Sohaila Wali is the sister of the late Sima Wali, a renowned Afghan women’s rights and human rights activist who died in 2017. Before retiring, she worked for the World Bank for more than 30 years.
My late sister, Sima Wali, was one of Afghanistan’s most prominent women’s rights and human rights activists. Surrounded by her male counterparts at the Bonn Conference of 2001, which formed a new Afghan government, she championed the creation of the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs and would not sign the peace agreement until that office along with an array of women’s rights were included in it.
Facing the courage of one tenacious woman, the men at the conference relented. For the first time in Afghanistan’s history, an executive-level ministry was dedicated to advancing women’s rights and causes.
In early September, amidst fearless female-led protests in Kabul, the Taliban made certain that the Ministry of Women’s Affairs would no longer exist in their all-male interim government, but nevertheless found room to include FBI-wanted terrorists in it. That office has since been handed over to the re-established and once-notorious ministry of virtue and vice, while schools have been reopened for boys but remained shut for most girls.
With international hopes that there would be an evolved and inclusive Taliban this time around, we should not be surprised by the brutal extremists’ continued backwardness.
What we should be shocked about is the near-silence here in the United States from Vice President Kamala Harris and First Lady Jill Biden — arguably America’s most powerful women — on the issue of their Afghan sisters, especially after these kinds of tragic setbacks. As a woman now grieving for her homeland, I ask the former prosecutor Ms. Harris and the current professor Dr. Biden: Where are your outspoken voices on justice and education for the women and girls of Afghanistan?
Since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August, the vice president has merely expressed hollow words on the matter in the form of a short tweet and a one-sentence statement of concern. Dr. Biden has been unacceptably silent on this critical issue.
It is true that Afghanistan faces a humanitarian and economic crisis that needs immediate focus, urgent response and delicate diplomatic handling. Watching the images coming out of Kabul for more than a month now has been emotionally devastating for every Afghan I know. But the impact of that emergency has been even more dire on the women and children there, which is why the advocacy cannot stop here.
When my late sister first led leadership-training classes in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan in the 1980s, she recognized the fact that women always bear the brunt of conflict and displacement. Sima would say that women are the “best equipped at building and sustaining a culture of peace” because they have not been the ones to wage war.
In the face of foreign-imposed Islamic fundamentalism, intelligent Afghan women that she met in those camps would cite Islamic and Quranic verses that praised women. She also recalled our own upbringing in a very different Afghanistan where women’s rights were upheld within a progressive Islamic framework as far back as the 1920s and were even enshrined in law as part of the 1964 constitution. The suffocating limitations imposed against women and girls by the Taliban are completely alien to the Afghan society that Sima and I, our mother, or even grandmothers ever knew.
“When I was growing up in Afghanistan, female role models were active members of parliament, as well as doctors, judges and educators working alongside men,” she said in the documentary The Woman in Exile Returns: The Sima Wali Story. “The Afghan spirit is indomitable, especially the women’s.”
She understood, however, that this war to return to equality cannot be waged alone — that we needed a global sisterhood to counter what she called the gender apartheid of Afghan women.
I remember when that worldwide sorority stood up for our women in 1999, during a period when the Taliban last held power. Sima’s voice, along with those of other powerful Afghan female advocates, was amplified by the Feminist Majority Foundation. Collectively, their efforts stopped the Clinton Administration from formally recognizing the Taliban government, which was going to profit from a lucrative American oil company deal, despite the fact that they were still stoning women in stadiums. Sima achieved this while lobbying the U.S. government to send millions of dollars in aid money directly to women-led grassroots organizations in Afghanistan, circumventing the nefarious tentacles of the Taliban — something that can and should be done again.
Because of valiant endeavors like this, along with her testimonies worldwide, my sister became the recipient of Taliban death threats. In 2005, as she led a democracy-building project among Afghan women in Jalalabad, a mob of Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and Pakistani militants who had crossed the border from Pakistan burned down the building where the training was being held. Fleeing for her life, she scaled over walls and used a bed sheet to envelope herself under a makeshift burqa so that she could be made “invisible.” With the help of the local governor, she was airlifted to safety.
Tragically, upon her return home to the United States, she began to manifest symptoms of Multiple System Atrophy, a rare neurological disorder that is in the same family as ALS, and which slowly and cruelly took her life by 2017. Whether it was an environmental toxin or psychological stress that triggered Sima’s illness, we will never know, but hers is just one case.
We don’t need anymore Taliban-induced trauma for our Afghan sisters, children or countrymen. With Sima now gone, I am imploring the women of this great American nation — behind the mighty weight of Ms. Harris and Dr. Biden — to bravely raise their voices in solidarity with us after the betrayal we feel by both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Abigail Adams once famously reminded her husband, the future President John Adams, to fight for women’s rights as the United States was still being forged in 1776. “Remember the ladies,” she wrote to him in a bold letter. Today, the current first lady has to urge her husband to do the same for Afghanistan, while America’s first female vice president has to channel that fearlessness we saw from her during the debates.
To echo my beloved sister’s words: “We cannot do it alone.”