Women of Influence: Malalai Joya

Tom Stoddart / Getty Images Many Afghan women are against a U.S. pullout, but Malalai Joya, who’s been called “the bravest woman in Afghanistan,” says the American occupation must end. She tells The Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg why.

Malalai Joya, a 31-year-old activist and politician, was once called “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” by the BBC. During the Taliban years, she defied her country’s rulers by running underground girls’ schools. After the Taliban’s fall, she helped start an orphanage and a medical clinic, and eventually became the youngest member of Afghanistan’s legislature. She has been fearless in taking on the warlords who populate the government of Hamid Karzai—declared the presidential victor Monday after a runoff election was canceled—so much so that in 2007, her political opponents voted to suspend her from parliament on the grounds that she had “insulted” the institution. Calling for her reinstatement, six female Nobel Peace Prize laureates compared her to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, describing her as “a model for women everywhere seeking to make the world more just.”

The Afghan government is “a group of warlords, criminals, who [waged the] civil war in Afghanistan from ’92 to ’96. They are photocopies of Taliban, but with suit and tie, talking about democracy.”

So when Joya inveighs against the American occupation of her country, we should take her voice seriously.

“My message on behalf of my people to [the] great American people is that democracy never comes by barrel of gun, by cluster bomb, by war,” she told me during a recent interview in New York, her words rushing out in an impassioned torrent. “They say war of Iraq is bad war, war of Afghanistan is good war, while both are war. You should raise your voice against the wrong policy of your government.”

Joya is touring the United States to promote her new book, A Woman Among the Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice. The volume is both an autobiography and a damning indictment of the Karzai regime and its American backers. It offers a perspective that’s particularly salient right now, as the U.S. debates its future in Afghanistan. Many liberals are turning against the war, but worry that pulling out will abandon Afghans, particularly Afghan women, to the ravages of a Taliban takeover. They may be right—there are plenty of Afghan women speaking out strongly against a pullout. Still, Joya shows that the feminist case for staying in Afghanistan is far from clear-cut.

Joya is barely 5 feet tall—she swims in her pantsuit—but her presence is arresting and authoritative. Educated largely in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, she never had the opportunity to go to college, but she’s a book-loving autodidact who quotes Bertholt Brecht as often as she cites Afghan proverbs. Her English is slightly broken but still impressive—she has a rich vocabulary of epithets to describe Afghanistan’s current government, which, she insists is no better than the Taliban regime it replaced.

After Sept. 11, 2001, she says, when it was clear there would be war, liberal-minded Afghans harbored hopes that the United States and NATO would “bring positive changes, especially [because] they came to Afghanistan under the banner of women’s rights, human rights, democracy.” Instead, she says, the U.S. and its allies “replaced one fascist regime, Taliban, these misogynist terrorists, with another group of warlords, criminals, who [waged the] civil war in Afghanistan from ’92 to ’96. They are photocopies of Taliban, but with suit and tie, talking about democracy.”

Joya rejects the argument that NATO troops are the only thing standing in the way of a Taliban takeover. In fact, she says, the widespread civilian deaths caused by American bombs are fueling the Taliban’s growing grassroots strength. Increasingly, she says, Afghans speculate that the United States is deliberately killing innocent civilians as revenge for the innocent American civilians killed on Sept. 11. “We are between two powerful enemies,” she says. “We are fighting against occupation, and also against Taliban and warlords who now negotiate with each other. So with the withdrawal of one enemy, these occupation forces whose government is giving more money and power to these terrorists… it’s much easier to fight against one enemy instead of two.”

To be sure, Joya doesn’t speak for all Afghan women. Indeed, many Afghan women’s rights activists and their American supporters express terror at what would await them after an American withdrawal. The Afghan human-rights activist Wazhma Frogh recently wrote in The Washington Post, “As an Afghan woman who for many years lived a life deprived of the most basic human rights, I find unbearable the thought of what will happen to the women of my country if it once again falls under the control of the insurgents and militants who now threaten it.”