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July 23, 2013
Call 911
Say you’re a Westerner in Afghanistan, trying to do some business, and suddenly you find yourself in a bit of a scrape—allegations of wrongdoing, of criminal activity, maybe even of personal violence. The legal system in Afghanistan is opaque. Where do you go for help?
by Tom Freston
Kimberley Motley on the streets of Kabul. A former Miss Wisconsin, she is the only foreign litigator in Afghanistan.
Americans are often accused of being homebound and uninterested in the world—and many Americans certainly are. It’s a quality that gets us into a lot of trouble. (George W. Bush, who got us into more than a little, did not even have a valid passport when elected president in 2000.) Still, travel to any far corner of the world, and you’ll stumble upon an American. There are adventurers aplenty among us. Take Kimberley Motley, a 38-year-old American lawyer I met in Kabul last fall. She has carved out quite an unusual career for herself. A recent e-mail makes that quite clear: “My day consisted of being the only woman—let alone a non-incarcerated international woman—in Pul-e-Charkhi Prison in Afghanistan during a violent prison riot, while trying to fight for the release of my South African drug-dealer client. The prison was locked down, 23 guards ran by in full riot gear, but I got locked into the Commander’s Office with 5 prison guards comfortably watching Elmo do his thing on Sesame Street on Tolo TV. You can’t make this shit up.â€
No, you can’t.
Kimberly Motley, who hails from Milwaukee, is the daughter of a North Korean mother and an African American father. This unusual pedigree—and the way it shapes her features and her outlook—has served her very well in Afghanistan. Motley is a lawyer, a mother of two young children, and a former beauty queen (Mrs. Wisconsin, in fact). Right now she’s the only foreign litigator in all of Afghanistan, having started her own law firm there, Motley Legal Services. She hung out her shingle after sensing an opportunity few mortals would have noticed: defending Westerners accused of criminal offenses in Afghanistan.
Tall and beautiful, Motley has the air of a very determined woman. I first saw her at a party and asked a friend who she was. “Oh, that’s 911,†the friend said. “That’s what we call her. If you get arrested in Afghanistan, you just call 911 and she’ll get you out.†She has successfully defended many a foreigner charged with murder, robbery, drug dealing, fraud, and other crimes. Who knew so many Westerners were coming to Afghanistan and getting into these kinds of predicaments? (Actually, I knew. The criminal set seems to fit in well there.)
She has received a bundle of death threats and has been accused of many things, including running a brothel.
In the 70s, I lived for a while in a hotel in Kabul—the Mustafa Hotel—where the residents were almost exclusively Western miscreants. It was touted as a hotel to the few losers, like me, who sought it out by mistake, but, in fact, it was more of a stoner halfway house. The Mustafa was sort of like the Hotel California—people checked in, but most didn’t check out. Back then, the city jail was over-crowded, so foreign prisoners were sent to the Mustafa to await sentencing before being locked up in the main prison outside of town. You could drink alcohol, smoke hashish, play chess, and listen to Led Zeppelin cassettes in the lobby. My next-door neighbors, two Germans, had been arrested for bank robbery. I don’t think anyone had a lawyer. Motley would have had a field day.
She came to Afghanistan in 2008. She had never been out of the U.S. before. Working as a public defender in Milwaukee, she had spent a lot of time in inner-city prisons. (“I love prisons,†she says.) She caught wind of a program funded by the State Department to train and mentor lawyers in Afghanistan. Curious, she signed up. As she toured the squalid Afghan prison system, she noticed Western prisoners languishing. No one seemed willing to represent these people, so she figured she could—and would. She went right to the minister of justice, the chief of the Supreme Court, and others with her idea. “They were cool with it,†she told me over lunch one rainy April afternoon in Kabul. There was no need for a bar exam. She was in business.
Motley at the Jalabad Detention Center. “I’m used to prisons,†she says, “to getting my hands dirty, and getting grimy with legal practice.â€
Her first client was an Englishman who had allegedly been caught at the Kabul airport smuggling out heroin in protein-powder cans. Next came a South African on a murder rap. Other clients were accused of fraud, bribery, proselytization, even terrorism. By her count she gets 90 percent of these people off.
Fearless, Motley cuts quite the figure in Kabul. She drives her own S.U.V. without a bodyguard or a weapon. Questioned at checkpoints, she holds up her iPad with the Afghan legal code displayed on the screen. Unlike most Western women in Afghanistan, she refuses to wear a headscarf, saying, “I need to be strong and a lawyer, not a second-class citizen. I cannot let down my clients.†For relaxation she teaches spin classes to soldiers serving with the International Security Assistance Force—the allied coalition. To the male-dominated Afghan court and prison establishment, she must appear to be someone from outer space. She acknowledges this but declares that she gets respect. “I get compliments from judges,†she tells me. “They say, ‘We’re so proud of you, here in our courts and fighting in our system.†She has proven to be a very effective and tenacious fighter.
Once established with Western clients, Motley moved on to bigger game. Her inner-city chops prepared her for her next step: taking on the cases of some of the earth’s most powerless inhabitants, Afghan women. Many NGOs have valiantly taken on their cause in the last decade, but no Western woman has actually gone on to litigate for them in the courtroom. Motley did. She would take on desperate cases, often making them high profile by means of clever publicity and social-media tactics. She works these cases pro bono and has not lost a single one. Her greatest triumph was for a 21-year-old Afghan girl named Gulnaz, who had been raped and impregnated by her 38-year-old uncle. Despite a high number of sexual assaults on women in Afghanistan, officially there is no such thing as rape. “Our rape is their adultery. If a woman is raped in Afghanistan, she gets charged with adultery too,†Motley told me. Both Gulnaz and her uncle were sentenced to 12 years in prison. She was told she would be set free if she married her rapist, but she refused and had the baby that ensued from the rape in prison. Then she met Motley, just before her appeal to the Supreme Court. Motley got the sentence reduced to three years. Not satisfied, she put in for a presidential pardon from Hamid Karzai and with an online petition gathered more than 5,000 signatures in support from around the world. She also worked the case in the international press. Karzai granted the pardon. It was an enormous victory: the first time there had ever been a pardon for a “morals crime†in Afghanistan.
Motley in action, negotiating on a client’s behalf.
A more recent case, one that made the front page of The New York Times, involved a six-year-old girl whose father essentially sold her for $2,500 to pay off a debt to another man. Her fate had been decided in a “jirga,†an informal, extra-judicial proceeding where elders decide on the outcome of a dispute. The mullah who presided over this jirga ruled that the girl was to be forcibly engaged to the debt holder’s 19-year-old son. After some initial publicity, Motley herself organized a second jirga to try to override the decision, a “jirga of appeals,†if you will. Improbably, she manipulated things so that she, a headscarf-less foreign woman, could preside over it. Then, sitting down in the dirt in a rough-and-tumble refugee camp outside Kabul, she argued the case and got her stunned male cohorts to agree that the debt would be satisfied (by an unnamed donor in some other way) and that the engagement would be annulled. Then, for good measure, she got them all to agree that none of them would ever sell, barter, or trade their own daughters. Right there she drew up an agreement and got everyone to sign or thumbprint it.
Motley’s go-it-alone legal act has had some personal fallout, but she remains undeterred. She has received a bundle of death threats and has been accused of many things, including running a brothel. During the Gulnaz episode, she says, her house was ransacked and her electricity cut off. The harassment was daily and became so intense that she moved out and slept in her car for a month in freezing December. In the mornings she’d wash up at the ISAF base, then go to work. “It was good for me, it made me stronger,†she says. She estimates there have been eight arrest warrants issued against her to date, none of which has held up.
For someone who wants to get stronger, this would seem to be an attractive line of work, what with its never-ending supply of obstacles and problems. Her unique urban-African-American-North-Korean experience is also a good match. “I would say that what best prepared me was my inner-city life in Milwaukee. I’m used to prisons, to getting my hands dirty, and getting grimy with legal practice.†As for what’s next, well, she wants to grow her business and open offices in places like India. Although Motley brims with ambition and idealism, one can sense a trace of weariness. She works seven days a week, needs help, but has never found any international lawyer to join her for more than seven days. She says, “They get scared, once they see me in action.†I can well understand.
