PREAMBLE


In September 1997, as European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, I travelled to the Afghanistan of the Taliban in open defiance of their policy of legal segregation of women. I was promptly arrested and thrown out of the country. Fortunately the incident was covered close-up by CNN's Cristiane Amanpour, who accompanied me, and was seen around the world, which contributed to blocking the expected recognition by the West of the Islamo-demented regime of Mullah Omar.

On December 1, 2001, the day after the fundamentalists were driven out of Kabul, I was in Bonn for an international conference held to give Afghanistan a provisional post-Taliban government. At this gathering I asserted that women had a right to participate in this government. As I was no longer European Commissioner, I entrusted this objective to the first global Satyagraha in radical history: about six thousand people participated, well-known and unknown, from around the world, including many Afghan men and women. And two women became part of the new government of Hamid Karzai.

I recently experienced an emotional return to Afghanistan. I had been invited by a few hundred Afghan feminists gathering in a theatre in the capital --on the eve of the first Loya Jirga open to women-- to ratify an ''Afghan Charter on Women's Rights'' for presentation to the assembly of traditional leaders charged with rewriting the constitution in the wake of the routing of the Taliban from power.

I return from this trip doubly surprised, positively and negatively. On the one hand, the condition of women in Afghanistan seems less startling than one might expect. This is largely due to the strength and determination of Afghan women, who taken their fate back into their own hands. While they will certainly suffer setbacks and continue to be victims of discrimination, their resoluteness gives real reason for hope.

On the other hand, the process of pacifying and rebuilding the country seems particularly vulnerable in the area of security and the availability of funds.

KABUL FIVE YEARS LATER


The Kabul I remembered was a dead city, deserted by women and inhabited by a sparse male population in the sway of a sect of armed fanatics. What I find is a city teeming with life, where neither the heat nor the oppressive dust prevent men and women from flooding the streets, working, filling shops and markets, and repairing what was systematically destroyed by decades of war. The new freedom of movement makes it possible for me to gauge the immensity of the devastation, which evokes that wrought by Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine. At the outskirts of the city stretch the cemeteries of the machines of war -- rusted carcasses of tanks, trucks, and artillery. The cemeteries for humans, hurriedly improvised with mounds of dirt and white stones wherever people were mowed down, civilians or combatants, extend even into the areas people live, among the ruins of neighbourhoods razed for the exigencies of battles or simply because they were home to the ''heretical'' Hazara minority. But wherever you go, in contrast to the desolation of the wreckage, you find the tenacious desire of men, women, and children to live. In every road left navigable or any remotely passable footpath, there is a proliferation of stores, workshops, stands, and carts, unaffected by the precarious walls of gutted buildings tottering on either side.

Of the million refugees that have returned to the country since the beginning of the year, 50,000 have set up camps inside or around Kabul: some are former residents of the city who were left homeless; others have come simply hoping to be able to survive. To the East, between the ruins of the old city and the hill where the fortress of Bala Hissar looms, a vast market of lumber has grown up, an expanse of improvised stacks of tree trunks, beams, and boards of every dimension hewn from poplars felled in the woods of Logar and hauled to the capital, which is desperate for low-priced dwellings.

Another million refugees are expected to return in the coming months if the Loya Jirga -- the grand assembly of Afghan society now under way in Kabul-- is successful. In the more modern areas, residential and administrative, hotels and restaurants have opened for business, vying for the dollars spent by military personnel and foreign aid workers. The major arteries of the city are bustling from morning to night (there is still a curfew from 11 in the evening to dawn) with multi-coloured trucks and old bicycles, brand new all-terrain vehicles and decrepit taxis, miraculously still working and packed solid with passengers.

IF THE WORLD FORGETS KARZAI AND AFGHANISTAN


I enter the office of interim Afghan president Hamid Karzai a few hours before the opening of the Loya Jirga, which will decide his political destiny. I find a man of down-to-earth ways, filled
with the quiet strength certain leaders are able to project. His office is sparse and straightforward, except for the large liquid crystal computer screen which looks out of place on the presidential desk. Among those present at the meeting is my old friend and jurist Fazally who from exile in Paris didn't miss a single anti-Taliban demonstration of the transnational radicals.
Today Fazally is one of the interim president's most influential advisors.

A politician of the American school, Karzai is committed to projecting optimism ("I have a little superstition, that my days go better if in the morning I come across children on their way to
school."), practicality ("My job is getting the country moving again by giving everyone a chance to take their destinies into their own hands and building the infrastructure the economy
needs.") and integrity ("In politics the one thing I hate is the constant temptation to compromise, even with criminals.")

After a few quips about current affairs ("Send my best to my friend Berlusconi -- I left my heart in the streets of Rome.") President Karzai addresses the most delicate issue of the time: the
risk that normalisation of the situation will put the Afghan crisis below the radar of major diplomatic activity and the media, accentuating the already visible tendency of the principal donor
countries to revise their financial and political-military commitments to guarantee the institutional and economic resurrection of the country. "It would be a shame, because even with our defects we Afghans are people who are not afraid of hard work and are able to take charge of our fate and get by if we are just given the chance.''

Ashraf Ghani, the economic brains of Karzai's staff, puts it more clearly. There are two risks: first, that there won't be enough resources, given that the international community has limited itself to doling out one drop at a time the 4.8 billion dollars over five years that donor countries promised in Tokyo early this year (though the figure requested by the United Nations
for reconstruction was USD 20 billion). The other risk arises from the paradoxical fact that the government is emerging weakened - with respect to the tribal potentates that control much of the
country - by the flood of international aid, which passes over the heads of the authorities in Kabul, preventing them from drawing up and implementing a coherent economic policy. Even balancing the state budget becomes difficult if there is no way of counting the aid resources on the balance sheet.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE MULTINATIONAL FORCE?


I visit the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), set up among the trees and buildings of what used to be the most elegant sports club of Kabul. What strikes me first, visible behind the back of one of the officials receiving me, is a colour map of Afghanistan featuring not the names of the regions but those of the 15 warlords and a pair of tribal alliances, and on which the administrative borders traced out are those between the areas controlled by these de facto powers. The zone controlled by the 4500 troops of the international force - English, Turkish, German, Italian, Spanish, and French - is a little red spot in the middle of the mosaic covering no more than Kabul and its environs. The officials in command of ISAF are as content with the work they have done ("In just a few months we've created an island of security and legality.") as they are worried by the future ("Our mandate is up in December and who knows what will happen after that; what we've built could be swept away in a few days.")

Separated as it is from the American military machine - about which no one knows the nature of its current operations against the remaining Taliban or its future projects, aside from the generic and recurring American reference to a ''rapid withdrawal" - the ISAF would like to consider itself the pathbreaker on an ambitious project, capable of extending to the entire country this combination of security and legality that restored to Kabul a quasi-normal political and social life and revived the principal economic activities.

In a few phrases gathered among the ISAF I find all the elements of the rebus: "We were created to counterbalance the excessive power of the armed tribal factions; to do this we have to allow the new state in Kabul either to impose itself on the warlords, or, more realistically, to negotiate from a position of parity a cohabitation between a central political-administrative authority and the mosaic of local potentates. In any case, we must assist the central power to move beyond Kabul and exercise its prerogatives everywhere."

"If the countries that finance this multi-national force do not want to betray Afghanistan and throw away a pile of money, the only reasonable approach is deciding to reinforce the ISAF and expand it into the other cities of Afghanistan.''

"Without a defined institutional-political project, our work runs the risk of going up in smoke: we are training troops that are efficient but that almost entirely lack superior leadership because
the only possible leaders of the new army and police force are still voluntary hostages of the armed factions; it is necessary to initiate a major project for the disarmament, demobilisation, and social reinsertion of Afghan troops who know almost no vocation but war. Otherwise the 80,000 soldiers in uniform that we are training will have to contend with more than 100,000 fellow citizens who, though lacking uniforms, consider themselves "soldiers" too, are armed, and are very worried about their and their families' future."

"The countries that say they have the best interests of Afghanistan at heart must find the financial resources and political courage to deploy as soon as possible and for as long as
necessary 20,000 good soldiers able to carry out their responsibilities in an inhospitable land where the temperature swings from twenty degrees below zero centigrade to more than
forty."

THE RISK OF LOSING THE PEACE


I can find nobody in Kabul who doesn't believe that the ISAF mandate must be extended. "All Afghans would like to be able to enjoy the security they have in Kabul,'' President Karzai tells me.
But not everyone agrees: still unconvinced are the strategicians of the Bush administration, European foreign ministers, and the more intractable of the Afghan warlords. To bring these parties around, we are working with the International Crisis Group (ICG), headed by ex-president of Finland Ahtisaari, who studies conflicts and how to defuse them. For months the ICG has repeated the same message to the major powers through its reports and at meetings : in Afghanistan, there is a very real risk that after winning the war you can lose the peace. But no one seems to be paying attention.

As was the case with the cause of Afghan women, we will now probably have to resort to non-violence, perhaps to another radical worldwide Satyagraha, accompanied in Europe by parliamentary actions at the community and national levels. The risk of losing the peace is quite pronounced among a group of international functionaries and volunteers working in the most remote areas of the country and now on their way to Kabul. From them, my only window into what is happening outside of the capital, the diagnosis is virtually unanimous.

The routing of the Taliban, the breaking out of peace, the resumption of aid, and the re-emergence of a legitimate government at Kabul have caused among the majority of the population a ''positive trauma'' and provided the country with a unique opportunity to pull itself of the abyss into which it had fallen.

I am told by a Frenchman who works for the Italian Intersos agency, which is demining the Bin Laden lair at Tora Bora, "It would be a crime not to give the government in Kabul the means to take advantage of this situation. All the more so since this peasant society, so tired of war, wants nothing more than to roll up its sleeves and free itself from the rule of the warlords. You know what the two top priorities are for the Afghans? Water for irrigating their crops (this is a part of the world that had irrigation systems already in the neolithic period) and schools for their children.''

WOMEN, THE BURQA-CHADRI AND RELIGION


There are three points that certain Afghan women friends have been making to me for some time now. First, that ''chadri'', not ''burqa'', is the name of the full-body cloak that Afghan women wear and that has become in the Western imagination the symbol of female segregation under the Taliban. Second, that this anachronistic vestment is part of the traditional wardrobe of many Afghan communities which many women freely choose to wear when, for example, they don't want to show themselves. Third, that Westerners are wrong to take the diffusion of the chadri as the principal if not sole indicator of freedom of Afghan women.

Regardless of this, wandering the streets of Kabul, I cannot resist keeping a mental count of the percentage of women who still hide themselves in this garment when they go out. And the percentage is very high. But I also note that a number of women I pass in the streets raise and lower it when they want to talk or simply breathe; that the numerous war widows now ''free'' to beg in the street are covered, but for what are evidently reasons of shame; and that it is not difficult to find women of every age who do not cover their faces. I conclude that the use of the chadri now depends only on habit or a conditioned reflex of prudence and not coercion, as was the case for the last five years.

Even some of the 200 bakers recruited by the twenty-five neighbourhood bakeries that have reopened in Kabul thanks to the flour provided by the UN World Food Programme (PAM) wear the chadri when leaving work. These bakeries serve, for modest prices and/or bread coupons, the poorest sector of the population: widows, orphans, and other vulnerable categories. I find the existence of these bakeries particularly heart-warming because they remind me of an announcement run in 1998 on Italian state television for the international campaign "A flower for the women of Kabul", for which we chose women bakers as the symbol of the condition of women before the arrival of the Taliban.

Many of the feminists that greet me so affectionately at the "Theatre in the Park", most of them obstetricians and teachers, carry the chadri in their a handbags -- also, I feel, out of prudence: many of them are delegates and members of the Loya Jirga. They are thus a bridge between two worlds, and from the way they move and interact in the theatre I am certain they are very active and determined also among the beards and turbans of the leaders at the Loya Jirga.

They are free women: they dress, laugh, and talk as they wish, and during work breaks they have a smoke in the bathroom or hallways. They represent the female emancipation that swept Kabul as early as the 1970s and consider the interlude of the Taliban a nightmare that is now ended. While they do not underestimate the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, they prefer to look towards the future. Their discussions recall the atmosphere, arguments, and fights-to-the-death of the feminist gatherings in the West thirty years ago. But in general they are women of great realism.

Living proof of this is Shukria Haidar, a transnational radical member and militant who in her years of exile in Paris was the soul of French-Afghan female solidarity and assumed the role of ''ambassador of Afghan women''.

Shukria says to the most impatient segment of the audience: "The Taliban, with all their aberrations, have made it such that today all Afghan men think it opportune to restore the offended dignity of women, offering them the protection of the law. We must take advantage of this historic opportunity to reintroduce women - that is, over 50 percent of the population - into the political arena, and through the front door. We must also avoid providing excuses to the misogynists and fundamentalists, who are still many, by venturing off into dangerous demands and debates on individual laws inspired more or less by religion. Our war against Islamic bigotry is not over, but we must resume it from a position of strength."

It remains to be seen what the face is today of Afghan Islam and what its political programme will be.

Foto credits: Focus Team