KABUL — Col. Shafiqa Quraishi has an improbable dream. It is that, before too long, women will assume command positions in the Afghan National Police.
A policewoman for 28 years, Quraishi is a towering exception in a country where most women dare not leave their homes without their husband’s or father’s permission, and then only if cloaked from head-to-toe in the infamous, shapeless, anonymous, usually powder-blue dress known as a burka.
"No one will give your rights to you as a gift, you have to take them," Quraishi told about 300 women who, most unusually for Afghanistan, all had their faces uncovered at a recent ceremony to mark International Women’s Day.
"Who says women cannot do anything? We can do anything we want."
It is such brave talk, in a country where women are seldom seen, let alone heard, that led U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to name Quraishi, the scope of whose duties includes gender issues, women’s rights and children, as a winner of the 2010 International Woman of Courage Award.
International Women’s Day falls on Monday this year, but the Afghan event to honour women was scheduled early because Quraishi was off to Washington to personally receive the award from Clinton.
The award — one of 10 to be presented by the secretary — "symbolizes what Afghan women can achieve when they want," Quraishi said.
"It is not in our culture for women to advance themselves. This is our daily struggle."
Joining Quraishi at the women’s day ceremony was Brig.-Gen. Anne Macdonald. The highest ranking American woman serving with NATO here, the army officer said Quraishi confronted similar challenges to those faced by Macdonald’s generation three decades ago.
"The situation here reminds me of what it was like when I was at West Point in 1976," said Macdonald, a Black Hawk helicopter pilot who flew combat missions during the first Gulf War. "There were very few women in our armed forces then and a much different environment than today."
Canadian Maj.-Gen. Mike Ward, chief of NATO’s police mentoring program in Afghanistan, also likened what Quraishi and her colleagues in the Afghan National Police had to overcome to "when I was at (Royal Military College) between 1976 and 1980 and there were no women in my class.
"When women began to go there, they were treated brutally by some of their peers, so I am not surprised at the challenges that Afghan women in uniform face. Of course, it is exacerbated by other factors here. The life of an Afghan woman is very, very hard."
Although the Afghan National Police, which is often regarded as poorly trained and corrupt, is a much less respected institution than the Afghan National Army, Ward and Macdonald agreed that the police force, with nearly 1,000 women, was more progressive with gender issues than the Afghan army, which only has 200 women in uniform.
The Interior Ministry’s stated goal is to have 5,000 policewomen within five years.
"That may be too ambitious, but at least there is a goal," said Macdonald, who is the senior adviser to the ministry on police development. "Joining the police provides a great way for woman to become literate. It is also one of the few jobs here where women get the same pay as the men."
Even so, "you will have seen that there are few young policewomen," Ward said, referring to the mostly middle-aged policemen who attended the women’s day gathering. "They tend to be older and married because it is still considered a stain for a single woman to be in the police."
Always keen to change the cultural perception that Afghan women should have no role outside the home, Quraishi, whose husband and parents were strongly supportive of her career in the police, scolded many of the women in the audience for showing up as much as one hour late.
"By arriving so late today you give men an excuse to say that we are not as good as they are," Quraishi said. "We cannot give men such excuses. When we come into the picture, we have to work twice as hard as a man does."
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