May I share a story? When I was doing the CEDAW training in Afghanistan, at one training session a woman said she was not supportive of this. I asked her why not. She said that on the radio they were saying that this convention is horrible — it promotes prostitution; it diminishes the role of motherhood; and so on. I said, ``Okay. Today we will look through this in Persian, article by article. You let me know when you have a problem with this.''
We went through every single article of the convention, and my question to them was, ``How does this article of CEDAW fit into your life, into Afghan society?'' At the end of it, we realized that there is a lot of misinformation and that none of them felt there was anything wrong at all with the convention. If anything, they said what is wrong with this convention is that it excludes any private rights: ``What about domestic violence? It is not in here.''
When we have that one-on-one conversation, when we engage individuals in that kind of thinking process, they will come to their own conclusion. You spoke about training, CEDAW and Resolution 1325: Have that available in the local language and in a way that people who cannot read and write are able to understand what the norms and the values are that these documents are trying to promote, and then ask them if it is beneficial to them, and if so, how.
The Chair: I will ask Senators Ataullahjan and Kochhar to put their questions forward, and then we will have an answer from each of our panellists.
Senator Ataullahjan: My question relates specifically to the fact that 65 per cent of Afghanistan is Pashtun. I think the Pashtun women have a tougher fight when it comes to their rights. What can we do? There seems to be a lack of political will to see that the existing laws are enforced. How do we educate these women about their rights and what they can do? There seems to be a conflict here. We talk about Islam and we talk about culture, but knowing Afghanistan very well and knowing that part of the world very well, I feel that many of the problems they have are cultural. I think they stem from the fact that there have been 30 years of war and there has been lack of schooling and education. We come back to that. We have to look at that, and I think that is the only way we move forward.
Senator Kochhar: Thank you, Ms. Koppell and Ms. Farhoumand-Sims. You have given a very enlightened presentation, and I am encouraged with your understanding of the problem. However, you must remember that it has taken 100 years in Canada and the United States to understand the values of other people. It has taken over 100 years to accept the immigration from the East and to respect those immigrants and put them on an equal basis. When I came here in 1967, you could not get a job at the city hall in Toronto unless you were Scottish.
You cannot go to a country and make changes all of a sudden. It is a slow process.
Train the trainers. That is a bigger problem than going there and trying to train people when you do not have in- depth knowledge. There are few people like you who have a deep understanding. It should be people like you, who understand the problem, going to Afghanistan to help out. A train the trainers program should be on the top. You hit the nail on the head.
It will be education, education, education, of men, women and children, and slowly it will change their values. As I said, you cannot change overnight, but slowly you can change their values and give them equality. For example, stoning women for certain violations and lynching happened in the United States a 100 years ago or 80 years ago. There was lynching of Black people, who were not considered to have the same values as you have.
We must realize these things, and we must ensure that the people who will train in Afghanistan are trained properly before they go there.
Ms. Farhoumand-Sims: I could not agree with you more. One problem with the international engagement in Afghanistan is that the Taliban were removed and then there was this idea that we would come in and just because we are there and are throwing millions and millions of dollars at this problem, everything would be solved overnight. It has taken 30 years for this conflict to destroy the society. The social realities that we are dealing with in Afghanistan have been present for much longer than that. These problems will not be solved overnight. They must be dealt with in an incremental, progressive manner. We need clear benchmark goals; we must seek to achieve them and then build on those achievements, until we have improved. We still have many of these issues right here; for example, we have issues of domestic violence and discrimination right here in our society.
When we approach our work in that humbled way that says, ``We are coming to partner with you — let us work together and solve these problems,'' it is much more effective.
I also could not agree with you more that we need to do a lot more training of trainers, both here and in Afghanistan. Many people who work in Afghanistan do not necessarily have the cultural sensitivity. I found it was extremely useful to have the language skills; it opened doors and allowed for relationship building, which was extremely important.
I also want to point to the issue about the Pashtun and how to support Pashtun women. One of the problems in Afghanistan is that Islam is being conflated with Pashtunwali. The codes and norms of Pashtunwali are being presented as Islamic code — ``We have to do this because we are Muslim'' — whereas that particular code is not in Islam; it is a Pashtunwali code. I think lack of education is huge here, as is a lack of education in Islam.
I observed something extremely useful in the micro-credit program where I met various women. In addition to the money aspect of the micro-credit program, they had to come to literacy classes. Another interesting component was that they also had to attend Islamic education classes if they wanted to participate in the micro-credit program. In that education class was discussion about how to be a better Muslim woman, mother and wife. This really helped because the men did not feel threatened; they felt their wives would learn about how to be a good Muslim.
However, by engaging in that education program, the women were learning about the rights granted to them rightfully within their religion. Then they could go home and talk to their husbands about it, and their children heard it. You can imagine the ramifications this had within this small community of people.
Therefore, we need educated voices. We focused CEDAW training and on education, but we need also to have Islamic education. We do not need the very extreme interpretations that dominate the discourse in Afghanistan right now. However, Islamic education should be a part of the curriculum in schools. I can share more ideas later.
Senator Kochhar: In your opinion, what percentage of trainers could speak Pashto, the Pashtun language?
Ms. Farhoumand-Sims: Ms. Gilbert, one of the later witnesses, will be able to tell you more about that, because she is engaged in civil society with some of the training work.
The CEDAW and Resolution 1325 training I was providing in Persian was well received. I heard from people that there are not that many people who can provide that training in the Dari language. Therefore, people were being flown in to provide the training, and then they would leave.
It would be an incredibly effective tool to have a few of us who can train Afghans to understand these documents, engage with them and advocate for them and then have them continue the training in their communities.
Ms. Koppell: I welcome the two questions because they dovetail perfectly from the perspective of the Institute for Inclusive Security.
With regard to Pashtun women and other women, within the institute we really seek to build broad-based coalitions of women who come from all parts of countries and across ethnicities and religions and bring different perspectives. If they have a shared vision for advancing women's inclusion in peace processes, then their strength comes from working across these divides.
My advice would be to build on this model of how to create these multi-ethnic coalitions that can drive forward an indigenous, relevant understanding of how to promote women's inclusion.
The other piece of what we are doing in Afghanistan is exactly what you said, senator, which is the training of trainers. My colleagues were working just last week in Nepal with a regional training of trainers program involving women from five countries in Asia to think about how they can work as trainers and as experts to drive this agenda forward on their own. The head of our training program travelled from Nepal to Kabul to work with Afghan women to carry that forward.
At the end of the day, it combines those two components: the element of coalitions that can be mutually supporting and the training of skilled practitioners, particularly those who are actually local who can help drive the agenda forward. There are incredible resources on the ground in Afghanistan with whom Canada and everyone else can work who can help advance this in the right time frame, using the right language — both literal language and locally appropriate language — to advance this agenda. I would encourage Canada to depend strongly on those local resources within civil society and within the population.
My last comment would be that you see the payoff from these multi-ethnic groups coming through. For example, it happened when Afghanistan was crafting its new constitution and was looking to balance women's rights and the rights of different ethnicities. The different ethnic groups and the women were the ones that forged a coalition to find protections and enshrine protections in that constitution.
I think there are threads within the society that can be seized and built on to promote the kind of organic transformation both of you are speaking about.
The Chair: Thank you both very much for being with us.
Senators, we are about to welcome Lauryn Oates. You should have in front of you a speech and fact sheets from Ms. Oates' organization.
Lauryn Oates, Program Director, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan: Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today and to share some of what I have learned in Afghanistan and my perspectives on Canada's ongoing engagement there. I am relieved that a training mission will continue post-2011 and am hopeful that aid commitments from Canada will be sustained at least to existing levels.
I have closely followed the story of Afghan women and girls since 1996, when the Taliban first took over there. Over the last decade of my involvement in gender and development work in Afghanistan, and some 20 visits to the country, I have learned a few lessons I would like to share with you that I think will be relevant.
The first is that the path to women's empowerment is through social development, even what we might think of as traditional areas of social development. The first of these is education, and next is economic development. Programs and projects that have broadly defined goals of gender equality or vaguely articulated strategies such as awareness raising on gender, gender mainstreaming or workshops promoting women's rights will not go far when still three quarters of the country's women cannot read or write. One must first start with the basics, and that is literacy.
Literacy has to be the foundation for building a society where women can be empowered. Afghan women often use blindness as a metaphor for illiteracy. It is crippling, silencing and keeps women out of public life. Eradicating illiteracy is the most radically empowering change that can take place towards promoting women's rights, but supporting literacy projects is gender equality programming in disguise. Literacy initiatives are generally received passively by conservative forces in the country, for instance, as opposed to projects with titles that include the words ``women's rights'' or ``gender.''
Strengthening basic education for men and women is a way of tricking people into recognizing women's potential without calling it ``women's rights,'' which can immediately alienate some religious leaders and the many closed- minded, uneducated men that the average Afghan woman contends with in her daily life.
In the teacher-training program we run, we have finished, with CIDA's help, graduating over 1,500 teachers in the last two years. In the program, our science education specialist, Marianne O'Grady, is a scientist who helps us focus on the science training of our teachers. She was once demonstrating an anatomy model of the human brain to some male teachers in a remote area, and after she put the model away, one of the male teachers said, ``Now can you show us the female brain?'' Marianne explained that men and women have the same size brains, and the men were shocked. One of the men exclaimed with horror that he would never again hit his wife on the neck because now he knows it is close to her cerebellum and can cause damage.
Science education can be fundamentally about women's rights education without seeming combative.
The greatest investment that can be made in women's rights is for Canada to take a robust role in investing in education development in Afghanistan. That would include using its trusted position to reduce incapacity and corruption in the Afghan Ministry of Education, which impacts its ability to deliver services, and to address some of the most painfully slow areas of progress, such as textbook production and distribution; training teachers; resourcing schools with science labs and books; supporting book development and children's literature, of which there is almost none in Afghanistan; and expanding secondary education.
Enrolment spiked in 2002, when schools first reopened. The kids who were in Grade 1 in 2002 are coming through the system like a huge wave, and they are about in Grade 8 right now. If there are not more secondary schools, colleges and university places for them, that is a potentially huge destabilizing factor as they make their way through the grades.
As an overall approach, investing in human capital will pay the greatest dividends, whether that is training civil servants, nurses and teachers or strengthening secondary education or building vocational centres. Orienting aid towards people instead of building roads, infrastructure or buildings will mean the people you invest in can later build those roads and infrastructure themselves. It is more cost-effective in the long run, and it is not only an aid and development contribution but also a contribution to security over the long run. Quality education is closely linked to peace, and there is an abundance of scholarly literature that proves that, as well as our own experience in Afghanistan.
Men also have to be included as beneficiaries and stakeholders in women's rights, and I hope you have heard that from other witnesses. When we opened a literacy class in a rural area in Kabul province a couple of years ago, the women started going to the class. The men petitioned us for their own literacy class. We decided to experiment a bit, and we went ahead and funded the literacy teachers' salary for the men, and it quickly showed us that this is supportive of women's rights because the men did not feel they were being excluded. They were getting something, too, and literate, educated men are good for women's rights. Excluding men will breed distrust on the part of men. The men and boys have to change their behaviours and attitudes just as much as the women do for social transformation to occur. Please do advocate for men's inclusion in any kind of gender programming.
On this point, I hope Canada will put literacy at the front and centre of its Afghan police and army training efforts because literacy is a very important part of police professionalization. If you look on the streets in the Kabul, you know which policemen are literate and which are not literate, not only because they have badges if they have been through the literacy training, but also because they carry themselves differently. The take themselves seriously, and only a policeman who takes himself seriously will take seriously the case of a woman, for example, who is coming to the police station with a domestic violence problem. That is an important part in addition to just the practicalities of police work needing to have literate officers.
You have probably also heard that, along with the Afghan government, the NGO sector in Afghanistan suffers from its fair share of corruption. That is in part true, though I would urge you to avoid making generalizations. To counter corruption in the NGO sector, invest in capacity building for accountability both in the Afghan government and in international and national NGOs and innovate in the development of stronger accountability mechanisms that produce cost efficiency, transparency and results. Of course, avoid any more heaviness to the bureaucratic procedures that we small organizations go through in applying for funds.
Rather than having people who are moved from file to file and country to country all the time, hire Canadian civil servants both in the field and in government agencies here to work on the Afghanistan file who truly know the country and the region, because then they can become familiar with the common corrupt practices, be able to better identify them and put in place safeguards.
Accountability for results can also be achieved through aid delivery mechanisms that allow for small projects to be supported by Canadian dollars. I know that is hard. CIDA does not want to fund 500 projects of $10,000 or $50,000 or $20,000 each. It is administratively complicated. I think there can be mechanisms that allow for this to happen, because in my years of watching both stunning success stories in development and shocking failures, the one pattern I can see emerging clearly is that small is beautiful, and sometimes the most impact can be achieved by a project that has a budget of less than $50,000. I have seen projects that are similar of more than $1 million in which too much gets lost along the way. It is hard to control the outcomes.
Have mechanisms in place that allow for small, grassroots, volunteer-driven projects to access small amounts of funding rather than always having to go in for the huge multi-million-dollar contracts.
Finally, Canadian investments in democracy in Afghanistan will help entrench women's rights. Canada has built up a lot of expertise and experience over the years that would allow it to make a solid contribution both to the technical assistance needed to build a democratic system, such as in elections, and to helping to build a democratic culture through information production and civics education, and this is fundamentally linked to gender equality.
I will leave my remarks there, and I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much. I will start off with the last point you made about small is beautiful. In the maternal health area at least, CIDA has gone to open and competitive bids. If small is beautiful, my experience is that it is difficult for smaller agencies even to get into the action because they do not have the staff, the resources and so on. What is your experience?
Ms. Oates: Definitely. We see calls for proposals coming out. There is an American one for women's rights that was over $100 million. Rather than celebrating that, I thought, how much of that will be lost? It opens the way for layers and layers of subcontracting. By the time it trickles down, there is not much left. These huge projects are unwieldy. It is hard enough to manage a $500,000 project and all of the activities, measuring outcomes, et cetera.
A small amount of money can usually have a quick impact for a need that has emerged suddenly, requiring a quick response and having a fairly simple solution, but organizations are then urged to bulk it up before they apply for funding. Then they have to wait six months anyway to hear back, and they have missed their opportunity.
There are ways in the model of funds where small grants could be given out to smaller organizations. For example, officers in CIDA have X number of projects to oversee. For the most part, I cannot think of many examples of anything less than $75,000 that has been given by the Canadian government.
The Chair: Are you aware of any countries that do a mix and match, have the larger competitive bids and smaller pools of money for smaller organizations, with a less rigorous test?
Ms. Oates: Many embassies have funds. Canada has the Responsive Fund for the Advancement of Women, which is closed now, and the Kandahar Local Initiatives Program, which is also closed. Those were good models. The response time is quicker. You can apply for $50,000 or $75,000. However, it is a limited amount of money overall, and it disappears quickly. It has been poorly advertised. You have to be in the know to find out about these.
Small projects, such as Women for Hope, which has reached tens of thousands of women through economic development programming, are run by volunteers, and they are so busy just running those programs that they cannot sit down and fill anything out. When I do a CIDA proposal, I set aside three weeks and have a team of five or six people involved in working on it. It is quite a burden, really.
Maybe we could scale up some of those fund models that embassies have and integrate them more, with wider programming.
Senator Jaffer: It is good to have you here from my province. Welcome. It is not often we get someone from our province.
I know you have been working on women's issues for a long time. You spoke about education and literacy and encouraging women to go to school. I know of your work. In a recent interview you were discussing work with women in Afghanistan. You said to the Calgary Herald that cultural relativism is a dangerous thing. It is used constantly as an excuse not to extend the same rights to others that we enjoy. You continued on to say that Afghan women will be the first to tell you that denying their daughters the right to go to school is not cultural; it is about controlling women, about power.
Can you elaborate on that statement? You have given us a good background on literacy. How do we first get the girls to the school?
Ms. Oates: To go back further, first we have to get the Canadian public onside with recognizing not only the need for education and the role of education in peace building and in advancing women's rights but also the demand for education in Afghanistan. In the last 14 years that I have been doing this, the chasm between the Afghanistan I know and the Afghanistan that is portrayed in the Canadian media could not be wider. There is a perception in Canada that Afghans are all like Taliban, that they do not want education and that we are imposing our world view on them, and it is neo-colonialism and this kind of thing. Every time I have written an article in the mainstream media advocating more support to education, I get a barrage of emails from ordinary Canadians saying, ``It is Western education; we should not impose it.''
It is important for Canadians, through the government, through independent organizations and through the media, to hear first-hand what I hear. When I go into one of our teacher-training programs, over and over again they ask for more chemistry and physics training, for laboratory materials. They want science. They know science education is real education. It is belittling to Afghans to suggest that that is not indigenous to them. That is what they are asking for.
Canadians can come on board with this, but there is work to be done up front in changing perceptions. There is what I call education obsession in Afghanistan, where all Afghans are concerned, first and foremost, before anything else, with their own education or the education of their children. There is a thirst for that. Meeting that need can go a long way in building trust with the Afghans and showing them we are responding to their needs. However, we also have to do a better job of demonstrating to the Canadian public that that is a demand there and a good role for Canada, not only in development but in peace building. It is a security strategy as well, because you are cutting off the very people that the Taliban recruit when they go to madrassas or refugee camps. They take people who are largely uneducated, poor and unemployed, who become suicide bombers and killers.
Senator Jaffer: You have had a lot of experience in the region. In your view, what are the biggest obstacles in recognizing and advancing women's rights, universal rights? Here we have had some people present Muslim values and Western values. You speak with such passion — and I agree with you — that Afghan people want education. Thirty years ago they did have education. They did have professionals. It is just because there has been a conflict, unfortunately, that they have been robbed of education. How to you deal with that?
Ms. Oates: It sounds cliché, but we respond to their needs as they voice them and work in as organic a fashion as possible. I mentioned the community library where we had a literacy class for the women; the men then came forward and said they would like a literacy class as well. Within about a year of that literacy class's operating and the library's opening, the literacy rate for women had gone from zero way up; it skyrocketed in 12 months. Word was getting around that valley. Another village sent a delegation to this village to say, ``We have heard what has happened here. How can we get a library and a literacy class too?'' We fundraised and came up with a salary for a literacy teacher and a small mobile library for them. About two months ago, a third village came to us and said, ``We want one, too.'' We respond like that to the needs that they voice. When we opened that particular library, the local volunteer who runs it spent part of the budget on books to buy a huge set of very prestigious Islamic books. When I saw them, I asked, ``What are you doing? We need material for beginner readers.'' He said, ``Just wait.'' He invited all the mullahs in the area to come, and when they spotted the books on the shelf they were impressed and were praising him. The next thing we knew, in the Friday mosque sermon, the mullahs were telling people that only good Muslims will go to the village library: ``It is your obligation to go and seek knowledge in the library. The library is a good place for Muslims.''
We worked with a knowledgeable local person who is well respected in the community, and he was able to get the religious leaders onside. We also cost-shared with them. The community provided the library space and volunteers, and we provided the books and the teachers. The community members have an investment in it. They will protect it. We have never had a security incident in any of our projects in the last decade. I think it is part of this methodology where we move in an organic way and work with the community to meet their needs.
It is all about methodology to be successful, but probably the biggest barrier is the waffling of the international community on Afghanistan. When Afghans pay close attention to the way the international community, including Canada, is talking about Afghanistan, they see a major lack of will to see this through. People are starting to think about their plan B. All those women who have been vocal, MPs and women's rights activists know they will be the first to be killed if a Taliban government comes back into power. Hundreds and thousands of other democratic, progressive, intellectual Afghans who have bought into the idea that the international community will stand by them in the long run are now seeing a wavering commitment. That makes people anxious and makes them think about saying they support the Taliban just in case, one day, they are dealing again with the Taliban government. We have to be vocal and mean that we will stick this out in the long run and will not cut and run.
Senator Ataullahjan: I liked your message that when we talk about education, we must not ignore the boys, because I think they go side by side. We are finding that in Afghanistan specifically, many women will not culturally defy their fathers or brothers. I feel that if the brothers are educated and if they have a sense of the situation, they can speak on behalf of their sisters. The story you tell about the library proved that if you have someone who is culturally sensitive and knows what he is doing, it makes the job that much easier. I like that message that you are stressing on boys' education, and boys' and girls' education must go side by side.
What part of Afghanistan have you worked in?
Ms. Oates: Currently, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan has projects active in 10 provinces. We are in the south, the north, the northwest — but not in the Herat area — and all over the eastern and central parts of Afghanistan, so in Bamiyan and in Ghazni. We have worked everywhere over time, but currently we are in 10 different provinces. I personally have visited everywhere but Bamiyan. There are obviously huge regional variations in both areas among different ethnic groups. The north can be much more liberal, but there are pockets of liberalism in the south even.
To go back to your earlier comment on supporting and working with men and boys to advance women's rights, I am sure everyone has heard of the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre in Kandahar, ACCC, run by a guy named Ehsanullah Ehsan. He is well respected in the community, and he serves as a champion for women's access to education and for women's rights. He is able to push the limits because of his own reputation. What he has been able to do with not much money at all is revolutionary for Kandahar.
The ACCC is one of our partners. With the ACCC and our other partners, we see things happen most effectively when there is some build up of relationship building in the community before things start, for example, working with the mullahs and with shura members, convincing and demonstrating to the community that if women come to this literacy centre or training centre they will not become prostitutes or run off or marry someone of their choice. They have to build some credibility for themselves first. It is a slower process. It is also a good reason to work with the same partners over a long period of time because this stuff does not happen quickly.
Senator Kochhar: Your presentation was enlightening. I have three short questions. Maybe you can combine the answer to all of them.
We have a right kind of education and a wrong kind of education. How do you define the right kind of education? The Taliban established hundreds of madrassa where the prime objective was how to teach little kids to start hating the Western civilization or the Western culture. Is there anything equal to that for the women? Madrassas are normally for the boys.
Are the funds from CIDA given only to Canadians, or can the local people in Afghanistan apply for that fund under the supervision of some Western guidance? How exactly do these funds work?
Ms. Oates: I will start with that question. For the Responsive Fund for the Advancement of Women, local NGOs can apply to it. It is really for them. It is more for national Afghan NGOs. It is the same for the Kandahar Local Initiatives Program. They do apply. For example, we applied recently and were successful in an application that was in partnership with the Afghan Women's Resource Centre. We are working with them. They implement, and we do some capacity building with them and some monitoring to watch the performance.
Again, those are small amounts. I do not think many national NGOs apply to the regular mechanisms, like the Afghanistan-Pakistan Task Force or the Voluntary Sector Fund, which is changing now. Some of that money will go to the Afghan government ministries, and pots of money that get divided up through the ministries.
I think the application process is beyond many Afghan NGOs, but some of them do partner with organizations like ours, or others, and would indirectly access some of those funds.
Senator Kochhar: Part of the education system has to do with the kind of written materials, books, et cetera. Is much literature and educational material available in the local language?
Ms. Oates: I am glad you asked that. Book development is a weak area that no donor that I know of has supported robustly at all so far. It is not only a practical challenge in that it is hard for us to find books to put in the libraries we are setting up but also a security issue and a political issue, because the books there generally come from Iran, so they are Farsi books, and because Dari is a dialect of Farsi, Afghans can read Iranian literature. However, that will often have a religious bent to it. The Iranians are interested in having both cultural and political influence over Afghanistan. They are doing teacher-training programs. They have built a teacher-training centre, and they publish and disseminate information on Afghanistan online and in print. In the absence of anything else, that is what people will access. Some Pashto literature will come from Pakistan, for example. The local publishing industry is weak. Supporting book development at all reading levels is a strategic way to support education and to support local writers, illustrators and authors' associations. Anything Canada does not do, Iran will gladly step in and do, such as run radio stations and teacher training. That can be quite dangerous.
To come back to the madrassas, I am glad you asked this as well. This is the cause of this conflict, and it has been ignored for so long — that is, the role of Pakistan and specifically Pakistan's failure to build a viable public education system, which has led to the rise of the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban. All the Afghan Taliban are trained in and supported on Pakistani territory.
In the madrassas, the curriculum promotes an extremist, violent, religious ideology, and there is very little secular education, such as science, math, literature and history. The teachers are poorly educated themselves. Another thing that never really gets talked about is the sexual violence in the madrassas. Rape of boys and men is extremely prevalent.
All these things are then combined in an individual, and we have boys who have been raped and have no one to talk to about it, who are trained in the use of weapons, who are taught the West is evil, who have had an extremely imbalanced education, and who have had no contact with females at all, even their own mothers. There is a very predictable outcome: It is like a machine for churning out people who will gladly sign up for suicide missions and so on.
I do not know how much Canada can do to address this, but we could at least start to put Pakistan in the discourse and recognize Pakistan's role in perpetuating the conflict and focus on the key system, because it really starts in the madrassas. I have read that there are upwards of 50,000 madrassas. Parents will put their kids there because they cannot feed them. The madrassas take them in and provide room and board, and parents think they are getting a free education. Then they often end up losing their kids.
I cannot emphasize enough how much this has to do with what we are seeing happen in Afghanistan now and how it turned the conflict a couple of years ago towards a downward direction. It really must be addressed in Canadian policy.
The Chair: I would like you to say more about Pakistan and Afghanistan in relation to your last comment.
Ms. Oates: I live in a silo in that I am all Afghanistan, all the time; that is what I know best. I cannot comment too extensively on Pakistan other than that we see in Afghanistan the consequences of what happens in Pakistan. In an ideal world, when NATO conceptualized its mission years ago, there probably should have been more emphasis on Pakistan, because we are putting out fires in Afghanistan that are being started in Pakistan.
It is not just about securing the border. Putting up a border fence is just a band-aid solution. We need to address how these killers are created from kids. It is about investing in education in Pakistan and working through diplomatic channels with the Pakistani government. There is probably more of an interest on their part now in addressing these problems than there used to be since the Pakistani Taliban have come to bite them in the butt, and that is their own creation.
We have to stop tiptoeing around this issue and recognize Pakistan's responsibility in perpetuating this conflict.
Senator Ataullahjan: You must be aware that the border that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan is not recognized by many of the local people.
Ms. Oates: Yes.
Senator Ataullahjan: When that border was created, it separated families. It is a difficult area to control.
I was in Pakistan last week, and I think there is an initiative started by the Canadian government. I could not tell you all the facts, but it was a dialogue being held in Dubai between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I think that is something they have started.
Ms. Oates: Building on initiatives like that will be very important.
Senator Andreychuk: I want to go back to your point about building up libraries and such. Are you still into the print media? It seems that everywhere else we are doing development is looking at technologies and the penetration of phones and access to computers. Even if there is only one in a village, it brings a whole new dimension to knowledge.
That is one thing we do not hear about in Afghanistan. We hear about it in Haiti, Africa and elsewhere. What is the literacy pointed to — is it to the new technologies, or are we still looking at a traditional situation with a traditional teacher?
Ms. Oates: It is both, actually. It has been changing rapidly. Years ago, I remember opening my laptop in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in northern Afghanistan, getting a wireless signal and thinking that Afghanistan is changing.
There are about 500,000 Internet users in the country, and that number is growing. There is a great interest in Internet cafes. Afghanistan is a very young country — mostly people under the age of 30. By and large, at least in the urban areas, many of them are kind of oriented towards the outside world. They want to know what is happening in the rest of the world, and they are using the Internet to find that out. It is a very popular medium and is spreading in Afghanistan.
The issue of literature comes back to Iran. Iran manages most of the blogs registered in Farsi language, so they control the content. I know there is a group of Afghans trying to get domain names that can be registered and run from within Afghanistan, which would give them more freedom of information and more Afghan content rather than Iranian content for Farsi speakers.
In our libraries, in the teacher-training work we do and in our schools, we work all in print because teachers just do not have access to the Internet. They do not even have access to print books much of the time. Therefore, we are starting there.
However, we recognized that we could harness the Internet, especially for teachers, to try to gather what has been produced out there in educational material. Therefore, we conceptualized a project that is a library for teachers, Darakht-e Danesh Online Library for Educators in Afghanistan; it means ``Knowledge Tree.'' It is a database of educational materials, such as lesson plans, curriculum materials and professional development materials for teachers.
We did not find much at all in the local languages, so we just started writing and translating it ourselves. We have about 500 resources in that library now. We are trying to find support to set up computer stations in the departments of education, which are the provincial arms of the Ministry of Education, or in the teacher-training centres where at least trainers can come and browse those resources, download and print stuff and then take it to their training with teachers. In that indirect way, teachers will begin to access some of those resources. That was the most efficient way we could think of to do that.
That is a bit of an experimental approach we will try. Even our own teacher trainers have never used a computer before. I am trying to convince them to take computer classes, but they are scared about it. It would be a step for them to go from writing to typing. However, there is much potential there, and I think it would be useful for Canada to explore sustainable ways of spreading that.
Many challenges go along with trying to introduce new technologies, including even the maintenance of hardware and trying to have some local skills so that people know what to do should the computer program break down or what have you after all the internationals have left. For now we are mainly working in print, and even that is a big challenge.
Senator Andreychuk: You made some comments about NATO that when it came in it was not clear about its mandate. It was an evolving situation; NATO was first time out of area that far out of area, so it was a learning experience, both for the United Nations and for NATO.
You say part of the problem is therefore the waffling of the international community. What are you looking for? Are you looking for a long-term military involvement or a long-term development involvement?
I say that because everyone is saying that the military is to secure the country — and when that can be is a question — in order to allow the development to continue.
What did you mean by the waffling, and what do you see as being needed to sustain some of the programs you are doing?
As a sub-question to that, have you ever had to ask for security for your projects, or have you gone in where you have deemed it secure enough?
Ms. Oates: I think what is scaring many people is the pinning down of withdrawal dates by different NATO member countries before specific objectives have been met. We should be leaving when certain things have happened rather than by arbitrary dates.
Regarding whether it is military or development, it is certainly both. We at Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan recognized a long time ago the importance of security provision from the international forces. At a time when many of the NGOs were kind of going over to the anti-war side, all the women we worked with were telling us that they wanted international troops there and were worried about them leaving.
Practically speaking, I know that anything other than a training mission is not possible. It seems our military is depleted and cannot handle a combat mission any longer, and the Canadian public just would not accept it. Carrying on the training mission until training objectives have been met would be useful.
We never work with the Canadian military in any formal capacity in our aid work. We do not have any security at all. I think that is helpful to us. It keeps our budgets low. We are discreet, and we can blend in more easily than if we were running around in armoured vehicles with armed guards and everything.
I visited the staff training college in Kabul where Canadian sergeants and colonels are training Afghan sergeants and colonels and lieutenants, and it was just incredible to see the camaraderie between them. It is different from what you see with the American military. They were goofing around together, kind of like any military base. They really seem to have a trust between them and to work well together. That is something Canada can really capitalize on in doing ongoing training and hopefully literacy training as well with the military.
We do rely indirectly on the security that is provided by NATO. I do not know that we would ever be able to continue doing the work that we are doing without NATO there if circumstances stay as they are.
I did want to mention briefly the topic of the militarization of aid. It is a real buzz word, and it is very fashionable to talk about that as a dangerous thing. I personally have not seen any evidence of its harm in the field, and I have seen data that supports its benefits. Many other NGOs talk about how the military cannot deliver aid, and I want to see some more concrete data on that before writing off that option altogether. I have seen them do some good things, and I am unconvinced about the dangers of the militarization of aid.
Senator Hubley: You mentioned in your presentation the number of students who returned to the schools after the Taliban in 2002 and have moved through the system and now are entering the Grade 8 level. You also caution that if there are no opportunities for continuing education, that will present a destabilizing factor, or it could. Could you would elaborate on that and give us an idea of what will happen if those students complete a certain portion of their education but have nowhere to go after that?
Ms. Oates: They would potentially join the ranks of the unemployed and be vulnerable to become the disenfranchised, the kind of people who join the Taliban or who leave the country and contribute to the brain drain that Afghanistan does not need but that is happening to a certain extent now. Although many higher education institutions have been opening in the country, it is not really happening fast enough to meet the demand. I think there are 50,000 university places in the country, in all the universities combined, and at least 200,000 applicants. Many people do not get in.
There is not enough in between, besides university. There are just not enough vocational training centres. There are no community colleges. They are not called that. The Afghan Canadian Community Centre in Kandahar is operating somewhat like a community college, or at least a continuing education centre. It is a useful model that is a stepping stone between secondary school and perhaps university. Secondary schools are also needed. There are not enough of those either. The primary schools there cannot meet the number of students.
One school in our program has 9,700 students in a single school, and they go in four shifts to accommodate all of them because there is not enough space. That means all the kids are in class for only about two and a half hours a day, and the teacher is completely exhausted by the end of the day, teaching four rounds of students with over 100 kids in each class. That deteriorates the quality of the education being offered.
A lot of progress has been made in quantity, in opening schools, in training teachers, in enrolling students. Enrolment is about 7 million in primary and secondary for boys and girls, and 2.5 million of those are girls. Those numbers are really impressive if you consider the base line numbers in 2001 when there were essentially zero girls in schools and not very many boys either. Now it is time to focus on improving the quality, both of the teachers who are in service already and the teachers who are being trained. It has been happening too slowly and too uncoordinated and with too much waste over time.
We are looking at a very young country, where most of the population is under 30 years old. They all want to be in school, if they are not already. They need to be kept occupied when they graduate to prevent them from leaving or potentially joining the insurgency.
Senator Hubley: Would you say the educational system and economic development are progressing at the same level, or do you feel that there are gaps that will present problems within perhaps both areas?
Ms. Oates: I think the education sector is perhaps weaker. It has not been a prominent part of the aid strategy. Certainly money has been poured into the education sector, with insufficient checks on how it has been spent, but education is not talked about as a security strategy, which I think it is. It is just one more thing in the long list of development priorities that need to be tackled, along with health, economic development, and infrastructure projects. It has not been prioritized, but it is where you will get the most bang for your buck if you are serious about it and invest heavily, both in money but more importantly in people power. Technical assistance can go very far in supporting the education ministry staff, for example, and the trainers at teachers' colleges.
Afghanistan has seen such consistent economic growth. That is an area of strength, and programs are intended to support women's access to markets and capital. The Business Council for Peace is one good example. The U.S. embassy has a small grants program and does stuff to assist women entrepreneurs. I have seen the project sites for MEDA, the Mennonite Economic Development Associates, the Canadian program which had some CIDA funding, and that has yielded good results as well. I would say it is overall a little bit better resourced than education, but also just as important to support.
The Chair: Dr. Sima Samar has an idea about a women's university outside of Kabul, maybe 1,200 students, and it would be gender-segregated so that the parents of rural women would feel freer to send their young women to university. Can you tell us what you have heard about it and what kinds of support and criticisms there are of this idea?
Ms. Oates: I have not heard about a women's university specifically.
The Chair: It is structured within a mixed university. There would be dorms for women only and classes for women only.
Ms. Oates: Do you mean a women's college within the university? Do they take different courses than the other university students?
The Chair: I think they take the same courses for a bachelor's degree, but there would be some emphasis on gender, self-esteem and things like that.
Ms. Oates: It has potential, certainly. Boarding schools are very important because the women have to be housed separately, and university education in Kabul is not very accessible to rural women, for example, because of the cultural limitations about women living on their own. It just does not happen. Women always live within the home they are born into or the home they marry into. They face a lot of gossip and can become unmarriageable if they go and live on their own. Women-only boarding schools are needed for every faculty.
One project I can bring to your attention is a very small one; again, some of the success stories are just small examples. It is a school called the School of Leadership, Afghanistan — the SOLA school. The school has only about 40 students at a time; there is a small women's boarding school within it, and they are focused on leadership skills. That is where I get my translators from because the girls that graduate from that program are confident, smart, well poised, very ambitious and extremely well-educated. They go through their regular high school curriculum for Grade 11 and Grade 12, but it is complemented with leadership skills and all these other programs. That is a useful model to refer to for giving women access not only to education but also to some of those leadership and confidence-building skills that can help them as well.
The atmosphere at Kabul University, at least, is different from the rest of the country. It is pretty liberal. It is like any campus in the world where there is that atmosphere of people pursuing knowledge together, and men and women are mixing and talking with each other and in heated political debates. That is something it would be good to scale up and further invest in — creating more faculties in the university system, for sure, but practical faculties.
I know there is a gender studies program, but I do not know too much about it. If it is heavily theory-based, I think it is perhaps less relevant to the women's rights needs in Afghanistan than medicine, health and education, the kind of practical skills that can put women into public life.
Senator Zimmer: Thank you for presenting to us this afternoon. I want to follow up on a question that Senator Kochhar and Senator Andreychuk asked, but I will come at it from a different angle.
Are we really fooling ourselves? I know it looks like the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition will be taking an open vote very soon about extending to 2014 from 2012.
I was in Kandahar and Kabul two years ago with the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. We took five armoured vehicles and went beyond the wire to view an economic development project of a bakery for men and an embroidery shop for women.
On the way back, we were intercepted, and they knew our route back into the city, but when you looked at the rooftops, you saw children running on the rooftops. Half of them were waving at us happily, and the other half were shaking their fists. It is a culture that is really early in the stages. It is not in the older; it is really in there deeply. This will take a generation, if not two; this could go on beyond 2020.
Are we fooling ourselves that we will be out by 2014? More importantly, how do we break that down? Children of five, six, seven and eight are already divided. It is not that the older ones are divided.
Second, how would you gauge when you should pull out? Will it be the number of people educated, the number of police force trained or the number of firms that are not growing drug crops but food crops? Those are the issues, and I know they are difficult to answer. How do you get beyond that culture of people, of the five-, six- and seven-year-old, children, and get them to think differently? It will take at least one generation, if not two.
Ms. Oates: Absolutely, and I will not lie to you: It will take a long time. It has to be a sustained, committed effort. Especially with development aid, our interest is fickle so often, and we jump around and reprioritize every five years. That will not work if you want to be effective in Afghanistan. It must be long term. It will not happen quickly.
As to when it should end, one indicator will be the Afghans' perceptions of their own security and circumstances. Luckily, we have that data. There are dozens of polls of Afghan opinions, the Asia Foundation, ABC News and the BBC, so we can measure over the years how Afghans feel about the situation.
Kandahar is a unique case. I do not think it is representative of the whole country. My friend Terry Glavin says that all these journalists in Kandahar reporting back to Canada as if Kandahar is Afghanistan is like an Afghan journalist coming to Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver driving around with video cameras and saying to Afghans that this is Canada. It is a place rife with challenges, and there are people who are open towards foreigners being there, towards Western aid and towards NATO overall in Kandahar, although of the whole country, people in Kandahar are the least supportive of the NATO mission, according to the polling data.
At the risk of repeating myself, the way you can change their confidence in us and perceptions of us is through education.
One of our partner organizations, PARSA, runs orphanages, and they were asked by the government to take in a kid who was about 11, who was a failed suicide bomber from the Taliban. A lot of kids are tricked into being suicide bombers, but this one was not. He knew what he was doing, but he was captured. They took the vest off him and he came to PARSA. He talked openly about his desire to kill infidels — all Westerners were fair targets — and he was very extremist, fully indoctrinated. For two weeks, they worked with him, counselled him, and there were temper tantrums and dramatic moments. After a couple of weeks, he was starting to have an epiphany where he was thinking differently about the people who were helping him and about what he almost did, and he went through a lot of guilt, and a lot of screaming happened. However, in just two weeks, his indoctrination was starting to reverse itself through the education, the counselling and the trauma support services that they were doing with him. Unfortunately, in that particular case, he made some phone calls and his handlers discovered where he was and came and got him. He disappeared and they have not heard from him since, but it does illustrate that, with a small amount of time and some resources, some of that indoctrination process can be reversed through education and psychosocial services. Again, it comes back to education.
In my own life and work as a development practitioner, I started working in women's rights from a legal and awareness-raising perspective and studied international development and then human security in graduate school. I then did a 180 and came into education because I was seeing those projects not achieve their intended results, and I recognized that we just will not get far if we do not do education first. The ground where these seeds will germinate is having a literate society first; then you can get to the other things that must be secondary to education. I then did a doctorate in literacy education. I was the only non-teacher in the education faculty, but it mirrors my own recognition of the importance of literacy and education to doing women's rights work well.
The Chair: We have no time left. Senator Brazeau wants to ask a question, so I will let him have a turn.
Senator Brazeau: I have a quick question. What level of collaboration, if any, do you have with the Afghan Ministry of Education? To your knowledge, are there any barriers that you are aware of internally that they may have in terms of fully incorporating some of the literacy programs you talk about? Obviously, the importance of education and literacy has been a common theme that we have been hearing throughout these discussions.
Ms. Oates: We have to work with them. Whenever you do an education project to do with the public school system, you have to sign a protocol with the Ministry of Education. It has often been challenging, but not always. There are different levels of capacity in their civil servants. Things happen very slowly. It took us many months to get our teacher-training program protocol in place, and it delayed things from moving more quickly. It was just bureaucratic changes. You get the hint sometimes that you could make the process happen faster if you did something illegal. That is discouraging, to say the least.
However, there are some competent people in there, who are overworked. They have lots of resources coming in. It is not a shortage of grants to do the work; it is that they are not delegating, and there is a backlog of things that need to happen, so that slows everything down.
An example would be the textbook fiasco. A great deal of money has gone into it, lots of time and effort and contracts with American universities, and yet eight years into this intervention, a basic step in rebuilding an education system — the production and distribution of textbooks — has yet to be completed. Up until last year, none of our schools had any government textbooks. They had never seen them before. We are just starting to see them coming into the primary levels, but the secondary schools do not have them. It is mind-boggling why that has not happened. It is lots of duplication, lack of coordination and lack of monitoring. There is no one at the top watching all these donors, development actors, NGOs and the Ministry of Education officials to ensure everyone is on the same page, making sure this stuff happens. The delivery of services does not happen quickly at the Ministry of Education. Some capacity development and efficiency processes and maybe more accountability to be demanded on the part of donors are important.
Afghans want the donor governments to their country to demand accountability. Last year, when I was doing research on the Shia Personal Status Law in Afghanistan, which was being called the rape law here — I am sure you have read about it in the press — there was a perception on the part of the internationals in the country — the UN officials, the donor governments — that Afghans do not want outsiders to interfere too much in their government and political processes, but the Afghans were complaining that they do not interfere enough. People said to me: ``You are financing this operation. If you are not standing up for our human rights, who else will? It is your right as the financiers of this effort to demand accountability and credibility on the part of the Afghan government, and to defend our rights, and we do not see you as imposing those. We want you to do more, and you are not doing enough.''
That is an important point.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Mobina S. B. Jaffer (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
The Deputy Chair: I would like to welcome Rights and Democracy and Human Rights Watch for this panel. We will start with Rights and Democracy.
Gérard Latulippe, President, Rights and Democracy: Members of the committee, with me this evening is Alexandra Gilbert, our program coordinator in Afghanistan and for the Afghanistan project. She will mainly lead the exchange with the committee members. However, I want to emphasize the fact that this Rights and Democracy program in Afghanistan and Rights and Democracy's support for women's rights in Afghanistan are of major importance for our institution.
The Rights and Democracy project implementation is led by an all-Afghan team. We have an office in Kabul of 16 Afghan employees, including six women. For instance, in 2002, Rights and Democracy established the Women's Rights in Afghanistan Fund, with CIDA support. Rights and Democracy, through the drafting committee on family law, led a drafting process of the reform of family law that is in line with Afghanistan's commitment to women's rights and inspired by experience in other Muslim countries.
The drafting process has been supported by the training of 350 men and women to lead discussion at the community level on human rights and the means to ensure the protection within family law. We also work in five provinces to raise awareness about the family law, through local radio programs and by providing support to legal aid clinics.
In January 2011, Rights and Democracy will publish A Woman's Place: Women's in Afghanistan Legal Framework, consisting of four chapters resulting from Rights and Democracy's experience in the law-making process. You will receive a complementary copy of this publication.
Since September 2010, Rights & Democracy receives funding from the European Commission to draft an anti- discrimination code of conduct based on ethnicity.
I will now ask Ms. Gilbert to continue.
Alexandra Gilbert, Project Coordinator for Women's Rights in Afghanistan, Rights and Democracy: We have discussed earlier tonight progress and achievements made by women of Afghanistan. I have been based in Kabul for most of the last year and a half, and what I have been hearing is fear that the gains of women will be negotiated during the peace talks with the Taliban, as well as individual freedoms that have been also enshrined in the Afghan constitution.
I have seen the evolution of a context made of negotiation with the Taliban, of a new Afghan parliament, as well as an increasingly marked expression of fundamentalism. This context is worrisome for many Afghan colleagues and partners. This could translate into an impact on the laws related to women. I will give the example of The Elimination of Violence Against Women Act that is highly controversial at the moment and that could be threatened by the new Afghan parliament as well as by the ongoing peace talks with the Taliban.
I will give the example of Shia Personal Status Law. Although an imperfect law, it is still bears some articles for the protection of women's rights, and this law is also threatened. There are also laws that could be used against civil society. I am thinking of the NGO law, for example, or the media law that could be used to decrease the space in which Afghan civil society is able to exercise or to speak.
I am thinking also of my colleagues — all my Afghan colleagues who are using sharia-based argument — who increasingly have seen, for the last six months, a progressive interpretation of sharia to promote women's rights and to promote a most equitable society, who are being increasingly accused of being bad Muslims or working for the West. I see as well — and I think it is encouraging — an increased number of Afghans who are like-minded and who are starting to find each other and to work together for a more equitable society in this specific context.
Mr. Latulippe: Broadly, what does Rights and Democracy believe Canada should consider for its future engagement in Afghanistan? We believe it is important to encourage a greater dialogue among progressive elements of Afghan civil society, including the political society, and also between the Afghan government and the civil society.
On the question of women's participation in the peace process, Afghan women have fought to be included in discussion with the Taliban. However, women's participation in the peace process must translate to greater decision- making roles, including discussion with insurgents.
Human rights and women's rights concept must be addressed within the framework of Islam, by Afghans adhering to these principles and by supporting Afghan-led initiatives, allowing the development of a sense of ownership. We have to acknowledge that a number of conservative groups are packaging the legal reforms and gender equality as ``foreign'' and therefore as a threat to the integrity of Afghan culture and religion.
In addition, we need to support Afghan women with the means they need to be liberated, which means principally education. Therefore, women's access to justice must be shaped by their empowerment, through a greater knowledge of their rights, the content of the laws having an impact on their daily lives and by their increased capacities to participate in dialogues concerning their status.
Ms. Gilbert will provide more detailed recommendations about what we think Canada can do more specifically.
Ms. Gilbert: One issue is the development of role models for Afghan youth, whether they are young girls or young boys. There was a question earlier about the type of model that Afghan civil society had, whether it was a Western model.
My experience over the last years has taught me that there are few models in recent history, especially in terms of people uniting in coalition to speak together or to work together. One of the only models they have is of warlords uniting together, a more fundamentalist element of Afghan society. Therefore, for the younger generation, it would be important to identify Afghans who make a difference in their communities and to start a dialogue between these people and young people. For example, it could be done in secondary institutions or at universities. We were speaking earlier of the support that a man was giving to his wife who was running for parliamentary election. Why not have some media interaction around how this man has supported his wife to run as an MP, and how it can be inspiring for youth who are trying to access public life?
It would also be interesting to implement programs of active citizenship for young people so that they have a better idea of how they can become involved in their society. There is a lot of disillusion and demobilization among youth today.
These are suggestions.
In the area of human rights and justice, our experience shows that even if there were perfect laws, their implementation is uncertain and extremely challenging because of a weak and corrupted justice system. Given this context, I would recommend the development of policies and codes of conduct that would operationalize the laws, especially the laws protecting women's right. Also it would be interesting to build the capacity of key ministries to implement these laws. One of the ministries would be the ministry of education or the ministry of higher education, as well as one for social affairs. For many Afghans, the idea of laws remains outside of them. Therefore, we need to show how a law can translate into a policy or code of conduct that can apply to daily lives.
Speaking of policy, Afghan colleagues and partners working in the area of the law-making process have been recommending for years to have public consultation to increase the linkages between the Ministry of Justice and Afghan citizens. It would be possible to develop a policy to encourage a dialogue between the ministry and different Afghan stakeholders. By doing so, it would also foster a greater sense of ownership of the laws by Afghan citizens.
Women's access to justice could be supported through an increased support to legal aid, through legal aid services, as well as a reinforcement of the role of organizations delivering legal aid in the area of legal awareness.
Finally, it would be interesting to promote the registration of civil status as a tool that would largely contribute to the protection of women. Earlier, we were working on the marriage contract. This is a tool that could ensure that some rights could be discussed during the engagement or the marriage ceremony.
I would like to conclude by coming back to something discussed earlier — the importance of training. We spoke a lot about training military and police on gender issues or to provide them with gender training. It is fundamental that people such as teachers, doctors, nurses and all the civil servant classes receive training on women's rights, as well. You will not necessarily carry a positive message about women into the classroom simply by being a teacher. It is important to raise their awareness.
In terms of what kind of gender training can be provided to military personnel, such as the Afghan army, I would recommend training on the Afghan constitution that would include sharia-based arguments to support women's rights and against discrimination based on gender or ethnicity. Finally, there ought to be training that would focus more specifically on laws affecting women's rights.
We have lately used the technique of mentoring for the training we were doing. The idea is to avoid having people just sitting in a class and listening to a message that they might not believe in. The idea is to encourage them to speak on this issue, to have follow-up sessions in which the participants are asked to speak about the topics. Again, that would be done to foster a greater sense of ownership of a positive message related to human rights and women's rights.
Rachel Reid, Afghanistan Researcher, Human Rights Watch: Thank you for the invitation to testify at this important and timely hearing. I have been working on Afghanistan for much of the last four years now. Much of that time, I was living there, although this year I am half in Kabul and half in the U.K. and the U.S.
I have spent much of the last year or two working on women's rights issues. I brought out a report in December 2009 called ``We Have the Promises of the World'': Women's Rights in Afghanistan, which looks at five key areas of human rights abuses against women — attacks on women in public life, child and forced marriage, violence against women, access to justice and access to secondary education for Afghan girls.
In July of this year, I brought out a report called The ``Ten-Dollar Talib'' and Women's Rights: Afghan Women and the Risks of Reintegration and Reconciliation, which dealt with the risks to Afghan women and girls as we move forward toward reintegration and reconciliation with the Taliban. I have interviewed a series of key women's rights leaders and former Taliban about the prospects of the Taliban's reintegration. This latter area will form the basis of my oral testimony today, but I am happy to take questions on a wider range of issues.
Reintegration and reconciliation cannot work without a more credible and legitimate government in Afghanistan. Otherwise I think we will see a wave of deal making, buying at best a temporary peace; empowering local strongmen; and fuelling corruption. Sadly, I think one thing that imperils Afghan women more than anything is the impatience of the international community to get out of Afghanistan. In many ways, they are still the best guarantors, apart from the Afghan women themselves, to ensure that this is not just a hasty deal and that rights are not traded away in the process of trying to bring a political settlement in Afghanistan.
It is vital for the Government of Canada, which has a good track record in raising human rights issues in Afghanistan, to keep pushing the Afghan government to improve its record on rights, governance and rule of law, even as we move forward slowly toward reintegration and reconciliation.
I have a quick caveat about wishful thinking before I go into specifics on reintegration and reconciliation. One of the reasons I wrote this report was because I was becoming frustrated by the creeping in of Taliban revisionism. There is a tendency of politicians and pundits now to increasingly talk about the non-ideological motivations of the Taliban — the economic drivers of the insurgency. I do not for a minute question that there are economic drivers, particularly for many low-level fighters, and I do not question for a second that in many areas of the country there are predatory areas of the state and predatory officials in the state who drive people into the hands of the insurgency. Much more attention needs to be paid to that.
However, I think the extremist interpretation of Islam is integral to the identity of the Taliban. Therefore, you need to keep in mind not only what motivates the insurgents to fight but how they behave when they have control of an area. As a reminder of that, I did a series of interviews earlier this year with women living in de facto areas of Taliban control, particularly in places where women had seen brief freedoms after the fall of the Taliban — they had resumed their jobs as teachers, midwives, civil servants or health workers, and had sent their daughters back to school. Then, as the insurgency took hold in 2005-06, and in some of the areas around Kabul in the last recent years, they have seen these freedoms unravel quickly. They have received phone calls, letters and visits from armed men threatening them, forcing them to stop work or take their daughters out of school.
I sent some reports to the committee from this report, and I included translations of some of the night letters that these women are receiving, which I encourage you to read. There is an extraordinary assassination campaign being carried out, particularly in the south by the Taliban. It is not that men are not targeted, but when women are targeted, there is a specific gendered aspect to it. For instance, after a young woman, an aid worker, was murdered in the spring of this year, other women in Kandahar received letters saying, ``You are next on the list.'' Other women received letters saying, ``You are mixing with men. You are not covering your face. This is haram. We will kill you in a way that no Muslin woman has been killed.'' A female teacher in Kunduz in the north received a letter saying, ``If you do not stop working at the school, we will behead your children.''
These are very specifically aimed at pushing women back into their homes, and it is very effective in many areas of Taliban control. That is just a note to say, let us be honest about who we are dealing with as we move forward into reintegration and reconciliation. Obviously all women in Afghanistan want peace because women are paying a very heavy price for the conflict in Afghanistan, but it does not mean that they want peace at any cost.
I would give a quick note on the political context here. This is a government that has shown itself very capable of trading away women's rights when it is politically expedient to do so, whether it is with the Shia Personal Status Law that I know received much attention in Canada, or when President Karzai freed some gang rapists from jail well before their term had ended because he wanted to do a favour for a political ally. There is a tendency for the government to suggest, as a reassurance about women's rights, that there would not be deals with anyone who would not agree to sign up to the constitution. I would like to flag what I think is the inadequacy of that. There have been many occasions when women's rights have been traded away, despite the supposed protection of the constitution. What is needed are explicit guarantees of women's basic freedoms, including the right to work, the right to participate in public life and the right to education. These kinds of rights need to be on the table during negotiations.
Women themselves, as you were just hearing, need to be at the table too. I met with President Karzai in July and asked him whether he could contemplate women being part of the negotiations themselves, and I received a theoretical yes. However, I think he was actually talking about sending a delegation of women to neighbouring countries to talk to other women, which is a long way short of actual involvement in negotiations. Representation is key, and I would urge that as something to be on your agenda, with your advocacy and your questions to the Afghan government and your government. Women fought hard to get decent representation on the peace jirga, which took place in June, and actually did a remarkable job and managed to get about 23 per cent in the jirga. There was much less success with the potentially important high level peace council, which was announced in September, and very little representation on the joint secretariat, which is the Afghan body that will actually be overseeing the programs themselves, particularly with a view to reintegration. They have a gender specialist, which is a very tokenistic bit of representation.
When it comes to reintegration, the Canadian government could play a helpful role. There is a need for some kind of vetting to take place when there is reintegration of commanders who are invited to come and rejoin the government. One of the inducements that will be used is the offer of political jobs, whether it is district governorships or district police chiefs or higher level government officials. This is part of the package, not necessarily formally in the programs but in terms of the conversations I have had with Afghan government officials; it is very much on the table. Canada will have some very detailed information about some of the insurgents, particularly in Kandahar, and I would urge you to share that information with the people at the local level, the provincial-level peace councils. The UN is setting up this task force or peace group that will hopefully have an important consultative role. There needs to be more of a pooling of this information so that, for instance, if a Talib appears wanting to reintegrate with the government, if he has a track record of burning down girls' schools, that information is at hand, and red flags will be raised. We really need to start looking at what the red lines are for reintegration and reconciliation.
I have a brief word on attacks on women in public life, which is important generally but will be particularly important for reintegration and reconciliation moves and women's ability to advocate for their own rights being upheld in this process. Women parliamentarians, counsellors and activists who assert their rights face serious threats. In the last few years, several high-profile women have been assassinated, and their killers have still not been brought to justice. I would encourage to you think about writing to the Afghan government to ask why there has not been justice for the killers of these victims. These killings should not be forgotten. I think it helps for the government to realize that these women's lives are not forgotten.
On violence against women, I will echo some of the points that Ms. Gilbert has brought to you. The broader picture of violence against women is dismal. There was one bright spot, which was the passing, by decree last summer, of The Elimination of Violence Against Women Act. It is not perfect, but it makes rape a crime for the first time. Much more work is needed still to try to ensure that this gets implemented — and that includes training programs for lawyers, prosecutors and judges. I would echo again Ms. Gilbert's point that although Canada is ending its combat function, you will still play an important role with the training of the Afghan army and police. We have seen a training program that is heavily skewed toward churning out paramilitary forces as cannon fodder in the insurgency and much less attention to basic law enforcement duties, including laws against violence against women. I would encourage to you evaluate and help modify current police training to take this much more into account.
In conclusion, I would say that Afghan women and girls do not forget the promises made all over the world when the Taliban were ousted, and they look to countries such as yours with a track record of attempting to uphold human rights in Afghanistan, to ensure that their rights will not be traded away, even as you reduce your troop commitments. Clearly the Afghan leadership has the primary responsibility here. However, as we have seen, for instance, with the appointments on the high-level peace council where women received such dismal representation, there is little sign yet that their rights will be protected by the government. The Government of Canada can play an incredibly important role when other troop-contributing nations and powerful donor nations in Afghanistan have not yet made it clear that they will really seek to protect women's rights as they also seek to extract themselves from Afghanistan. Canada can help to ensure that women are included in the process and that serious human rights violators are not put into positions of power over people's lives and that the fundamental freedoms enshrined in Afghanistan's constitution are not sacrificed. Thank you very much.
Senator Kochhar: Thank you for your helpful presentations.
I have a small question. I am trying to understand. You have been telling us all the problems can be solved by education. What is the process behind it? Let us say CIDA gives a $200,000 grant to a group to go to Afghanistan and bring about a change so that women can be educated and more education can be given. Do you have to go to their ministry of education? Is it a national government or a provincial government? Once you receive the CIDA grant, how do you proceed to effect the change for which you received the grant?
Ms. Gilbert: For me, the key point about how to achieve change through education is really to let Afghans, whether they are individuals or groups, take the ownership of the discourse that is carried to bring a more equitable society. It is not about us going there and giving training and doing this and that. It is about identifying local resources that are well versed, for example, in progressive interpretation or sharia.
It can also be that they are well versed in economical and sociological arguments to promote the rights of women to education and to work, for example. That goes to not only formal education in the sense that the teachers and the professors must also have access to that kind of training to be able to carry on this message to the classroom, but also informal education through training, workshops, and raising awareness. Earlier I mentioned legal aid clinics in the provinces. These are fantastic ways to raise awareness on women's rights.
Senator Kochhar: Where do you get the permission? Do you go to the federal government, provincial government or the local government? Who controls the education in these schools? CIDA will give grants to only Canadian organizations in partnership with the Afghan organizations, and this Canadian organization will empower the local organization to make things happen. Where would the local organization get the permission to go to these schools?
Ms. Gilbert: In terms of the ministry of education, I do not know the content of their curriculum. However, for example, we have been trying to include teachers in training at a local level, and doing training on how to preserve harmony in the family, which is the message that my colleagues are conveying to discuss women's rights. There were some teachers who were just taking a few days to attend our training. If we take the training outside of the classrooms, in terms of raising awareness, so that there are mixed groups, that can be organized at the community level. For now, I know the ministry of justice is working to frame legal awareness. It is at an early stage, so I do not know how it will affect the work we are doing.
Senator Kochhar: I do not think you understand my question. The education system in Canada is a provincial and local jurisdiction. How does the education system work in Afghanistan? Is it provincial, federal or local? Under what jurisdiction does the education system fall?
Ms. Gilbert: I am not an expert on the education system. My expertise is informal education in the form of raising awareness, so outside the classroom.
Ms. Reid: I am not an expert, either, but, in theory, there is a national system. A lot of informal and community education was being led by NGOs in the early years. There was a transition policy to move more of the schools into the control of the Afghan government and to regularize the system. It is moving toward being a nationalized system.
We did some work on girls' access to secondary education last year and found that it was the small, local community schools that girls found much easier to access. One of the failings in the state system was a tendency to go to large, centrepiece flagship schools in provincial and district capitals. The barriers to girls' education, which kick in particularly when they hit puberty, are not necessarily about Afghan families not wanting to send their daughters to school or not wanting them to have an education. They are often things about the problem of girls of pubescent age travelling to school, being seen on roads, being seen in schools where there are no school buildings. There are many of these much more subtle cultural taboos.
The answers we were getting from the communities we were interviewing were to have more small, local community schools and more training for female teachers. Certainly, on the reconciliation issue, if we are moving into an era where the Taliban and more conservative factions have more sway, we need to be looking at what their objections are. When they were in power, they were not necessarily saying that they were opposed to women's education per se. Often they were using technical problems such as there not being enough female teachers or women's schools. Those issues should be on your agenda and CIDA's educational programs.
[Translation]
Hon. Patrick Brazeau: My question is for the representatives of Rights and Democracy. In your presentation, you told us what considerations Canada should have for its future involvement in Afghanistan. You also mentioned that the Afghan people have fought to be included in discussions for the peace process.
Could you please expand on the importance of ensuring that Afghan women take part in this process? Why should Canada focus on this? Thirdly, and just so I can have a better understanding of it, what are the benefits of their involvement? Lastly, I would like to know if it's realistic to do this.
Ms. Gilbert: Can I respond in English? Because I worked with Ms. Reid in Kabul, and I know she does not understand French.
[English]
Ms. Reid, I will answer in English because you will like the question as well. We mentioned in our presentation that women have fought to be included in the peace talks and then on the High Peace Council. The question is how they will make a difference, and is it realistic.
I felt at the very beginning that the inclusion of women in the peace talks was cosmetic. You include women to include women because then afterwards the government can say, ``Oh, yes, women were included.'' Yes, there were women present, but what was the role of these women?
I will give you another example. At the peace jirga, men were chairing the committees, and women were deputy chairs, from what I remember. Yes, they were there, and they were still deputy chairs, which was good, but still they did not have the front role.
I will answer by a greater question: How can we ensure that they have decision-making roles that actually mean having something to say about who we negotiate with? We heard very often that it would be the moderate Taliban. What is a moderate Taliban? How do you identify a moderate Taliban, and can women eventually meet these people as well?
Ms. Reid mentioned that you have to bring articles from the constitution to the table, the ones that relate to women, and say, ``Listen, this is what needs to be preserved.'' Women should be sitting there as well to talk about these things.
I am answering again with a question: How do you ensure that it is not a cosmetic role women are playing but rather one in which they can have an impact and be present for all the decision making?
Ms. Reid: I agree. Women can actually really make a huge difference, and it is absolutely necessary that they are part of the process because it is so clear that the Afghan government itself will not represent their rights. There is no choice. The only way that we can avoid having their rights unravelled is to help them ensure that they are part of the process.
As one Afghan friend of mine said, ``We do not have guns or poppies, so who listens to us?'' The way power works is very much through these corrupt patronage networks that are connected to militias or narcotics interests, and women do not have a strong access network into power.
At the peace jirga, I was not completely disheartened. The jirga itself was huge. About 1,500 people were present; it broke into these committees, and women had the same share of the jirga as a whole — about 23 per cent. I spoke to women who had been, for instance, the emergency lawyer jirga or the constitutional lawyer jirga, in 2002, 2003 and 2004, those early bodies that were formed. They said that the mood was transformed, and where five or eight years ago, they would have been spat at, insulted or abused for daring to be part of the process, there they were sitting with people such as Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf who is, frankly, a man with views almost identical to the Taliban when it comes to gender and raising points such as women need to be in the negotiating process itself, and they were not being laughed out of the room. Many of my female friends came out of these committees being astounded by the fact that their presence was now more or less accepted.
I do not want to create a completely dismal picture for you, but things can change quickly in Afghanistan. It will require help for women to make sure they are included. In the High Peace Council, they only got about 10 seats out of 70 and the majority of those 10 are Karzai loyalists or connected to former mujahedeen groups, so they will not be effective advocates for women's rights. Only a couple of the women in there will. We need to do much better than this — those of us who are interested in ensuring that they receive adequate representation. There is no doubt that it is absolutely fundamental.
Senator Andreychuk: Thank you for your presentations. I am reassured in one sense that the informal networks are having some impact, but it is a slow, long-term impact. You are changing a society from within as and when they can handle it and according to their own precepts or rights. I am encouraged that some of what we are doing in the international community is assisting Afghans to start making some changes and to work with each other, but that is on a long-term basis.
In the short term, the international community in Canada is caught in the same way — NATO and the UN are caught — with the fact that we were all thinking that the new Karzai government had some political will to look at women's issues and to make some changes in society. However, we are less optimistic — in fact, I think some people are very pessimistic — that President Karzai is committed to the changes that he espoused that excited the international community. We are now stuck with suggesting that he live by what he said, reminding him of not repealing laws that he has committed to, to support women in a real sense and not in a superficial sense.
It troubles me is that there is no alternative to the present Karzai government, and I do not see any challengers or any grouping within the country that will move this forward. We are back to encouraging the same people who have not done the job. From where does your optimism come? Implementation is not happening, and it needs to. Words have been said but not followed through. President Karzai's government does not show a willingness beyond when it is requested. It is a constant political pull one way or another.
The women themselves want to be in the process, but where are other levers, if they are not in the bureaucracy, the institutions or the military? Where do we put our emphasis, or do we continue to hope that what we have been doing will bear some fruit? Again, is that a long-term answer not a short-term answer?
Ms. Gilbert: I really like the question because sometimes when you are in Afghanistan working on women's rights, you have deep evenings thinking about why. For me it is that there are still some sparkles in the dark that keep me moving. I work with an all-Afghan team, and it is men and women who are progressive that I see. Ms. Reid knows them as well, and I am sure she has had the same experience. They are still trying to do something, to go around the system to find ways to be creative and to propose solutions. I feel that there is still this space. I mentioned earlier that there are laws that could be easily used to restrict the space, but for the moment it is still possible for Afghan civil society to have a certain space.
One of the mistakes that we made is that we assume that civil society is just about organizations, just about organized civil society, and we forget, for example, lawyers, teachers, female mullahs, businessmen, doctors, nurses, individuals who can also adhere to principles of equality. Thus far, we have been working mainly with organized civil society. It is about time — and this is what we are trying to do right now to a very modest extent to the project — to get the organized civil society to identify individuals who can increase the network of like-minded individuals to carry progressive messages and be women's rights and human rights advocates. If we come back to the peace talk, if I remember correctly, the list of members of the High Peace Council is quite depressing. However, there could be men willing to defend women in this process as well. We still have some time. Anyway, this is what keeps me doing what I am doing, and this is what keeps my colleagues also believing that there are still some things that can be done.
Ms. Reid: I would echo Ms. Gilbert's highlighting of the number and wealth of inspirational Afghan leaders who we work with and come into contact with all the time. Outside of Afghanistan you get an image of President Karzai and some of the entourage around him. No country has only this. There are some inspiring people in every country, and Afghanistan is not short of them by any stretch of the imagination. Are they accessing power? No; there is a stranglehold of power by a group of former warlords and the Mafia-like leaders, many of whom are profiting from the war economy. To be honest, the international community shares a lot of responsibility for this situation.
Early on there was a decision made that it would be security now and justice would come later. Still today those decisions are being made. Particularly since the shock around the 2009 presidential elections, which Afghans were much less shocked about, we have seen a lot of stress on the need for reforms around governance and rule of law, but we do not see much action. Part of the reason is that the international communities themselves are dependent on these same characters, whether it is for their private security companies, their logistics or in battle. If you look at Kandahar as a recent example, in the military operations in the spring, Kandahar was described as a political problem. The solution was to be governance-led. Look at who the key ally is now of international forces in Kandahar presently, Commander Raziq, who is notorious for human rights abuses and narcotics smuggling, and is very much a part of the problem.
I do not think it is the time to despair with the Afghan government while the international community is still sending such mixed messages: on the one hand, finger-wagging, and on the other hand enriching and empowering the same characters who are part of the problem. A signal needs to be sent on the international communities side as well as the Afghan government side that there is a genuine commitment to reform, to sever some of these links and to marginalize some of these characters, as it is not just about one individual. It is not just about President Karzai; it is a corrupted system.
The Deputy Chair: I am intrigued by The ``Ten-Dollar Talib'' and Women's Rights: Afghan Women and the Risks of Reintegration and Reconciliation. I would like to hear from you as to what negative role those people would play with the rights of women.
Ms. Reid: If you look at provinces such as Kandahar, major parts of Helmand, Paktitka, Paktia and a large number of provinces now, sadly, where the Taliban has de facto control, it will mean that women in public life working with the government, working for NGOs, will be harassed to stop work. They will receive night letters — these threatening letters left at night, which, as I was saying, men do receive as well. However, the women are so much more visible. There are so few women in public life, particularly in these conservative provinces in the south and east, that there is more pressure on them to disappear.
Last year in Kandahar, there was the murder of one of the most prominent outspoken women's rights leaders, Sitara Achakzai, and almost overnight a small group of very brave women who were also working for women's rights in the province disappeared. None of the women who were running for the provincial council later that year were present in the province to run. There is a domino effect when a woman is targeted like that.
When it comes to girls' education, I was in Kunduz recently in the north, and we have seen a wave of threats and intimidation around girls' education, particularly targeting girls over the age of 10 or 11. When they hit this age, it becomes significant to the Taliban in terms of conservative norms about pubescent girls and mixing. Girls' education in rural areas in some of these Taliban-dominated areas disappears often. It is reminiscent of the Taliban time in terms of women's presence and their ability to assert their right around education, work and participation in public life.
The Deputy Chair: I have a question for Rights & Democracy. You said that you have been working on this for many years. When I was preparing my questions over the weekend, I was looking at some of your reports. As long ago as 2003, you were speaking of the priority areas, namely, security, women's development and international donor funding. One of the areas on women's participation that you spoke of was on Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. Maybe I will ask Ms. Reid and Human Rights Watch about this as well.
From 2003 to 2004, have we made progress on that resolution? Is women's participation better? When I hear all of you speak, I feel that the foundation is slippery, and we could quickly lose everything. Have we made progress, or are we still at the same stage that we were at in 2001, 2002 and 2003?
Ms. Gilbert: It is hard for me to answer because I just took on the project three years ago. I was not there then. I have been basically working in and on Afghanistan since 2007. Perhaps Ms. Reid would have greater input.
Ms. Reid: Progress is being made. My anecdotal evidence from the peace jirga is that women are present in these serious, high-level discussions with tribal elders and various conservative faction elements in society. It was accepted as being something that was more like normal. Two women ran for the presidential election last year, and none of the major conservative groups such as the Afghanistan National Council of Ulemma, the council of Islamic scholars, protested as sometimes they do or have done in the past about women's participation. In that sense, there are some areas of progress.
If you look at the Afghan media, which is a dynamic part of society, there has been a mushrooming of Afghan media. Female journalists are very much part of that, both as newscasters and reporters. They face problems, some threats and intimidation in some areas, but they are there. It is slippery, as you say, and it could change quickly. It is not just about the Taliban. There is a possibility that this character Sayyaf, who I mentioned earlier, who is very conservative and a hardline Islamist, could become speaker of the parliament. If that happens, suddenly The Elimination of Violence Against Women Act could be in jeopardy. We are expecting a family law to come into parliament for Sunni Muslims, the majority of the country. If this man becomes speaker of the parliament, again, who knows what the outcome could be?
It is not just about reconciliation; it is also about the strength of these conservative factions. As we move toward reconciliation, you see President Karzai trying to position himself more and more as someone with whom the Taliban can do business. There was a call recently for the Ulemma council of religious scholars to bring in the conservative aspect of sharia surrounding rape and some of these issues. That call, if heeded, would be dismal for women's rights. Yes, it is fragile, but yes, gains have been made.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much. We have appreciated your presentations.
Mr. Khan is from the Canadian Pashtun Cultural Association, CPCA. Mr. Khan, we noticed you have been with us all afternoon. We appreciate your interest on this subject and the fact that you are here to tell us how you think we can help to empower women in Afghanistan.
Mashal Khan, President, Canadian Pashtun Cultural Association: First, thank you very much for having me here. The topic today is environmental association. Before going to that, I want to tell you some background.
Back in my country, I belonged to a Pashtun political family for the last 100 years. I have been in Pashtun politics for 40 years and here in Canada I was working as the president of the Canadian Pashtun Cultural Association, for the last 8 years. The Pashtuns from Afghanistan and Pakistan are members of this organization. There are 50 million people in their area.
I have been sitting here since 1:30 p.m., and I have heard many things. We are hearing every day that the Taliban are Pashtun. I am also Pashtun, but our Pashtuns are not Taliban. In Afghanistan, Pashtuns make up 65 per cent of the population. That is why the Pashtun are the majority in every area. It would be nice to have some discussion in the future about the political situation — the past, present and future — in Afghanistan. I would like to participate in that discussion, but today's discussion is not about that.
I want to tell you a little about the past and what has happened. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, I was in Moscow at that time because I was a student. I was the president of the students union, and I was invited to a forum such as this to talk about whether they were right or wrong to invade Afghanistan. I told them at that time that soon they will know whether they were right or wrong because they did not study the history of Afghans.
They invaded Afghanistan but depended on the minorities. They toppled the government of the majority, and then handed over the government to the minority. The result was that the majority of the people in the forum did not agree with me. They told me that they were internationalists. I told them that I know about their internationalism because I am living here in Moscow, and you can now do anything.
After nine years, they went back; they were defeated. I asked them what the situation was, and why they were defeated. I was told that they had committed a very big mistake in that they made the Pashtuns enemies and not friends. That was the main mistake. The same mistake was committed again; history repeats itself.
From guns and bullets, they did not win the hearts of the people. Therefore, they needed to think about some other approach. They wanted to donate and teach them socialism. Again, we are talking about democracy now. It is fantastic. However, it cannot be donated. It has to be realized amongst the people by themselves. They should fight for it. Unfortunately, first, the people came and invaded, and then they brought other things such as socialism and immigration, et cetera.
I do not want to go into detail on this. I will start my speech now. I will read it, and afterwards I will discuss it in detail.
Yes, Afghans have problems; there are serious challenges in Afghanistan. Many Afghan women hoped things would change for the better after the overthrow of the Taliban, but now there is a great sense of disappointment.
The main problems our Afghan women are facing are education, health, security, domestic violence, food, shelter, income generation, forced marriages, underage marriages, prostitution, rape, repression and other socio-economic and cultural issues. All of these issues should be addressed.
I want to give a little detail of a few of these problems.
On education, 23 years of war has destroyed the infrastructure of the educational system and further increased the illiteracy rate in Afghanistan. Education is the key and the power by which women can fight for their rights. Women occupy a low position in Afghan society because of a lack of opportunities due to illiteracy.
Health is another issue. The poor health situation has been aggravated by the lack of basic health services and resources, particularly in rural areas; and the strict segregation of medical staff and the small number of trained female doctors, nurses and midwives who remained in the country after the rise of the Taliban. The Taliban government was a major cause of the current health care crisis in Afghanistan.
Domestic violence is also a big issue. Violence against women and girls represents a global health, economic development and human rights problem. In Afghanistan, 80 per cent of Afghan women are affected by domestic violence. The majority of them are illiterate, and nearly half of them are married off while still children under the age of 16.
Food is a big challenge. Afghan women, especially widows, have many problems to overcome for their survival. These women do not have any education, so they do not have any job opportunities. They are, therefore, unable to provide food for their families.
Forced marriages involving girls have been part of the social compacts between tribes and families for centuries. Beating, torturing and the trafficking of women remain common.
Security is an issue; Afghan women feel insecure. The government should provide them protection. However, protection for women remains mostly theoretical in much of the country, particularly in rural areas, where tradition runs deepest and women have limited access to advocacy services and courts.
There have been advances for women's rights since the fall of the Taliban, including the establishment of the ministry for women's affairs, a constitution that generally grants women equal status to men, improved access to education and representation of women in parliament. However, these hard-won gains could be seriously compromised as the Government of Afghanistan and its international partners pursue reconciliation with various anti-government armed groups, including the Taliban.
Opium abuse among women and children is a problem. In the rural areas, women use it as medicine. People tend to consume opium as a painkiller. Locals in the district say that if health services were provided, they would not use opium as a substitute for medicine.
Ladies and gentlemen, Canada's UN action plan on women, peace and security calls for preventing violence against girls and women in conflict zones, advocating for the participation of women in any peace process, protecting girls and women from attacks on their physical or mental well-being, economic security or guaranteed rights, and ensuring women's access to humanitarian and development assistance.
Many activists argue that the West, including Canada, has failed to live up to its promises to Afghan women. However, from the very beginning, women's issues in Afghanistan were a way to gain public support for intervention.
A report last year by Human Rights Watch also suggests the international community has not lived up to its promises as many Afghan women still face violence, forced marriages and those in public life are still subject to threats and intimidation.
Canada should play the role of international leader in advancing women's issues in Afghanistan. We Canadians do have a humanitarian, democratic and social obligation to the people of Afghanistan.
As far as the negotiation with the Taliban is concerned, I think hardcore Taliban fundamentalists are not changeable. However, many of them are only there because they are poor, illiterate or were forced into the Taliban. They are the ones who can be integrated back into society with the help of education, jobs and a secure government committed to the rule of law. That is where Canada can play an ongoing role in Afghanistan. They can help create an environment that prevents ordinary Afghans from being attracted to the Taliban.
Morale has been high, but Afghans are now anxious because they fear the world will abandon the country. It is crucial to explain to the Afghan people exactly how the international community will follow through on its promise to protect and promote their human rights after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That confidence is eroding a lot, especially among women, because they have the most to lose.
Afghan women want their daughters and sons to go to school. They want to have jobs. They want to have food on the table. They want to be able to walk on the streets without bullets and bombs overhead.
Senator Ataullahjan: After what we have heard this evening, I have two issues. First, they are always talking about women in the cities. However, what about women in the rural areas? What is the state of health care and education in the rural areas?
Mr. Khan: The situation in the rural areas is catastrophic. Unfortunately, when people go to Afghanistan, they talk about only Kabul, Kandahar and the big cities. Outside these big cities, they do not know anything about what is happening there. There are no elementary schools, primary schools, in the remote areas.
We can do basically four things to help in the remote, rural areas. We could establish schools there, encourage the children to go and provide them with food, books and security. I emphasize security because we have heard that the Taliban are blowing up these schools. Why? They do it because they know that if these children become educated, they will not be controlled by them easily in the future. Children are the future of Afghanistan, and there are two options — either they will destroy Afghanistan, or they will rebuild Afghanistan. If these children are not given the opportunity to receive education, then they will be vulnerable to the Taliban, and they can be attracted easily by them. If that is the case, then they will destroy the country. However, if they have a chance to receive an education, then they will be the people who will rebuild their country. These schools are a necessity.
Senator Ataullahjan: Is it your feeling that most of the recruits that the Taliban have are from the rural areas and not from the city? My sense is that when you hear of the Taliban, it is from the rural areas, where the people have no hope, and where the children are sent for religious education and are picked up. Am I correct in that view?
Mr. Khan: Yes, you are. There are 34 provinces in Afghanistan. It is a big country. It is basically an agricultural country, not industrial. The majority of the people there live in the remote, rural areas. Unfortunately, we have forgotten about that, because there is a security challenge there. That is why the majority of the people from the NGOs do not go there. The people are suffering there. They are suffering from many problems in the rural areas, but especially the lack of education. That is the main issue or one of the crucial issues that we should address.
Senator Kochhar: What is the population of rural versus city?
Mr. Khan: The population of Afghanistan is 28 million, and 70 per cent to 80 per cent depend on agriculture. For the remaining people, after the revolution in 1978, the education infrastructure was completely destroyed. The people living in the rural areas are also trying to move to the cities because there is no security there. However, before the revolution, 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the people were living in the rural areas.
Senator Hubley: I have a question on the media and the role it plays in the support of human rights, either reporting incidents of successes or incidents in areas that still needed attention, as you suggested in your presentation. What role does the media play? Is it controlled? Are these stories not getting out, or is there no reaction to them?
Mr. Khan: Once I had a person tell me that he printed many books and sent them to the rural areas for the women to read. I told him they will prepare tea on them, because 85 per cent of women are illiterate. They do not have formal education. They do not have access to the media. Even he did not know that 85 per cent of women are uneducated there. He sent them books to read about democracy and democratic values and human rights. They cannot understand that; they do not know about it.
I have prepared a plan of how we can support them and how we can help those people. I believe you have that plan. I am a politician, but, at the same time, I have been a businessman for the last 20 years. That is why I am also thinking about how we can help those people.
Senator Zimmer: Thank you very much for being here and for your openness and frankness. I know you were here earlier when I stated that I went to Afghanistan two years ago and went beyond the wire. I have been questioned why I took the risk of going beyond the wire. My answer was that I wanted to see what is really happening, to at least get a snapshot. Some of our members in the National Defence Committee said, ``We will just put them on the screen, or get them to report.''
The senator just asked a very good question. Is much of this information being feathered down by the press to print whatever stories they wish so that they can collect the fee at the end of the day for their sensationalism?
The question is whether this information is really true. What can be done to get correct information so that it is not being watered down and so that we can respond to the key issues? Along the way, there are so many layers, like an onion, that it is difficult to get to the centre. How can we get beyond that and truly acquire correct information so that we can make correct decisions?
Mr. Khan: Unfortunately, the majority of the people are doing their assessment only in the cities. They come to the big cities and say that this is the situation in Afghanistan. It is not. We must have access to the rural areas. In my report, I have only targeted the rural areas. From there, we can get the exact information from most of the people because they do not know about media. They will tell you about the real situation. They will tell you about that straight away.
I recently met a person who came from Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar Province near the Pakistan border. He was living in a small village. He told me that it was strange that there was a big article about his village because there was nothing there. He came from there, but there was nothing there. If you have access to the local people and concentrate only on the rural areas, you will get the exact information, not the information given in the cities. Only from the rural people can we get the exact information. He was telling me the article was two pages, but I saw nothing there. It said that there were schools there, and the library and the health centres are there, et cetera, yet there was nothing there. If we see something on the Internet or in electronic or print media, we are not getting the exact information; you need to know that. I am close to the situation in Afghanistan. It is my country. Pashtuns consider Afghanistan as their home country. We need to contact ordinary people for the correct information.
When I heard about going from a combat mission to a training mission, I thought it was fantastic. However, what do we think? They were not only training the people in Afghanistan. They had been invited to Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. They were given training there, but they had not earned the hearts of the people, people who were saying, ``I do not have anything on the table; I do not have food; I do not have security; I do not have education; my kids are hungry; and we cannot do anything.'' They said, ``Okay, we want to train you'' — then when they went back, those trained people were supporting the mujahedeen. I am a little scared that the same situation can happen again to these people.
For example, when they brought Babrak Karmal to Kabul, at that time he was called the ``mayor of Kabul.'' He was the president of Afghanistan, but he was called the ``mayor of Kabul.'' We are hearing now the same rumours about President Karzai being the ``mayor of Kabul.'' It is in print that he does not know anything about what is happening outside of the cities.
If there is no contact with people in the rural areas, they will not win their hearts. That is the main thing. Therefore, how can we help those people? It is not by bullets, nor with guns. There is no need to train every Afghan to be a real soldier. I want to tell you about that. Who trained these Taliban? I am an educated person, but I am a good fighter. It is in the blood of the Pashtuns.
When you go to any society, you must know about the psyche of the people, what they are thinking about and who they are. If we only think through the prism of our society to understand their society, then we cannot do anything there. We need to talk to them.
For example, no one has instructed the people in the rural areas, so when someone comes from Kabul, they think that because that person is from Kabul, he is not a Pashtun. This is a fact. That is their psyche. Let us educate them.
How can we do that? I am not talking about education that is resisted for women; no, it is too late. Every Afghan family has seven kids on average. In the Afghan family, male members have always been the breadwinners. They have been supporting their families. After 23 years of war, thousands of families have lost the male members. Now the women have to be the breadwinners, but they cannot be because there are no jobs; no opportunities are there. The women are illiterate.
I have written how we can approach the job. I am talking not only about the problems but also about the solutions. I have brought the solutions for how we can help. I am a businessman, and I know how to talk to them. If we give one woman a job — and I know how we can give her a job; I have it written there — we can solve many problems.
If one woman has money, she will send her children to school, instead of begging in the streets or sending them for low-wage child labour. That is their education problem solved. If they get sick, they will be able to pay for doctors and medicines. It means the health problem is solved. These children will be either in the school or in the home, so they will not be available to various street crimes. If they are in the street all the time, then the Taliban or miscreants or terrorists will approach them, and they can easily attract them and do what they want with them.
In addition, these women will be able to pay for their groceries, so food is on the table because they will have money. When these children are educated, then no one can compel them into forced or underage marriages. Therefore, the human rights problem is solved.
There will be no prostitution because if there is money, there is no need for prostitution.
When women are making money in the family, then men cannot also exploit them, and domestic violence is minimized to a greater extent because women will not be dependent upon men. When they are dependent upon them, there is domestic violence and many other factors. However, when a woman is independent, there is no violence because she can say, ``You are on your own, and I am on my own.''
The average Afghan family has seven kids, thus we can solve the problems of education, food, health, security, domestic violence and shelter for these seven kids. We can secure their rights, their human rights. These kids are the future of Afghanistan, and they will help to rebuild Afghanistan.
I was telling Senator Ataullahjan today that in 1600, the British East India Company entered the subcontinent from the U.K. as traders. They were working in the local community. They won the hearts of the people, and then they stayed there for 200 years. They did not convert India by force. They came in 1600, and they were there for 200 years.
Canadians will be spending a lot of money on training. However, again, I want to tell you that we should spend that money on these cottage industries, and I have given the details of how we can do that.
Senator Zimmer: That the one woman creates the catalyst for all those other things to happen.
Some of our committee members did not want to go to Afghanistan and said that we could just get them to come to report to us here in Ottawa. I must commend Senator Kenny for pushing for us to go there, personally, even though we were endangering our lives, to see exactly what is happening.
You mentioned crops. There are two kinds of crops. What kind of crops were they? As we know and saw, one of the major crops is opium. Everyone can now see crops such as wheat, barley, rye and so forth. However, you know that way back in the bush, they are still growing opium.
How do you get them out of that culture? Can you give me a brief answer on that? What is the solution?
Mr. Khan: Afghanistan is one of the biggest producers of dried fruits, and throughout the neighbouring countries, they are eating their dried fruits.
Let us take the example of pistachios. The business community and the exporters are sitting in Kabul. They buy these pistachios in bulk and send them to the women in the rural areas or somewhere near for packing, grading and for cracking. However, there is a chain of brokers. Why can he not give $10 per day to a woman? What happens? He gives $8 to one subcontractor and more money to another and another all the way down the line. Therefore, when — and you would be surprised — this stuff comes to the houses of these women, they get 40 cents to 50 cents per day. I have a solution for that.
If there is a head office in Kabul and a business community in Afghanistan, because I am not only Pashtun but also a businessman there as well, we can take directly from these and minimize the brokers. That woman who is making a certain amount of money within one month will be able to make that same amount of money in one and a half days, because we will give the money directly to the women. They will get the full $10 because we are not making money; we just want to help. The pistachios are only one example. There are many examples.
Afghanistan is big producer of fresh fruit, but they do not have a food processing industry. Therefore, the majority of their food is just wasted. We can have small food industries in the rural areas where these fruits and vegetables are grown. It is also a female-based industry. We will provide them jobs. With pistachios, it involves women, and this also involves women.
There are countries that manufacture many things, but the international market has limitations on how much can be imported to certain countries. They have a quota system. Let us take the example of Uzbekistan and Pakistan. Pakistan produces a lot of textiles, but it has a quota system. They can import from Europe and from other countries just a certain quantity of garments and textiles. You cannot import more than that, but there are also countries in the world that are called least developed countries, LDCs, and the developed countries have given them a chance to develop. There is no quota system for these developed countries, and Afghanistan is one of them.
We can import from Pakistan raw material, their textiles, to help the small garment factory that is also a 100-person, female-based industry, in the small villages in remote and rural areas. We can produce the finished goods from their textiles because we will be importing it as a raw material. We can then export it to any country we want, and the price will be low because there will be no quota system. Let us say that the price of shorts is $4 in Pakistan. With a quota, that price becomes $15 or $20. However, in Afghanistan, if it is $4, then it will be $5 here in Washington and Canada also.
There are two types of projects, long term and short term. I have combined them both because straightaway now the women will be are getting the money, and in the long term that money can be spent on their children. That is the long term. If you are thinking only about the long term or the short term, it will not work.
Senator Zimmer: Thank you very much for your candour.
The Deputy Chair: Mr. Khan, I know you have been here since 1:30 p.m., and you have listened to all the things said by everyone. If there is anything more you would like to say after you have given it some thought, please let Mr. Thompson know. We can certainly share further information once you have reflected on this afternoon's proceedings. I want to thank you for being with us here all afternoon. We appreciate your appearance and look forward to hearing from you in the future.
Mr. Khan: Thank you.
(The committee adjourned.)