What the Surge Means for Women

Nicolas Asfouri, AFP / Getty Images In Afghanistan, where domestic violence is epidemic, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon speaks to young mothers who’ve survived abuse and want women’s rights to top the military’s agenda.

Sitting atop a burgundy pillow with her back pressed up against the bare white wall of the shelter she now calls home, Naseema pushes her polka-dot headscarf away from her eyes and begins to tell her story.

She was around 16 years old when her father, who suffered from mental illness, married her off without her consent, for a sum she does not know, to a man eight years her senior. Naseema’s mother had left her children behind years earlier when she married another man, so there was no one to intervene on Naseema’s behalf.

“I will kill myself before I go back to my husband,” says Shukria, just 20 years old.

“From the start, my life was not good,” Naseema says. “My husband beat me and my children; he was a criminal.”

• Dana Goldstein: Why Feminists Love the Surge Eventually, Naseema’s husband went to jail on charges of murdering a woman in her community. But his detention brought Naseema no safety. Neither her in-laws nor her siblings were willing to protect Naseema and her four children, out of fear of retribution from her husband, who was furious at his wife’s attempts to escape his abuse and threatened to kill anyone who took her in. Fearing for her life, Naseema sought a divorce, but court officials told her it was impossible to resolve her case until her husband’s murder charges were settled. His prison escape earlier this year has now made that all but impossible.

Now the young mother lives in fear for her own life—and that of her children. “I have no hope,” Naseema says, her dark eyes flooding over with tears as she wraps her arms around her 2-year-old son’s waist. “Everyone is afraid because of my husband. I have no one to help me.”

In Afghanistan, where violence against women is both widespread and rarely reported, Naseema’s story is all but routine. A recent U.N. report said the country suffers from “a deeply entrenched culture of impunity” in which perpetrators of violence seldom face punishment and victims “risk further violence in the course of seeking justice.”

But some women’s rights groups, including Women for Afghan Women, the organization that oversees the shelter where Naseema lives, greeted President Obama’s speech Tuesday night—and his vow to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan—with a modicum of hope, and a call for a long-term American commitment to the country.

“Without security, the Taliban will engulf the country and return women to the hell of rape, domestic captivity, denial of education and health care—to the erasure of their very humanity,” the group’s leaders said in a statement.

In Kabul alone, Women for Afghan Women receives 45 to 55 new cases of women escaping from domestic violence each month. Most are settled within four to six weeks, as women seldom live alone in this family-centered society and are most often taken in by relatives or returned to their husbands following the organization’s mediation. The toughest cases, like Naseema’s, last far longer, however, with some clients staying at the shelter for years.

To save Naseema, Manizha Naderi, who oversees the shelter, is searching for a country to take in the young woman and her children, the oldest of whom are excelling in school classes offered by the shelter. Regular school is out of the question because the threat of kidnapping is too great. So far, Naderi has had no luck, but she presses forward, certain Naseema will be killed by her husband if her own efforts fail.