Working to Help a Haven for Afghan Women Blossom

 

　　

　　KABUL, Afghanistan — There was in the city an old garden, and in that garden there were trees, and under the trees there were women.

　　And there were no scarves on the heads of the women who sat under the trees in the old Kabul Women’s Garden.

　　That was all something remarkable once upon a time, as it is even now. Screened from male scrutiny by the leafy canopies of almond or apricot trees, women could go outside as they pleased, dare to wriggle naked toes in fountain water or just gossip without the veil.

　　Now this oasis of freedom for women, surrounded by the misogynist desert of the capital city, is undergoing a rebirth.

　　As with so much happening today in Afghanistan, the midwives are foreigners, the gestation is troubled and the parents are hopeful.

　　Some say this fabled eight-acre enclosure in the Shahrara neighborhood of Kabul goes back to the days of Babur the Conqueror, in the 1500s. More reliably it is dated to the 1940s or ’50s, when King Zahir Shah was said to have bequeathed it to the state.

　　Karima Salik tells the story of the Kabul Women’s Garden she remembers as a girl in the 1970s, a halcyon age for Afghanistan and its women, before the present 32 years of unbroken war began.

　　“The trees covered everything,” she recalled. “There was laughter and chatter and music.”

　　For the past three years, Ms. Salik has managed the garden, which is now in the midst of a $500,000 face-lift supported by the United States Agency for International Development and CARE International. Most of the money pays laborers who are landscaping, planting trees, rebuilding footpaths and raising the walls still higher. Women on construction projects are almost unheard of in Afghanistan, but the United States Agency for International Development program requires that at least 25 percent of the work force be female. Here they are 50 percent of it.

　　Ms. Salik’s childhood witnessed one of the most liberated periods for women in Afghan history, when the communist government took over in 1978 and enforced equality, banned the burqa and mandated education for girls.

　　The revolt of the mujahedeen, led by conservative, rural warlords, wiped that all out in a few years’ time.

　　People desperate for fuel felled the garden’s trees for firewood. Militiamen held cockfights within the walls. Women dared not go near the place.

　　In the Taliban era, the city was more peaceful but women were confined to their homes. The northeast end of the garden was appropriated by the mosque next door. A warlord who came over to the Taliban was rewarded with the southwest corner for a construction project. The rest, renamed the Springtime Garden, became a public dump.

　　When Ms. Salik and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs took over three years ago, “We hauled 45 truckloads of trash out.”

　　Now male police officers outside the tall steel gates open them only for women, or for male children if they are under 9. Inside the gates are those rarest of public employees: female police officers, two of them. They are reinforced by five female intelligence officers, whose main job is to look for suicide bombers who might hide explosives under the capaciousness of the burqa.

　　Mostly the burqas come off once inside the gate, and there are dressing rooms where many of the women change into normal clothes, putting on makeup and high heels.

　　Then, unheard-of things happen here. The women themselves have raised funds for a tiny mosque, with religious instruction given by a woman — one of only a handful of such places in a city where at least 1.5 million female Muslims live.

　　A consortium of European Union aid groups built a spacious gym, and women in tights take fitness classes there or play badminton. The Italians started the Always Spring Restaurant, featuring something else unknown in Kabul, female pizza chefs.

　　Between the compound’s outer and inner walls, a shopping arcade of little, female-run businesses grew up, many of them financed with microgrants: hairdressing, embroidery, children’s clothing, ladies lingerie.

　　There are other such businesses in Kabul, but none are run by women, to whom the busy bazaars are off limits not by law but by hard custom.

　　Some come here for opportunity, many for refuge of one sort or another. Fairly often, women who have run away from abusive husbands, or from fathers who threaten to commit a so-called honor killing, wind up here, and the staff members find them a place in one of the city’s secret women’s shelters.

　　Arezo Ghafori, 22, has a talent for hairdressing and a family of eight for whom she is the sole breadwinner, but the men in the family refused to allow her to work, even if they starved, until she started a salon inside the garden.

　　Leila Husseini, Afghanistan’s 25-year-old Asian tae kwon do champion in the women’s under-95-pound class, came here to train and also to lead courses for other women.

　　All of this did not happen without a fight. Ms. Salik called in the police over the mosque’s encroachment, and the mullah led a noisy demonstration of male neighbors in protest. “I used religious arguments against him,” she said, “and pointed out it was a sin to use stolen land for prayers.”

　　They compromised on a new wall, but the mullah, Abdul Rahim, is still seething. He says that a police officer was caught inside the garden in an improper assignation with a woman, but that the incident was hushed up.

　　“I don’t care what the hell they do,” he said. “But inside the garden they get all dressed up and do their makeup and they have other intentions.”

　　A politically well-connected former warlord named Amanullah Guzar had gained control of the Taliban warlord’s old building site, and a 13-story building began rising there, overlooking their walls and, worse, providing vantage points into the gym’s windows. Construction workers leered and jeered, and Ms. Salik went to court to stop the building, which she claims is actually on land belonging to the garden.

　　“Women need to have privacy here or it does not work,” she said.

　　Efforts to reach Mr. Guzar for comment were unsuccessful.

　　“It is women against men,” she said afterward, uncharacteristically discouraged. “Our action will never succeed.”

　　A few weeks later, she was hopeful again. She had found powerful allies who promised to intercede. In the meantime, work on the building was suspended and the aerobics classes resumed.

　　The face-lift is due to finish July 5. Every 40 days a new crew of female laborers is brought in, giving new people an opportunity to earn money and learn skills.

　　Some are jobless poor, like Zehia and Hassina, two 19-year-olds pushing wheelbarrows, who had baseball caps on over their headscarves and black veils across their faces — more out of shame than modesty.

　　“We are like men here,” Zehia said. “It is an embarrassment for educated girls like us to work like this.”

　　Both are English-speaking high school graduates who have rejected all offers of marriage, hoping to get into a university.

　　“What would I do with a husband, especially an uneducated husband?” Zehia asked. “A job is much better.”

　　In a broad sense, the success of the Kabul Women’s Garden is an admission of failure. Women simply cannot go to other parks in Kabul unless chaperoned by male relatives, and often not even then; most parks, like most public spaces, are overwhelmingly male.

　　“You can’t change people’s ideas overnight,” Ms. Salik said. “So we need to address the immediate needs.”

　　Ms. Salik has other projects in mind for the Kabul Women’s Garden.

　　There is an unused parking lot beside the garden where women could learn how to drive, something almost unheard of here — not because it is illegal, just because it is not done.

　　Most of all, Ms. Salik would like to see a program that would take women on brief trips to other countries, perhaps for job training, but really, she said, just to see how women live in lands where there are no women’s gardens.

Obama’s Twist of BP’s Arm Stirs Debate on Common Tactic

　　

　　WASHINGTON — First there was General Motors, whose chief executive was summarily dismissed by the White House shortly before the government became the company’s majority shareholder. Chrysler was forced into a merger. At the banks that received government bailouts, executive pay was curbed; at insurance companies seeking to jack up premiums, scathing criticism led to rollbacks.

　　But President Obama’s successful move to force BP to establish a $20 billion compensation fund that the company will have no voice in allocating — just a down payment, the president insisted — may have been the most vivid example of what he recently called his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.”

　　With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach. It is an argument that has come to define Mr. Obama’s first 18 months in office, and one that Mr. Obama clearly hopes to make a central issue in November’s midterm elections.

　　To Mr. Obama, this is all about rebalancing the books after two decades in which multinationals sometimes acted like mini-states beyond government reach, abetted by a faith in markets that, as Mr. Obama put it at Carnegie Mellon University a few weeks ago, “gutted regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight.” When Representative Joe L. Barton, the Texas Republican, opened hearings Thursday about the gulf oil gusher by accusing Mr. Obama of an unconstitutional “shakedown” of BP to create a “slush fund,” he was giving voice to an alternative narrative, a bubbling certainty in corporate suites that Mr. Obama, whenever faced with crisis that involves private-sector players, reveals himself to be viscerally antibusiness.

　　The reality, not surprisingly, is more complex.

　　Mr. Obama clearly sees his presidency as far more than a bully pulpit — he has cast himself as a last line of defense against market excesses that take many different forms. “In the past, corporate America was not only at the table, they owned the table and the chairs around it,” Mr. Obama’s combative chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in an interview Thursday. “Obama doesn’t start off confrontational, but he will be confrontational if there is resistance to the notion that there are other equities.”

　　But at the same moment, as his critics on the left have pointed out, Mr. Obama has been warding off calls for far more stringent regulations of the banks, hoping to win at least a modicum of business support — and to defuse the notion that he is at war with American-style capitalism.

　　Each of his confrontations with corporate executives had its own rationale. G.M. had become so uncompetitive, Mr. Obama argued, that its imminent collapse was threatening the jobs of millions of workers; the only way to save the company from its own worst instincts was to become its temporary owner and bring new blood into the boardroom. (It will take years to determine if that worked, but on Thursday, though it was overshadowed by the grilling of BP’s chief executive on Capitol Hill, G.M. announced it was forgoing its usual summer shutdown of most of its plants so it could meet renewed demand.)

　　The Wall Street executives who needed the government to prop them up, but still thought their services were worth millions a year, were cast by Mr. Obama as a shameless privileged class. Toyota was described as seeking profits over safety; Wellpoint, the insurance giant, was castigated for seeking to insulate itself from the new health care legislation by taking actions that the law will soon prohibit.

　　Against that backdrop, forcing BP to take a $20 billion bath — even before the inevitable lawsuits are filed — seemed an easy decision. Mr. Obama had no legal basis for the demand, but concluded he did not need one. “He had a power other presidents have used — you call it jawboning,” Mr. Emanuel said.

　　The question is whether the cumulative effects of these actions create an impression that, over the long run, may make it harder to persuade both American and foreign corporations to cooperate with Mr. Obama’s program to reinvest and reinvigorate the American economy.

　　“He’s walking a very fine line here,” said Jeffrey Garten, a professor of trade and international finance at the Yale School of Management and a former top official in the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department. “He is taking each case on the merits as he sees it, but he runs the risk of sowing a level of mistrust about all big companies. And it’s those companies — not small businesses — that he will need to invest and innovate for the kind of recovery he wants.”

　　Mr. Obama is betting that Republicans are also walking a fine line. That became evident Thursday as Republican leaders distanced themselves from Representative Barton’s outburst, which included the charge that Mr. Obama was acting illegally by applying “some sort of political pressure that in my words amounts to a shakedown.”

　　Mr. Obama’s aides clearly relished the idea of a Texas Republican dependent on donors from the energy industry who was actually apologizing to BP. As a political strategy, they appear to be adapting the course taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who seized on a mood of distrust when, in the closing days of the 1936 campaign, he said: ”I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.” When the applause subsided, he added: “I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”

　　It is in the “master” role, however, that Mr. Obama and his advisers know he is on dangerous ground. He has responded to his critics by making the case that every time American business predicted ruin from government intervention — that “Social Security would lead to socialism, and that Medicare was a government takeover” — American capitalism survived.

　　It did. But just as Mr. Obama’s fortunes last year depended on a G.M. turnaround, his fortunes this year depend on demonstrating that the health care legislation that he pushed through both reduces costs for the consumers and saves taxpayers money.

　　And his fortunes over the next two years depend, in part, on showing that he can both turn off the spigot of oil in the gulf and turn on the spigot of aid — out of the coffers of BP’s shareholders. Along the way, he will have to avoid painting with such a broad brush that foreign and domestic investors come to view the United States as a too risky place to do business, a country where big mistakes can lead to vilification and, perhaps, bankruptcy.

Children Carry Guns for a U.S. Ally, Somalia

　　

　　

　　MOGADISHU, Somalia — Awil Salah Osman prowls the streets of this shattered city, looking like so many other boys, with ripped-up clothes, thin limbs and eyes eager for attention and affection.

　　But Awil is different in two notable ways: he is shouldering a fully automatic, fully loaded Kalashnikov assault rifle; and he is working for a military that is substantially armed and financed by the United States.

　　“You!” he shouts at a driver trying to sneak past his checkpoint, his cherubic face turning violently angry.

　　“You know what I’m doing here!” He shakes his gun menacingly. “Stop your car!”

　　The driver halts immediately. In Somalia, lives are lost quickly, and few want to take their chances with a moody 12-year-old.

　　It is well known that Somalia’s radical Islamist insurgents are plucking children off soccer fields and turning them into fighters. But Awil is not a rebel. He is working for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, a critical piece of the American counterterrorism strategy in the Horn of Africa.

　　According to Somali human rights groups and United Nations officials, the Somali government, which relies on assistance from the West to survive, is fielding hundreds of children or more on the front lines, some as young as 9.

　　Child soldiers are deployed across the globe, but according to the United Nations, the Somali government is among the “most persistent violators” of sending children into war, finding itself on a list with notorious rebel groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army.

　　Somali government officials concede that they have not done the proper vetting. Officials also revealed that the United States government was helping pay their soldiers, an arrangement American officials confirmed, raising the possibility that the wages for some of these child combatants may have come from American taxpayers.

　　United Nations officials say they have offered the Somali government specific plans to demobilize the children. But Somalia’s leaders, struggling for years to withstand the insurgents’ advances, have been paralyzed by bitter infighting and are so far unresponsive.

　　Several American officials also said that they were concerned about the use of child soldiers and that they were pushing their Somali counterparts to be more careful. But when asked how the American government could guarantee that American money was not being used to arm children, one of the officials said, “I don’t have a good answer for that.”

　　According to Unicef, only two countries have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the use of soldiers younger than 15: the United States and Somalia.

　　Many human rights groups find this unacceptable, and President Obama himself, when this issue was raised during his campaign, did not disagree.

　　“It is embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land,” he said.

　　All across this lawless land, smooth, hairless faces peek out from behind enormous guns. In blown-out buildings, children chamber bullets twice the size of their fingers. In neighborhoods by the sea, they run checkpoints and face down four-by-four trucks, though they can barely see over the hood.

　　Somali government officials admit that in the rush to build a standing army, they did not discriminate.

　　“I’ll be honest,” said a Somali government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject, “we were trying to find anyone who could carry a gun.”

　　Awil struggles to carry his. It weighs about 10 pounds. The strap digs into his bony shoulders, and he is constantly shifting it from one side to the other with a grimace.

　　Sometimes he gets a helping hand from his comrade Ahmed Hassan, who is 15. Ahmed said he was sent to Uganda more than two years ago for army training, when he was 12, though his claim could not be independently verified. American military advisers have been helping oversee the training of Somali government soldiers in Uganda.

　　“One of the things I learned,” Ahmed explained eagerly, “is how to kill with a knife.”

　　Children do not have many options in Somalia. After the government collapsed in 1991, an entire generation was let loose on the streets. Most children have never sat in a classroom or played in a park. Their bones have been stunted by conflict-induced famines, their psyches damaged by all the killings they have witnessed.

　　“What do I enjoy?” Awil asked. “I enjoy the gun.”

　　Like many other children here, the war has left him hard beyond his years. He loves cigarettes and is addicted to qat, a bitter leaf that, for the few hours he chews it each day, makes grim reality fade away.

　　Awil gobbles down greasy rice with unwashed hands because he does not know where his next meal is coming from. He is paid about $1.50 a day, but only every now and then, like most soldiers. His bed is a fly-covered mattress that he shares with two other child soldiers, Ali Deeq, 10, and Abdulaziz, 13.

　　“He should be in school,” said Awil’s commander, Abdisalam Abdillahi. “But there is no school.”

　　Ali Sheikh Yassin, vice-chairman of Elman Peace and Human Rights Center in Mogadishu, said that about 20 percent of government troops (thought to number 5,000 to 10,000) were children and that about 80 percent of the rebels were. The leading insurgent group, which has drawn increasingly close to Al Qaeda, is called the Shabab, which means youth in Arabic.

　　“These kids can be so easily brainwashed,” Mr. Ali said. “They don’t even have to be paid.”

　　One of the myriad dangers Awil faces is constant gunfire between his squad and another group of government soldiers from a different clan. The Somali government is racked by divisions from the prime minister’s office down to the street.

　　“I’ve lost hope,” said Sheik Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a defense minister who abruptly quit in the past week, like several other ministers. “All this international training, it’s just training soldiers for the Shabab,” he added, saying defections had increased.

　　“Go ask the president what he’s accomplished in the past year,” Sheik Yusuf said, laughing. “Absolutely nothing.”

　　Advisers to President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed say they have fine-tuned their plans for a coming offensive, making it more of a gradual military operation to slowly take the city back from the insurgents.

　　Awil is eager for action. His commanders say he has already proven himself fighting against the Shabab, who used to bully him in the market.

　　“That made me want to join the T.F.G.,” he said. “With them, I feel like I am amongst my brothers.”