From Burqa To Beret

By Hannah Bloch

When a woman wearing a blue burqa showed up near the Kabul airport three days after the Taliban fled the capital last November, no one gave her a second glance. But heads turned when she marched up to the Northern Alliance soldiers guarding air force headquarters and demanded to be let in. "Go home, Auntie," said the guards, shooing her away. "Get out, go home." The petite woman didn't budge. "I am not your aunt!" she shouted, tearing off her burqa and tossing it to the ground. "I train soldiers. I am Khatol!" Hearing that name, the guards apologized and, too flustered even to salute, opened the gates. Khatol Muhammadzai is the highest-ranking woman in Afghanistan's air force and the country's first and only female parachutist. That day, after more than five long years of forced retirement, Khatol had come back to work.

Widowed 17 years ago, when her only child was still an infant, Khatol (women in her tribe prefer to use only their first name) was among those hardest hit by the Taliban's ban on women's employment. Although she is better educated than most Afghan women--as few as 5.6% are literate--Khatol's options under the fundamentalist regime became as narrow as those for many of Kabul's 30,000-plus other war widows. The Taliban's restrictions on its female population were infamously harsh: girls could not attend school; and women, except for some doctors and nurses, were prohibited from working. The mullahs further isolated women by forcing them to cover themselves head to toe in burqas and forbidding them to leave home without a male relative. Now Khatol has traded the burqa for her old camouflage uniform.

Restored to her job as director of physical training for the air force, the energetic Khatol, who is in her early 40s ("A lady doesn't tell her age," she says), has to make sure soldiers stay in shape. But after 22 years of war, things are in such disarray that the force simply is not equipped for the usual drills. Some soldiers don't have shoes to wear. Government coffers are nearly empty, and salaries have not been paid for months. In early July Khatol spent the better part of her days hounding officials in the Defense Ministry to provide her men with clothing and basic sports gear. "We don't even have a real net for volleyball," she says, watching a group of officers hit a ball in preparation for a match against the International Security Assistance Force.

Khatol's male colleagues are pleased to have her back. "We are proud of her," says Masood, 40, an air force officer and volleyball-team member. "It doesn't matter if she is a man or a woman. She is a champion of Afghanistan." Says Abdul Rahim, a gray-bearded brigadier who has known her for 10 years: "During the Taliban time, I was worried about her. I couldn't even go to her house and ask how she is. They'd kill me." These days, it is possible for a colonel to drop by and chat and even fan Khatol affectionately when she complains of the heat.

For Afghan women with less standing, though, the situation remains difficult. A recent survey by CARE showed that 13% of needy widows in Kabul have resorted to begging for food, up from 1% in 2001. Afghan women's life expectancy is only 44 years, and the country still has the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world--1,700 deaths per 100,000 births. Still, women move about more freely these days, and education promises a sliver of hope. According to preliminary unicef figures, as many as 30% of all children currently in school are girls; even before the Taliban, girls made up only 2% of enrollment.

Khatol, who for a while studied law at Kabul University, was a 14-year veteran of the air force and a brigadier with 500 parachute jumps on her record when the Taliban forced her to return home with severance pay of $13 a month, about a third of her usual salary at the time. A week after taking over Kabul in 1996, "they collected all the women here and told us, 'You cannot work again until we tell you,'" Khatol recalls. "I came back to my office, collected my things and went home." After storing the reminders of her old life--her 30 medals, uniform and parachute--in a large wooden cupboard, she wondered how she would support her teenage son, her elderly mother, her brother's widow and children, and her youngest sister, all of whom depended on her. "I am the man of the house. I was suddenly jobless. I'd lost my uniform, my job, everything... I lost hope."

Occasionally, she took her parachute out and talked to it like an old friend. "What happened to us?" she would say. Once she dreamed of being in a plane preparing to parachute and, when she woke, found herself on her balcony, about to jump. An alarmed neighbor stopped her, crying "What are you thinking?" She occupied herself with menial jobs, tailoring clothes to earn a little extra cash and working on handicrafts, decorating flatware, glasses and dishes with tiny colored glass beads. So she wouldn't forget her profession, she drew intricate diagrams of parachuting equipment with instructions on how to use it and included some of her poetry at the bottom of each illustration. She did what she could to resist the Taliban. Defying its prohibition on girls' education, she welcomed children from her building into her living room and secretly tutored them.

President Hamid Karzai elevated Khatol to general during Afghan independence celebrations in April, making her the second Afghan woman to attain that rank. Despite her promotion and return to work, Khatol's life isn't easy. She continues to lives in her cramped, three-room apartment with her son, mother, sister Lailama and two baby nephews. Lailama once dreamed of becoming a math teacher but was in the eighth grade when the Taliban took over; she's now raising two sons alone because her husband has vanished. There is no running water in the apartment, and for the family to wash and drink, Khatol's son Ahmed Zahir, 18, must lug water up four flights in buckets filled from a hose on the sidewalk. Money is tight. Khatol receives a monthly $39 food allowance from the government in lieu of her salary, which has not been paid.

The general rises every day at 4:30 a.m. to say her prayers; then she sweeps the floors, has a breakfast of nan bread or green tea and gets ready for work. She leaves for work at 8:30 a.m., always immaculately turned out--lipstick and eyeliner carefully applied, tie knotted perfectly on her olive drab shirt, hair pulled up and arranged under her maroon beret. Inside her black army boots, her toenails are painted a glossy red. But Khatol, a Pashtun, still chooses to wear her burqa while shopping, so she will not be overcharged in the bazaar. "The burqa is the culture of Afghanistan. With or without it, I am Khatol," she says.

When Khatol returns home from work, she sometimes takes a nap on her bed, still wearing her uniform. Other times she relaxes in the living room, surrounded by colorful bouquets of paper flowers sent by well wishers. She likes to watch an old black-and-white Soviet-made TV that she borrows from friends, especially "fighting films" with Jackie Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme. But mostly she frets about the future of women like her sister Lailama, who will find it difficult to make up for the time lost under the Taliban. "There's no difference between the Taliban time and now," says Lailama. "Right now I stay at home, and then I was at home."

Khatol's greatest joy remains parachute jumping. She has always loved the way the wind feels whipping against her face and the thrill of the free fall before her parachute opens and carries her safely to the ground. She did her first jump in six years in March as part of the official celebration of Nawroz, the Afghan new-year holiday that the Taliban had banned. She was supposed to land in the Kabul stadium, but the helicopter mistakenly dropped her in a nearby field instead. Unfazed, she gathered up her parachute, hailed a battered old taxi and rode to the stadium, where a cheering crowd greeted her as she made her entrance. "I felt I would start a new life again, a good life," she says. "In that stadium, the Taliban used to execute women. But people clapped for me, and Hamid Karzai also made me a general in that stadium." As she leaped from the helicopter that day, she welcomed the old rush. "It is a terrible wind," she says. "But we're not afraid, because we know it's good when the wind blows in your face."