Burqas and ballots

In one of the most male-dominated nations on earth, Afghan vice presidential candidate Shafiqa Habibi doesn't play second fiddle to anyone.

By Ann Marlowe

Oct 8, 2004 | Perhaps the best summary I heard of next week's Afghan presidential election came from one of the freshman boys I've been teaching English to at Herat University. "It is unfair, but we must say it is fair, because it is our first election. Karzai will win because the Americans want him to win."

Sitting presidents have an advantage everywhere in the world, but it is rarely as large as in media-poor Afghanistan. Most Afghans cannot read well enough to understand the newspapers, which are pitched to a high school reading level. In Ghor Province, Afghanistan's poorest, the mention of the word "rouznameh" (newspaper) produced blank stares, as well it might in a province where only a small percentage of the people outside the local capital can read. Together with small, colorful posters found even in village shops, radio and TV are the main sources of information (where there is reception). But in Herat, as in other provincial capitals, there is just one TV station. (The rich here, as elsewhere, have satellite TV.) Before President Karzai deposed local strongman Ismail Khan three weeks ago, the station showed all Khan, all the time. Now it shows a mixture of Kabul and local programming, but the Kabul news coverage is all Karzai, all the time. The other night, I watched nearly real-time coverage of Karzai's recent visit to the United Nations. None of the other 17 candidates for the presidency appeared at all.

With little chance of victory, most appear to be running for a combination of symbolic reasons and free publicity that may help them in the March parliamentary elections, but a few have a chance of leveraging a good showing into a cabinet ministry. Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a so-called jang-salar, or warlord, of Uzbek descent who controls most of Afghanistan's northwestern provinces, is in this category. Dostum seems to be keeping the channels of communication open with Karzai. Although he attacked "financial corruption" in Karzai's bureaucracy at a Kabul stadium campaign rally on Oct. 6, he also had positive words for the president, saying, "After breaking the power of al-Qaida, Mr. Karzai brought us peace and also millions of dollars of outside aid."

Dostum is running as a simple, forthright man of the people who, unlike the vacillating Karzai, will be able to vanquish the Taliban -- a claim that he might actually be able to back up. More unusually, in a society still dominated by the khan class -- landed feudal aristocrats like Karzai's family -- he uses his humble origins to appeal to the average voter. In his Kabul stadium speech he also told the crowd: "One foreign journalist asked me how with little education I could aspire to become president. I told him that we have not come from Europe. We have come from the heart of the Afghan people."

But the most intriguing thing about his campaign, what makes it transcend Afghanistan's ethnic (qomy or, literally, tribal) politics, is his vice presidential running mate.

Shafiqa Habibi is a human-rights worker, a Pashtun, and a public intellectual from an upper-class family. She is also one of only three women in the race.

Habibi is a remarkable figure in many ways. Her human-rights credentials are impeccable. One of 1,000 women nominated as grassroots peace workers for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, she has also won the 2002 Ida B. Wells Bravery in Journalism Award. During the Taliban period, Habibi ran eight secret home schools for girls. More recently, she worked for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Her political appeal to Dostum is obvious. As a Kabul University graduate from an educated family, married to a former high government official, she has the elite connections Dostum lacks. And as a Kabul-raised Ahmedzai Pashtun whose family is from Logar Province, she brings regional balance to the ticket. (The Ahmedzai are a large, powerful tribe, and Afghanistan's royal family belongs to a subgroup.) She's perfect on more subjective grounds, too: While Dostum is burly and intimidating-looking to some Western reporters, Habibi looks every inch the television announcer she was for more than 20 years.

The two running mates might seem to have a puzzling lack of common ground, until you know that Habibi and her husband were among the 200,000 Kabulis, including many of the most educated, who fled after the mujahedeen took the city in 1992 for Mazar-e-Sharif. There Dostum managed to maintain law and order and fend off the Taliban until 1997. Habibi's husband, Dr. Mahmoud Habibi, was also in the same orbits as Dostum at that time. A Ka Khel Pashtun from a famous Kandahar family, he was variously minister of information under King Zahir Shah, president of the senate under Najibullah, and governor of Kabul, Kunduz and Panjshir provinces in the 1970s.

Given that this is the first election in which Afghan women can vote, Habibi's presence in the race, along with two other female candidates, is extraordinary. On Kabul's streets, I saw vastly more women showing their faces than in fall 2002, and I was told, but didn't see, that a few elite women were driving cars. (Nothing had shocked my English students more in 2002 than my being "allowed to" drive a car in the United States.)

I briefly saw Habibi at the Oct. 6 rally in Kabul where Dostum spoke. She had come straight from the airport from a campaign rally in Herat. She said that it was the first time in history that women had participated in such an event in Herat. Of the crowd of 1,000, 100 were women, she said: "some in chadoris, some in burqas, some not wearing chadoris or burqas."

Despite these signs of progress, it's hard to predict whether female candidates like Habibi will pick up women voters' support, or whether ethnic and class loyalties -- or the injunctions of their husbands -- will prove more decisive.

Whatever the results of the election, Habibi's political career is sure to continue. If Dostum doesn't win, she says she may run for Parliament. She could receive a cabinet position. And she recently started a cross-party women's political committee.

I met with Habibi on the mornings of Sept. 20 and 21 to hear her answers to questions many Afghans were asking: why she had joined Dostum's ticket and why she thought Afghans should give her their vote. We spoke in a mixture of English and Dari while my friend Dr. Shafiq translated when necessary.

Next Page: "Karzai never did anything he promised"

• View blog reactions