UK Press Features

Beauty shows its face in Afghanistan

Times Saturday Magazine – September 6, 2003

Afghanistan’s recent history is often simplified into the triumph of Beauty over the Beast. The story goes like this: the Taleban jihad against the feminine imprisoned women in their homes or shrouded them in burqas. Only after the world’s most misogynistic regime was brought down by the American-led War on Terror in 2001 did its liberated victims dare emerge. Now the lives of Afghan women are full of hope.

One proof of this version of events has been the reappearance of hundreds of beauty parlours in Kabul. They began opening again as soon as the Pashtun fundamentalists who had boarded them up left town. Today there is a salon on every street corner: a curtain fluttering in the doorway, wobbly lettering welcoming customers in Dari and English, and windows full of Pakistani posters of back-combed, back-lit big hair, lacquered curls and frosted lips. Men are not allowed inside (though anxious bridegrooms are permitted to fidget on the pavement while they wait for a dolled-up intended to emerge). Two years after the fall of the Taleban, the beauty salons are also still pretty much the only way of earning a living – apart from needlework, or prostitution for an unfortunate few – for young women whose schooling stopped in the Taleban years.

Now a new twist has been added to this already uplifting tale of cottage-industry empowerment. Just as Kabul, already crowded with hundreds of Western aid agencies and embassies, and thousands of troops, is being offered hundreds more US advisers (who look likely to turn President Hamed Karzai’s government into a remote-control branch of the Bush administration), the made-in-Kabul beauty salons are also getting and extra spritz of Stateside glitz. An American beauty school has opened in the grounds of the new Afghan Women’s Ministry, a small part of the national project to raise women’s consciousness, earning power and political clout.

The mission of “Beauty without Borders” is to take 21 pupils every three months from the salons of Kabul, hone their skill levels to American standards, then turn them loose with a free supply of US beauty products to use on their existing customers. The venture is sponsored by Clairol, L’Oreal, MAC, Pivot Point, Revlon and others. It has won $40,000 of funding, been endorsed glowingly by Vanity Fair and received enthusiastic support from Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue. The Afghan beauticians who win places will not only learn the secret of how ladies inside the Beltway and in the New York fashion world do their faces and hair, they will also become part of the West’s political narrative of perky girlish Beauty beating the brutal and domineering Islamist Beast.

The three women whom chance has thrown together as unlikely co-founders of the school – a sleek new marble-floored building in the garden of the Women’s Ministry – are all, in one way or another, believers in the power of positive thinking. Patricia O’Connor, the cheerfully charming thirtysomething who is the business brain behind the venture, has had the school walls painted with flowers and feel-good phrases in the flowing Islamic script of Dari. “Welcome,” says one. “The door to a new world is open to you. Don’t be afraid to change – it means you are moving on.” “Beauty is reality; reality, beauty,” reads another, a cheeky adaptation from Keats. “OK, I admit he thought of it first,” she giggles, all Irish eyes and mischief. “But it’s the message.” She gives the message more seriously to the 100 or so people at the school’s inauguration ceremony: “We believe that education is the key to empowering people, and we think that our curriculum will empower the women here in Afghanistan.” For this, she receives applause.

Mary McMakin, the veteran aid worker who first came to Afghanistan in 1961 when her husband got a job writing textbooks for the then King’s government, is nostalgic for the days before Kabuil turned “from a paradise to a hell”. She is saving up horrible fates for the various bad guys who have done the damage, especially the Taleban, “who weren’t even human, but just from some alien planet”, and she describes them with a grim energy that would shock anyone fooled by her sweet Miss Marple air, pink cheeks and spriggy dresses. The Talbean deserved “to have the shit bombed out of them, it was the only thing to do.” One warlord “deserves a lethal injection”, another is “like a cockroach, and you don’t want a cockroach in your house, do you? He should just be exterminated.” But she is full of hope that the good guys might, at last, be winning, and determined to help.

Terri Grauel, an ethereal blonde 43-year-old who works as a make-up artist and hairdresser to the fashion industry in New York, adds a spiritual dimension to the school’s ethic. “Imbalance in the world affects us all, but this kind of work opens your heart and connects you and makes magical things happen,” she says breathlessly. She is fascinated by the many coincidences that brought the school to life – her chance meeting with MacMakin while the aid worker was being profiled in Vogue three years ago; their serendipitous conversation about alleviating the sufferings of Afghan women (the answer was the beauty school); the twist of fate that led to her hooking up with O’Connor; and the fact that one of the Afghan-born educators who will soon return from the States to teach at the new school turns out to have worked at a long-vanished beauty salon on the same site. “This is the perfect plan because it is the divine plan,” she explains, wide-eyed. “When things happen like that they’re meant to be. It’s all for a reason.”

The expats who pack Kabul’s ramshackle dollar guesthouses are more sceptical. They see the school as Big Lippy’s corporate move into an overseas market opened up by US military action in 2001. First bombs, then blusher: turning 100 women a year out with goody bags of free mae-up, after a crash course in the superiority of US cosmetics, sounds like a market-building strategy.

One deeply cynical group of muscular American men, who were coy about explaining quite what their job “for the President” entailed, were jappier telling stories about meeting gun-toting heavies in the provinces who painted the toenails of their “Yeti-like feet” with black varnish, and doused themselves in rosewater; their half-joking point was that cosmetics firms looking for market penetration should target men as well as women. But O’Connor, whose normal job is as a business consultant to beauty companies in New York, only laughs off the idea that the school’s sponsors might have a hidden agenda. “You know, Afghanistan is pretty small,” she says. “It could never make money for these companies in the way that expanding into, say, China, might. You could say, ‘Why don’t Clairol build hospitals?’ But then again, would you want to have your hip replacement done in an Estee Lauder hospital? The point about these companies is that they don’t do medicine, or irrigation. Their business is beauty. And if they can do what they do best, and give some women a grassroots business that they can do anywhere, then everyone benefits – and it’s good PR.”

No one dreams of questioning the motivation of the Americans and Afghan-Americans teaching the course. They are unpaid volunteers taking time out from working lives across the Atlantic. Anyone who escaped a past in Kabul for better times abroad is back, partly, out of survivor’s guilt about the suffering of the friends and relatives left behind. Those who are new to the city are here, partly, because they have been exposed to years of media campaigns about the plight of Afghanistan’s pitiful, mute, veiled, female victims. Naively or not, their aim is to make things better.

But good intentions alone are still not enough to please most foreign experts and aid workers in Kabul. “Aha – cosmetic repairs!” one Western academic sniffs disdainfully, when she hears about the school. “A bunch of American girls come along with a lipstick revolution, and suddenly everything’s OK!” Research by Estee Lauder shows that American women buy more lipstick during recessions (the idea is that when you can’t afford the big things, you go for small, affordable luxuries instead). The company playfully calls this The Leading Lipstick Indicator.

Experts on Afghanistan have a moral worry: that beauty firms may hope Afghan consumers recovering from two decades of war will behave the same way – without realising that some experiences are too terrible to be wiped away with a coat of lipstick. Less theoretically, they are also suspicious of showy, pretty, attention-grabbing little aid projects, right in the middle of the capital, that will get a lot of sentimental media coverage in the West, divert attention from their own more challenging projects in remote areas, and foster the ignorant belief that all is now well in Afghanistan. Too many people in Europe and America do want to believe that Western intervention has sorted out Afghanistan’s troubles. They might remember the anguished e-mails from US feminists that zipped about in the late Nineties, begging governments to save Afghan women from the barbarity of the Taleban (which were ignored by politicians). They’ll also remember the decisive response of Western leaders after 9/11, once the Taleban had stopped seeming irrelevant to the wider world. Briefly, the need to free Afghan women from their persecutors became a Western political imperative (Cherie Blair and Lauren Bush were among those who championed the cause). The War on Terror was sometimes cast as a gigantic act of chivalry to save damsels in distress from the burqa.

The burqa, a traditional garment that the Taleban forced sophisticated city women to wear, has become the icon of oppression in Western minds. Everyone has seen newspaper photographs of women veiled from head to toe in its blue folds, only able to see out through a tiny mesh around the eyes which deprives wearers of peripheral vision. The most shocking picture shows the execution of a woman under the Taleban. A man stands in profile, pointing a gun downwards, ready to fire. His target is crouched, or perhaps kneeling. It is impossible to tell which. Her terror is invisible too. Under her coverings, she is nothing but a faceless huddle of blue.

Most people’s knowledge of Afghanistan ends not long after this, at about the time John Simpson entered Kabul (with the Northern Alliance), or when radios in Kabul started playing music again. There have been no big news headlines from Afghanistan since 2001. The uninitiated are left with a freeze-framed mental shapshot of a liberated country full of women just about to rip off their burqas and live life to the full. So newcomers to Kabul now stare pityingly at women on the street, failing to understand why so many are still in blue and not seizing their new opportunities. As one American visitor landing at the airport said wonderingly to me: “How long will it be before they realise they are free?”

What only the Kabul aid workers, and the Afghans themselves, understand is that there is still a long way to go before these women really become free. The depressing reality is that Western intervention has achieved very little. Beauty has not, after all, quite beaten the Beast. Women still hide behind their veils because they are frightened. Afghanistan today is far from safe. The warlords whose misrule a decade ago – involving so much random rape and killing that thousands of peaceable citizens fled abroad – are back in power. Grouped in the Northern Alliance, they became the West’s proxy fighting force in the War on Terror. One of their number is now the Defence Minister in Kabul, heading a motley crew of swaggering militias. Others, who hold absolute power in Afghanistan’s shattered towns and mediaeval villages, have been officially named provincial governors. Because the warlords have guns and local authority, the American forces hunting the remnants of the Taleban and al-Qaeda tolerate them, as well as the ever-expanding poppy fields and opium trade in their lands. But they are as violent as ever.

“What we’re seeing today is day-to-day insecurity – extorition, theft, looting of property and cases of rape of women and boys in which the perpetrators are often the people who should be providing security,” says Vikram Parekh of the International Crisis Group. In central Kabul, patrols by the International Security Assistance Force give a comforting illusion of safety. But Isaf does not protect the rest of the country. Talk of “reforming” the Defence Ministry – which translates as getting the gunmen out of town – goes nowhere. Fear of violent attack by these old oppressors, who enjoy new American backing, keeps many women, even in the relatively safe capital, as firmly burqa’d up as ever. “Optimism is always important,” Palwasha Hassan says with a sad laugh, “but I don’t think that things are moving in the right direction.” She is a founder member of the Afghan Women’s Network, which in August brought a few hundred women together in a Kabul park to make their first public protest about the lack of security. “The world is not really that concerned about what’s happening in Afghanistan, but only about the war against terrorism. In the provinces the warlords are being given more guns and power. That’s not what Afghans need.”

Few warlords encourage provincial girls to go to school or women to work. In many areas, women are no freer than they were under the Taleban. In Heart, the governor, Ismail Khan, forbids women to work for foreign men. He calls the girls who commit suicide by setting themselves on fire “weak”. What foreign aid has come in to repair the damage of wartime has trickled away with little to show for it. The international presence in Kabul has made the city a magnet for returning refugees seeking safety: three million ragged people are packed into a city that can only support 600,000. The vistas of bombed-out houses and bullet scars on walls oppress everyone. So do the white ticks painted on ruins in the dusty countryside, a reminder that a demining team has recently been at work. Shinkai Zahine’s family’s old rural retreat – a mud fort damaged during the War on Terror – stands in a pale, boulder-strewn desert. She sighs nostalgically when I ask her the name of the place. The Taleban cut down the fruit trees that used to grow here, she says, but it is still called Shehar Dara – the Valley of Sweetness. Women live in the ruins of the past with all the curses of poverty. More die in childbirth here than anywhere else in the world. Even in Kabul’s top-of-the-range Malalai Maternity Hospital (a decrepit Soviet-style sprawl, now being overhauled using some $70,000 from UNICEF), the wards are desperately overcrowded. Tongue-tied, illiterate, 19-year-old Aziza draped herself in her burqa and trudged out of the door just two hours after giving birth to her first daughter. There was no room for her to stay longer.

In law, women are still the property of their men, to be married, punished and disposed of as their families see fit. If they run away from domestic cruelty, or to a man of their own choice, they are still thrown into jail. The 32 prisoners currently in Kabul Women’s Jail are all guilty of crimes of love. One of them is Sharifa, a 20-year-old whose pale face, frail body and small, shamed voice make her seem much younger. Sharifa was imprisoned last year for running away from the husband her parents had chosen when she was 11 – because his family forced her into prostitution. She escaped from his home with a houng male neighbour, but her husband tracked the runaways down in Kabul and reported them to the police. Her punishment is four more years in a cramped, crowded, sweltering cell. Sewage smells waft in from fetid puddles of water in the courtyard. Sharifa is fed rice at midday, potatoes at six in the evening, and one nan bread a day. She shares her bed with her eight-month-old daughter, Kashma, who was born in captivity. Customary law says Sharifa still belongs to her first husband. He has married again, but he is allowed up to four wives; so Sharifa will eventually be returned to him for a lifetime of domestic punishment. There are only two ways for her to avoid this fate. Her husband might agree to divorce her, if her parents return the bride price they received on her wedding day. Or her parents might settle the debt another customary way – by giving the husband (and his abusive family) one of Sharifa’s sisters.

A 2001 study by Physicians for Himan Rights found that “more than 70 per cent of Afhgan women suffered from major depression, nearly two-thirds were suicidal, and 16 per cent had already attempted suicide.” Amidst so much female suffering, it’s not surprising that many people don’t see how something as frivolous as an American beauty school can help.

Even the soft-spoken Women’s Minister, Habiba Sarabi, has mixed feelings about the project her ministry is backing. “I don’t wear make-up myself,” she says gently, “because I’ve seen now businessmen use made-up women to sell things. My preference is to show my natural face, and let my authority and knowledge speak for themselves. Women in Afghanistan have always been thought of by men as good only for sexual enjoyment and having babies and looking after children. I want to show them that a woman should be respected as a human being and not just as a doll. But life is all about learning, and a well-trained beautician is the best kind, so it’s good to have this training centre. I’m not against it.”

Minister Sarabi’s real passion- and that of every member of a new elite of activists trying to right the wrongs done to women – is the process that the local jargon calls “mainstreaming gender issues”. For, as girls from good families catch up with their missed years of school and pack into university, and President Karzai’s Government makes a point of including at least some women in its commissions and ministries, the Afghan capital is becoming a fizzing laboratory of radical feminist experimentation. Practically every international organisation has, or is appointing, a “gender offier”. Piles of reports are written and discussed. Purposeful foreign feminists channel money from NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and charities into solving women’s problems in hospitals, prisons and schools.

The home-grown feminists are as energetic as the imports, even though they have to live with constant intimidation – anonymous phone calls, midnight knocks on the door, and threats of violence – as a result of their work. Tajwar Kakar, fired as deputy women’s minister this year, but planning a parliamentary comeback, has always struck fear into strong men’s hearst. This doughty veteran has taken on everyone from the Communists of the Eighties (who imprisoned and tortured her for refusing to join the Party) to the camp authorities in Pakistan (whom she forcefully persuaded to set up schools for girls) to the Taleban (she returned briefly from emigration in Australia to berate the fundamentalists for treating women disgracefully) to the mujaheddin-era ex-President, Burhanuddin Rabbani (whom she laid into during last year’s Emergency Loya Jirga, or national assembly, that created the present government, asking, “Why did your time in power leave so many Afghan women widows?”)

Now a younger generation of feisty, educated Afghan women are pouring back from Pakistan, bringing teaching qualifications and small NGO organisations formed in exile, eager for action. Some are working with the war’s victims: street children, mine victims, widows. Others are setting up sewing cooperatives or literacy classes for women at the bottom of the heap. These economic and social projects are only the beginning. The gender elite’s most serious attention is given to securing women full political rights. A new national constitution is being drafted and should be ready by this October. “The rightgs of women should be mentioned in the constitution, which is fundamental for Afghan women – the most important thing at the moment,” Minister Sarabi says.

Senior activists from Sima Samar, head of the Afghan Independent Hman Rights Commission, to Professor Mahbuba Hoquqmal, State Minister for Women’s Affairs and head of the faculty of law and political science at Kabul University, are determined first to make the constitution female-friendly, and then to make sure its provisions are reflected in fairer laws. “The constitution is just a promise on paper,” Professor Hoquqmal says. “We also need the power to change the laws to implement our women’s rights.”

These reformers are already trying to get out into whatever provinces are safe enough to get their intellectual message across. But even the most enthusiastic of them realise that deep change will take time – enough time to repair the damage of the war, to eradicate a culture of violence, to reconcile Afghanistan’s harsh customary laws with the sharia (Islamic) code and with the norms of the Western world, and, probably, to educated a whole new generation of girls. “Yes, it will take a lot of time,” Minister Sarabi admits wistfully. “It’s not possible to change everything fast.”

The short-term goals of most ordinary women are far more basic. “Women in the provinces don’t want to participate with men in these political processes yet. They can’t read. They haven’t even got TV. They want first for the Government to improve their lives so they can learn to understand these processes,” says Suraya Pakzad, of the Voice of Afghan Women group. The women she speaks to hope for nothing more ambitious than schools for their daughters, hospitals for themselves, and jobs to give them economic independence.

And this is where small, imaginative projects like the Ameircan beauty school come into their own –providing exactly the kind of economic empowerment dreamed of by the many middle-ranking Afghan women who do not need the safety net of literacy classes or sewing circles, but are not part of the elite striving for a future of full legal equality either.

After hair-cutting lesson one – a simple solid-form cut, flat and precise all the way around the head at just above shoulder length – I ask the students at Beauty Without Borders if they would like more political rights for women.

Layla Shamal, a chunky woman of 30 in a black trouser suit and dusty black platforms, looks bewildered, but only for a second. Then she smiles. “Peace has come to Afghanistan, and peace is very important to life,” she says. “But now we need rights so we can get a chance to get women’s jobs. Everything starts from the economy. If women have a job they can find money; and if they have money they can find themselves.”

Other heads nod. All the students who file into the school at eight o’clock every morning feel lucky to be where they are. Hanifa Noori, a tall, elegant doctor’s daughter with three children under five, who comes to classes every morning in a modest veil – but with her lips boldly outlined and filled in with silver glitter – is one of the luckiest. Hanifa, her husband Khalilullah, and the children she gave birth to in refugee camps, came back from Pakistan last autumn. They are still camping in her father’s upstairs flat – two unfurnished rooms, a kitchen with a gas burner, and a roof terrace – with the old man and with a sister and her family. (Hanifa’s father’s other wife and her family live in the downstairs flat).

Khalilullah Noori is desperately embarrassed by the shortage of electricity, crooked mud walls, tired old cushions and dust. He has a university education and speaks a little of a lot of languages – including English, Russian, Japanese and Urdu – but so far has only been able to find work as a watchman for a Japanese aid agency.

To help out with money, Hanifa put a hand-drawn advert outside the door of their new home, offering beauty treatments. But in a shabby district whose two main features are a tent camp for returning refugees from Pakistan and, up on the hill, a mausoleum to a dead king, there wasn’t much hope that this would earn the Nooris enough for a comfortable life.

Hanifa’s luck changed overnight. Hearing a rumour about the American school, she and Khalilullah rushed off to see if she could enrol. She couldn’t. There were 150 other applicants. Then two students dropped out at the last minute.

Patricia O’Connor rumples her wild red hair and grins at the memory of the chaotic crowd scene that ensued. “It was so hard. Each woman’s life story was more heart-breaking than the last. I didn’t know how to choose,” she recalls ruefully. “In the end I decided to put everyone’s names in a hat and fill the places by lottery.

“Hanifa’s husband was begging me to let her in, saying he was afraid that she was seriously depressed. But everyone had their story. I said no, I had to rely on the luck of the draw.”

Hanifa’s was one of the two names drawn.

“All around there were other women bursting into tears. Hanifa had been very quiet and nervous. But when she heard her name being called out her face just lit up. She took off out of here to where her husband was waiting, and burst out with her news, and he literally picked her up so her feet weren’t touching the ground, and whirled her round, and kissed her.”

It is dusk, in another of the carefully tended rose gardens that are one of the most heartening signs of the peace returning to Kabul. A cageful of songbirds twitter as the guest-house habitués gather for another evening’s tea and expat gossip. A British gender adviser leans over to ask what story I am writing. A little nervously, I tell her about the beauty school opening.

Unexpectedly, her face lights up. “Well, I’m in favour of beauty!” Carol le Duc says cheerfully. “I think there’s room for more beauty here.” And the full moon rises slowly out of the dust.

ENDS