Afghanistan’s female drugs cop swaps burqa for AK-47
By: Administrative Account | Source: Pakistan Daily Times
April 21, 2005 6:46AM EST
By Rachel Morarjee
The streets of Kabul are crawling with gangsters and warlords linked to the country’s booming drugs trade
By day Malalai Badahari wears dark glasses, combat fatigues and wields an AK-47. But at dusk the diminutive counter-narcotics cop slips her veil back on her head and goes back to her home life, where all her neighbours think she is a teacher.
In the mud-brick street in Kabul where she lives with her husband, father-in-law and her five sons, revealing what she does for a living could mean death as the streets of the Afghan capital are crawling with gangsters and warlords linked to the country’s booming drugs trade.
Her family are also worried she could be threatened by Islamic fundamentalists who want to turn the clock back four years to a time when Afghan women were barred from working or leaving the house without first shrouding themselves in a burqa. But 37-year-old Malalai, who shares her name with an Afghan heroine who battled the British colonialists at the turn of the century, is undaunted by the threats she faces.
“I like President Hamid Karzai because now I can carry a Kalashnikov. This is the new Afghanistan,” she says, cradling her machine-gun on her lap and pushing the shades back over the black cap she wears to cover her hair when she is at work. She is one of six women who have been trained at a centre in the bombed-out rubble of west Kabul as part of an elite counter-narcotics team by British and American instructors to seize drugs, which now make up the backbone of war-torn Afghanistan’s economy.
The National Interdiction Unit, of which Malalai is a part, will eventually form part of the frontline in the country’s war on drugs and is expected to be 200-strong by the end of this year, with around 15 to 20 female police officers. Women are vital to the unit because they are required to search the women’s quarters of homes, something men can’t do without offending local Islamic sensibilities. Malalai and her colleagues have their work cut out. Since the hardline Taliban regime was toppled by US-led forces in late 2001 - after they refused to hand over Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, the architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States - cultivation of opium poppies, the raw ingredient of heroin, has soared.
The crop now accounts for between 40 to 60 percent of the Afghan economy and both the United Nations and the US State Department have warned that the country is teetering on the verge of becoming a “narco state.” We’re Afghan women like you: At the moment the unit has to operate like a SWAT team, launching lightning raids on heavily-armed drug traffickers and heroin laboratories in Afghanistan’s far-flung provinces, and carrying out spot checks on trucks entering Kabul to look for opium, heroin and hashish.
In the West, drugs enforcement agencies like America’s Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) gather intelligence and monitor crime syndicates before announcing their presence with a raid. But in Afghanistan there are still no functioning courts or secure prisons to deal with drug traffickers. So the handful of raids Malalai and her colleagues have so far launched have led to relatively small hauls of drugs and not so far brought any major arrests of drug kingpins.In her biggest seizure to date, Malalai found seven kilos of opium and 70 kilos of hashish secreted in rooms in the women’s area of a house in Kabul, where she and her 40-year-old colleague Habiba had gone to search the women.
Under the Taliban: Malalai, who still trains two to three days a week between actual operations, says women are just as good as men at the gruelling training regimen. During her seven months with the unit, she has learned to use a pistol and an AK-47 as well as being trained in surveillance and close combat techniques.
But she says the dangers she faces in her current job pale into insignificance beside the threats she faced when teaching girls under the Taliban regime.
Between 1997 and 1999, Malalai was one of 26 women who taught 300 girls to read and write in a mechanic’s house in the Shashadarak neighbourhood of Kabul - an area that now houses the main base of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in the country. The Taliban, fiercely opposed to almost any activity by women that did not involve doing housework or praying, raided the school twice, breaking down the door on one occasion and searching for notebooks and writing materials.
“We had bought sewing machines and put embroidery on the walls and we said that we were teaching women how to sew, which was kind of allowed under the Taliban. It was far more frightening than the work I do now,” Malalai says, looking at her father-in-law. If she had been found out when the Taliban broke down the doors, Malalai would have faced an immediate beating, and then been lashed and jailed.
Her father-in-law recalls one time she came home after a Taliban raid, shaking and pale. “She looked so scared. All the blood had drained from her face,” he says.Despite her family’s support for her work since she joined the force, Malalai took a while to get used to the major readjustment of actually working with men.
Drugs are against Islam: Even in Afghanistan’s more liberal capital Kabul, women are rarely allowed out after dark without being escorted by a family member for fear that people will start whispering about their virtue being compromised. And even if the woman is a major breadwinner in the family, like Malalai who earns 150 dollars a month from her work, it is hard for husbands and other male relatives to adjust.
“When she explained it to us, it almost sounded like he didn’t trust her or trust us, and felt insecure about her being around all these men later in the day, when he is used to having her home by four, cooking or being with the family,” Chambers says.
Sitting at home with her eldest son and her father-in-law, Malalai says that with five boys all grown up and at school - her youngest is 12 - it’s not such an obstacle to be away from home.
But she is realistic about how long it will take to turn the tide on the narcotics trade given the poverty of Afghanistan, where most of the population scrape by on less than two dollars a day and 20 percent of children never live to see the age of five.
“Farmers here are very poor. You have to give them some alternative, and that will take years. The entire nation is so poor.” Malalai says.
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