JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Parveena almost got away.
She was on her way home from a visit to her parents in a remote corner of eastern Afghanistan with her children by her side and a small group of women. Two men, their faces covered by kaffiyehs, pulled up on a motor scooter.
“Who is Parveena, daughter of Sardar?” said one, looking at the group of women, their faces hidden behind blue burqas.
No one answered. One of the men took his Kalashnikov and used the muzzle to lift the burqa of the nearest woman — in conservative Afghan society, a gesture akin to undressing her in public. It was Parveena, who like many Afghans used only one name. She grabbed the muzzle, according to her father and her brother, and said, “Who is asking?”
But the gunmen had seen her face, and they fired 11 bullets into her.
Parveena’s story — she was one of six policewomen killed in 2013 — is an extreme case, but it reflects the dangers and difficulties of Afghan policewomen and the broader Western effort to engineer gender equality in Afghanistan. The plight of women under the Taliban captured the Western imagination, and their liberation became a rallying cry. A flood of money and programs poured into Afghanistan, for girls’ schools and women’s shelters and television shows, all aimed at elevating women’s status.
But these good intentions often foundered against the strength of Afghan sexual conservatism. As the tale of Afghan policewomen shows, repressive views of women were not just a Taliban curse, but also a deeply embedded part of society.
Now, as Western troops and money flow out of Afghanistan, the question is just how much the encounter with the West and its values has really changed the country, and whether any of the foreign ideas about the status of women took hold.
In 2001, when the Taliban regime fell, women in Afghanistan were among the very worst off on earth: They had no access to education, women’s health care was scant, and government-sanctioned public beatings were widely accepted. Women rarely ventured out at all, and when they did, they had to be accompanied by a man and covered head to toe with a burqa.
Fourteen years later, there is a palpable sense of possibility for women, especially in urban areas. Girls are going to school in large numbers, at least up to age 11, and there is more access to women’s health care even in some remote parts of the country. However, in rural areas and in the Pashtun-dominated east and south, most women still live confined lives. They are subjected often to forced marriage, child marriage and beatings, and sometimes to honor killings. And conditions for Afghan women over all still rank close to the bottom among developing countries.
This is the first article in a series examining the legacy of efforts to help Afghan women and girls.
Hiring and training policewomen have been key priorities of Western governments and funders. They reasoned that Afghan women and girls, who face high levels of violence, sometimes on a daily basis, would be more likely to report abuse or seek help if they could turn to other women, and that meant ensuring there were women on the police force.
But those hopes ran up against the sexual taboos that haunt every interaction between men and women in Afghanistan. Policewomen have been branded as little more than prostitutes, dishonoring their families. That stigma means that mostly desperate women, usually illiterate and poor, have joined the force. In a society where coercive sex is a frequent tool, many endure sexual harassment for fear of losing their jobs.
Afghan policewomen, struggling to maintain good reputations, face a legion of logistical problems poorly understood by Western donors — a need for separate changing rooms in police stations, for example, since women are afraid to wear their uniforms on their way to work. After a decade and millions of dollars, even the modest goal of recruiting 5,000 policewomen remains a mirage. In fact, only 2,700 are on the force, less than 2 percent of the 169,000 members, according to the United Nations’ office in Kabul based on numbers from the Afghan Interior Ministry.
“The situation in Afghanistan is not prepared for women to work with men, and our community is not ready for female police to work here,” said Col. Ali Aziz Ahmad Mirakai, who heads recruitment for conservative Nangarhar Province, where Parveena worked.
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Still, Parveena was enthusiastic about her work. Her father, a frail man of 70, said she liked it so much, she persuaded her younger brother to join the police as well.
Her commanders said they respected her hard work, so much so that they entrusted her with the dangerous mission of recruiting more women for the police force when she was visiting her home district of Lal Pur, near the Pakistani border.
Recruiting women for the security services can be dangerous even in a large city, but in a region where the government had no presence, it turned deadly.
All the more so because as much as a year before she was killed, the Taliban learned of her job, said Wali Khan, 21, her younger brother.
“She was doing the job secretly,” he said, telling only her immediate family and not wearing a uniform. “Then a year ago one of our relatives who was in the Taliban found out and he told people.”
That put her life at risk. Agnesa Shinwari, a member of the local provincial council, said, “In Afghanistan, if your husband allows you to work or your father allows you, it doesn’t matter.” The women is still not safe, she said, if another family member does not approve.
She said she had heard that cousins of Parveena were involved in her death. The provincial police accused the Taliban, but local Taliban commanders denied involvement. After the killing, the family quickly called relatives who were in the Taliban and they heard there had been a spy, a person they knew in the community who had tipped off the Taliban to her visit to her home district.
Her brother’s casual reference to Taliban relatives is a chilling reminder of how hard it is to know which side people are on — or if they are on both.
Her father summed it up bitterly as he sat on a lumpy cot in the bare room in Jalalabad where he was visiting his son. “Who killed her? God knows, God knows better than I. Everyone is pulling a shawl on their face and calling themselves Taliban,” he said.
As word spread that Parveena had been killed, some whispered that she had had an affair or had been bold with men.
Madina, 21, a policewoman who attended seminars with Parveena, said the talk of immoral acts was a lie.
“She was a good and clean and honest woman,” she said.
Yet the stigma of being a policewoman remains so powerful that even after Parveena’s father and brothers picked up her body, they could find no mullahs in their village who would bury her or say the funeral prayers.
“There were six mullahs in our village, and after she was killed they disappeared intentionally,” her brother Wali said. “The Taliban had told the mullahs, ‘Don’t do a funeral ceremony for those people,’ and not one would say the prayers for my sister.”
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