The Other Afghan Women

Authored by newyorker.com and submitted by NonamePlsIgnore
image for The Other Afghan Women

Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.”

Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar—as old as the war itself—whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty.

Shakira’s family walked for hours under a blazing sun. She started to feel the rattle of distant thuds, and saw people streaming from riverside villages: men bending low beneath bundles stuffed with all that they could not bear to leave behind, women walking as quickly as their burqas allowed.

The pounding of artillery filled the air, announcing the start of a Taliban assault on an Afghan Army outpost. Shakira balanced her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her hip as the sky flashed and thundered. By nightfall, they had come upon the valley’s central market. The corrugated-iron storefronts had largely been destroyed during the war. Shakira found a one-room shop with an intact roof, and her family settled in for the night. For the children, she produced a set of cloth dolls—one of a number of distractions that she’d cultivated during the years of fleeing battle. As she held the figures in the light of a match, the earth shook.

Around dawn, Shakira stepped outside, and saw that a few dozen families had taken shelter in the abandoned market. It had once been the most thriving bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, carts loaded with women’s gowns, and storefronts dedicated to selling opium. Now stray pillars jutted upward, and the air smelled of decaying animal remains and burning plastic.

In the distance, the earth suddenly exploded in fountains of dirt. Helicopters from the Afghan Army buzzed overhead, and the families hid behind the shops, considering their next move. There was fighting along the stone ramparts to the north and the riverbank to the west. To the east was red-sand desert as far as Shakira could see. The only option was to head south, toward the leafy city of Lashkar Gah, which remained under the control of the Afghan government.

The journey would entail cutting through a barren plain exposed to abandoned U.S. and British bases, where snipers nested, and crossing culverts potentially stuffed with explosives. A few families started off. Even if they reached Lashkar Gah, they could not be sure what they’d find there. Since the start of the Taliban’s blitz, Afghan Army soldiers had surrendered in droves, begging for safe passage home. It was clear that the Taliban would soon reach Kabul, and that the twenty years, and the trillions of dollars, devoted to defeating them had come to nothing. Shakira’s family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. The gunfire sounded closer. Shakira spotted Taliban vehicles racing toward the bazaar—and she decided to stay put. She was weary to the bone, her nerves frayed. She would face whatever came next, accept it like a judgment. “We’ve been running all our lives,” she told me. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The longest war in American history ended on August 15th, when the Taliban captured Kabul without firing a shot. Bearded, scraggly men with black turbans took control of the Presidential palace, and around the capital the austere white flags of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan went up. Panic ensued. Some women burned their school records and went into hiding, fearing a return to the nineteen-nineties, when the Taliban forbade them to venture out alone and banned girls’ education. For Americans, the very real possibility that the gains of the past two decades might be erased appeared to pose a dreadful choice: recommit to seemingly endless war, or abandon Afghan women.

This summer, I travelled to rural Afghanistan to meet women who were already living under the Taliban, to listen to what they thought about this looming dilemma. More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities, and in the past decade the insurgent group had swallowed large swaths of the countryside. Unlike in relatively liberal Kabul, visiting women in these hinterlands is not easy: even without Taliban rule, women traditionally do not speak to unrelated men. Public and private worlds are sharply divided, and when a woman leaves her home she maintains a cocoon of seclusion through the burqa, which predates the Taliban by centuries. Girls essentially disappear into their homes at puberty, emerging only as grandmothers, if ever. It was through grandmothers—finding each by referral, and speaking to many without seeing their faces—that I was able to meet dozens of women, of all ages. Many were living in desert tents or hollowed-out storefronts, like Shakira; when the Taliban came across her family hiding at the market, the fighters advised them and others not to return home until someone could sweep for mines. I first encountered her in a safe house in Helmand. “I’ve never met a foreigner before,” she said shyly. “Well, a foreigner without a gun.”

Shakira has a knack for finding humor in pathos, and in the sheer absurdity of the men in her life: in the nineties, the Taliban had offered to supply electricity to the village, and the local graybeards had initially refused, fearing black magic. “Of course, we women knew electricity was fine,” she said, chuckling. When she laughs, she pulls her shawl over her face, leaving only her eyes exposed. I told her that she shared a name with a world-renowned pop star, and her eyes widened. “Is it true?” she asked a friend who’d accompanied her to the safe house. “Could it be?”

“So there’s no way to take her off desk duty?” Facebook

Shakira, like the other women I met, grew up in the Sangin Valley, a gash of green between sharp mountain outcrops. The valley is watered by the Helmand River and by a canal that Americans built in the nineteen-fifties. You can walk the width of the dale in an hour, passing dozens of tiny hamlets, creaking footbridges, and mud-brick walls. As a girl, Shakira heard stories from her mother of the old days in her village, Pan Killay, which was home to about eighty families: the children swimming in the canal under the warm sun, the women pounding grain in stone mortars. In winter, smoke wafted from clay hearths; in spring, rolling fields were blanketed with poppies.

In 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmand—a province the size of West Virginia, with few girls’ schools. Tribal elders and landlords refused. In the villagers’ retelling, the traditional way of life in Sangin was smashed overnight, because outsiders insisted on bringing women’s rights to the valley. “Our culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school,” Shakira recalled. “It was this way before my father’s time, before my grandfather’s time.” When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls’ education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

FoolsGold45 on September 7th, 2021 at 23:09 UTC »

How do you convince a traditionalist population that new methods of governance (socialism or democracy) or social progressivism are in their best interest? If a population follows rules that anywhere in the Western world would be considered violations of human rights, but the population itself is foundationally stable and even the people denied those rights do not call for them or fight them because even the concept that they should be equal to the other members of their society is foreign to their entrenched beliefs, is it moral to decide what is best for them? A woman treated unequally in a patriarchal settlement may have no protests against this - some would say that this is her choice, others would say she's simply internalized the misogyny of her society.

Push too hard on these people and you get the blowback this article references. You can force people to change their actions, but that will not their minds or what they teach their children. Don't push enough, and the Westerners running the government have to witness human rights abuses every day but can't enforce their own morals upon the people doing them. The populace back home may also wonder why the soldiers and beurauecrats from their progressive societies are allowing the continuation of such backward practices in an area that is supposedly under rule of law.

agent00F on September 7th, 2021 at 22:23 UTC »

Because these wars are acts of retribution rather than any serious rebuilding exercise, the latter of which is only cover/rationalization for the display of power, there's no surprise none of their perpetrators including "the american people" understand (or care for that matter) the first thing about governance.

The Taliban came into power (via local support) because they brought basic rule of law, even if it's via sharia, for simple matters such as theft or the even more fundamental Maslow need of security & livelihood, which the coalition never brought. The top-down aspirations & grandstanding about democracy or whatever were only ever hollow without building effective policy. In contrast the Taliban were relatively better organized from the ground up; imagine how low of a bar that is the west could never clear.

These invasions have left nothing but a trail of failed states, eg iraq/syria/libya etc, worse off than even under the "oppressive" regimes that came before (if they were oppressive, what does that make us?). To save face in this case the invaders will argue that the new kinder Taliban is an upgrade, but of course any failures will be dumped on them trying to piece back together a war ravaged country, which will still get sanctioned for this reason or that. It'll basically be another Cuba, where we're pretending to fight oppression while punishing the people there.

NonamePlsIgnore on September 7th, 2021 at 20:07 UTC »

When looking at geopolitical events on the large scale, it is often helpful to be occasionally informed of the smaller scale interactions that occur on the individual level. This New Yorker piece is an in-depth look into the lives of rural Pashtun villagers (primarily following a woman) in the Sangin Valley spanning a period from the soviet intervention to the current coalition withdrawal. The Sangin Valley has been noted to have a high level of Taliban support, and the piece looks into why that occurred. Several things of note:

At the time before Coalition invasion, villager tensions were high with Taliban as they forcefully conscripted men, and mishandled the opium eradication from an economic sense. This was a window of opportunity for the coalition. Both Soviet and Coalition forces were seen as imposing rules on villagers. Things like women's rights were seen by locals as not naturally transitioned or convinced, but rather forcefully imposed. Coalition forces made a massive error in implementing pre-Taliban warlords to rule over Sangin. These forces were notoriously corrupt and brutal, contributing greatly to local support for Taliban. Furthermore the above abuses were in fact, noted by coalition command. They instead chose to ignore it, and the villagers were very cognizant of that. Coalition treatment of "collateral damage" was extremely reckless from local viewpoints, even compared to the Taliban. (The Taliban contrary to some stereotypes of terrorists using human shields, did have a system in place to notify villagers to evacuate before attacks) There was seemingly no system of compensation and more importantly, no system to pursue justice for villagers. In fact, it doesn't even seem like there was a proper communication system at all for reporting, villagers had to exit their locality far into the city in order to report such incidents to the UN (which again, is removed by several degrees from coalition command, preventing any direct addressment of local concerns).

Throughout the entire article it seems to highlight one key item. Transition of power and of social structures done through force, at speed, and without sufficient local input is extremely risky. The Soviet and Coalition attempts to rapidly mold afghan society into their more "socialist" or "democratic" ideals were done in this way. A revolution should not always be used to change society. Yes, such transitions may work out in the end, but you run a very high risk of blow-back.

Furthermore, one must at least make an effort to ensure that social changes are positively impacting and evenly distributed. In the case of Afghanistan, it seems that urban areas (e.g. Kabul) benefited the most from liberal policies (e.g. women's rights, infrastructure, education), while the rural areas suffered under military occupation and collateral damage. Given that the vast majority of Afghanistan's population was rural, this was inherently an unstable arrangement. The Afghan rural villagers were very aware of this situation and rightfully considered it unfair.

Various nation-building/stabilization attempts are still in play today (e.g. French intervention in Mali). The lessons in Afghanistan should be a cautionary tale used to inform such efforts.