New Yorker journalist Anand Gopal spent the last weeks and months of the U.S.'s ill-fated war in Afghanistan in rural Helmand province, interviewing local women. It's a very long article, so I won't post the whole thing in the topic. But I'll post snippets. The TL;DR: women only ever had rights in the cities, while rural women lived traditionally under the constant threat of military conflict and brutal local warlords and gangs(which enjoyed the active support of the U.S. and Afghan government, lol) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/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 arent 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 dont leave immediately, everyone is going to die.
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 whod accompanied her to the safe house. Could it be?
This passage is cute, use it steel yourself.
n 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmanda 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 womens rights to the valley. Our culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school, Shakira recalled. It was this way before my fathers time, before my grandfathers 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.
Nighttime evacuations became a frequent occurrence and, for Shakira, a source of excitement: the dark corners of the caves, the clamorous groups of children. We would look for Russian helicopters, she said. It was like spotting strange birds.
The first time Shakira saw Dado, through the judas of her parents front gate, he was in a pickup truck, trailed by a dozen armed men, parading through the village as if he were the President. Dado, a wealthy fruit vender turned mujahideen commander, with a jet-black beard and a prodigious belly, had begun attacking rival strongmen even before the Soviets defeat. He hailed from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, had held vast feudal plantations for centuries. The lower valley was the home of the Ishaqzais, the poor tribe to which Shakira belonged. Shakira watched as Dados men went from door to door, demanding a tax and searching homes. A few weeks later, the gunmen returned, ransacking her familys living room while she cowered in a corner. Never before had strangers violated the sanctity of her home, and she felt as if shed been stripped naked and thrown into the street.
But the roads were studded with checkpoints belonging to different mujahideen groups. South of the village, in the town of Gereshk, a militia called the Ninety-third Division maintained a particularly notorious barricade on a bridge; there were stories of men getting robbed or killed, of women and young boys being raped. Shakiras father sometimes crossed the bridge to sell produce at the Gereshk market, and her mother started pleading with him to stay home.
Then one afternoon, when Shakira was sixteen, she heard shouts from the street: The Taliban are here! She saw a convoy of white Toyota Hiluxes filled with black-turbanned fighters carrying white flags. Shakira hadnt ever heard of the Taliban, but her father explained that its members were much like the poor religious students shed seen all her life begging for alms. Many had fought under the mujahideens banner but quit after the Soviets withdrawal; now, they said, they were remobilizing to put an end to the tumult. In short order, they had stormed the Gereshk bridge, dismantling the Ninety-third Division, and volunteers had flocked to join them as theyd descended on Sangin. Her brother came home reporting that the Taliban had also overrun Dados positions. The warlord had abandoned his men and fled to Pakistan. Hes gone, Shakiras brother kept saying. He really is. The Taliban soon dissolved Dados religious courtfreeing Sana and her husband, who were awaiting executionand eliminated the checkpoints. After fifteen years, the Sangin Valley was finally at peace.
One night in 2003, Shakira was jolted awake by the voices of strange men. She rushed to cover herself. When she ran to the living room, she saw, with panic, the muzzles of rifles being pointed at her. The men were larger than shed ever seen, and they were in uniform. These are the Americans, she realized, in awe. Some Afghans were with them, scrawny men with Kalashnikovs and checkered scarves. A man with an enormous beard was barking orders: Amir Dado.
Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree.
Shakira was bewildered by the Americans choice of allies. Was this their plan? she asked me. Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims? She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Divisionand made it its closest partner in the province.
Dado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangins governorDados brotherto discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dadoa suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlords former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dados forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassinan ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalilthe Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantnamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalils classified Guantnamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to cover for the fact that Dados forces had been involved with the ambush.
Sometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakiras husband, took refuge in a friends home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.
Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. They would drop leaflets saying, Stay in your homes! Save yourselves! Shakira recalled. In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deathsanonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the wars civilian toll.
For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.
But the foreigners efforts to embed among the population could be crude: they often occupied houses, only further exposing villagers to crossfire. They were coming by force, without getting permission from us, Pashtana, a woman from another Sangin village, told me. They sometimes broke into our house, broke all the windows, and stayed the whole night. We would have to flee, in case the Taliban fired on them.
In 2010, a group of Sangin Taliban commanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, U.S. Special Operations Forcesacting independentlybombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.
On the strength of a seemingly endless supply of recruits, the Taliban had no difficulty outlasting the coalition. But, though the insurgency has finally brought peace to the Afghan countryside, it is a peace of desolation: many villages are in ruins. Reconstruction will be a challenge, but a bigger trial will be to exorcise memories of the past two decades. My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming, Pazaro said. We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, No, no, they wont come back.
I met Wakil, a bespectacled Taliban commander. Like many fighters Id encountered, he came from a line of farmers, had studied a few years in seminary, and had lost dozens of relatives to Amir Dado, the Ninety-third Division, and the Americans. He discussed the calamities visited on his family without rancor, as if the American War were the natural order of things. Thirty years old, hed attained his rank after an older brother, a Taliban commander, died in battle. Hed hardly ever left Helmand, and his face lit up with wonder at the thought of capturing Gereshk, a town that hed lived within miles of, but had not been able to visit for twenty years. Forget your writing, he laughed as I scribbled notes. Come watch me take the city! Tracking a helicopter gliding across the horizon, I declined. He raced off. An hour later, an image popped up on my phone of Wakil pulling down a poster of a government figure linked to the Ninety-third Division. Gereshk had fallen.
A scholar whod spent much of the past two decades shuttling between Helmand and Pakistan said, There were many mistakes we made in the nineties. Back then, we didnt know about human rights, education, politicswe just took everything by power. But now we understand. In the scholars rosy scenario, the Taliban will share ministries with former enemies, girls will attend school, and women will work shoulder to shoulder with men. Yet in Helmand it was hard to find this kind of Talib. More typical was Hamdullah, a narrow-faced commander who lost a dozen family members in the American War, and has measured his life by weddings, funerals, and battles. He said that his community had suffered too grievously to ever share power, and that the maelstrom of the previous twenty years offered only one solution: the status quo ante. He told me, with pride, that he planned to join the Talibans march to Kabul, a city hed never seen. He guessed that hed arrive there in mid-August. On the most sensitive question in village lifewomens rightsmen like him have not budged. In many parts of rural Helmand, women are barred from visiting the market. When a Sangin woman recently bought cookies for her children at the bazaar, the Taliban beat her, her husband, and the shopkeeper. Taliban members told me that they planned to allow girls to attend madrassas, but only until puberty. As before, women would be prohibited from employment, except for midwifery. Pazaro said, ruefully, They havent changed at all.
Travelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state. Unlike other rebel movements, the Taliban had provided practically no reconstruction, no social services beyond its harsh tribunals. It brooks no opposition: in Pan Killay, the Taliban executed a villager named Shaista Gul after learning that hed offered bread to members of the Afghan Army. Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban ruleincluding the women I interviewed. It was as if the movement had won only by default, through the abject failures of its opponents. To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sisters wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble. What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.
Abdul Rahman, a farmer, was rooting through the refuse with his young son when an Afghan Army gunship appeared on the horizon. It was flying so low, he recalled, that even Kalashnikovs could fire on it. But there were no Taliban around, only civilians. The gunship fired, and villagers began falling right and left. It then looped back, continuing to attack. There were many bodies on the ground, bleeding and moaning, another witness said. Many small children. According to villagers, at least fifty civilians were killed.
As we spoke, Afghan Army helicopters were firing upon the crowded central market in Gereshk, killing scores of civilians. An official with an international organization based in Helmand said, When the government forces lose an area, they are taking revenge on the civilians. The helicopter pilot acknowledged this, adding, We are doing it on the order of Sami Sadat. General Sami Sadat headed one of the seven corps of the Afghan Army. Unlike the Amir Dado generation of strongmen, who were provincial and illiterate, Sadat obtained a masters degree in strategic management and leadership from a school in the U.K. and studied at the nato Military Academy, in Munich. He held his military position while also being the C.E.O. of Blue Sea Logistics, a Kabul-based corporation that supplied anti-Taliban forces with everything from helicopter parts to armored tactical vehicles. During my visit to Helmand, Blackhawks under his command were committing massacres almost daily: twelve Afghans were killed while scavenging scrap metal at a former base outside Sangin; forty were killed in an almost identical incident at the Armys abandoned Camp Walid; twenty people, most of them women and children, were killed by air strikes on the Gereshk bazaar; Afghan soldiers who were being held prisoner by the Taliban at a power station were targeted and killed by their own comrades in an air strike. (Sadat declined repeated requests for comment.)
The day before the massacre at the Yakh Chal outpost, CNN aired an interview with General Sadat. Helmand is beautifulif its peaceful, tourism can come, he said. His soldiers had high morale, he explained, and were confident of defeating the Taliban. The anchor appeared relieved. You seem very optimistic, she said. Thats reassuring to hear. I showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadats Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Walis house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girls limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, Were civilians! The choppers killed him and Walis son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. Why are they doing this? he asked. Are they mocking us?
As a result, like the Soviets, the Americans effectively created two Afghanistans: one mired in endless conflict, the other prosperous and hopeful.It is the hopeful Afghanistan thats now under threat, after Taliban fighters marched into Kabul in mid-Augustjust as Hamdullah predicted. Thousands of Afghans have spent the past few weeks desperately trying to reach the Kabul airport, sensing that the Americans frenzied evacuation may be their last chance at a better life.
This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable projectthe Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here, Pazaro said. Is this justice? Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, This is not womens rights when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers. Khalida, from a nearby village, said, The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.
All the women I met in Sangin, though, seemed to agree that their rights, whatever they might entail, cannot flow from the barrel of a gunand that Afghan communities themselves must improve the conditions of women. Some villagers believe that they possess a powerful cultural resource to wage that struggle: Islam itself. The Taliban are saying women cannot go outside, but there is actually no Islamic rule like this, Pazaro told me. As long as we are covered, we should be allowed.
Yeah but Americans don't care about those other Afghan women. They care about the ones they can use to justify more imperialism.
Pretty much. It puts the lie to the idea that our presence in Afghanistan was ever about anything but control. Also, Afghanistan is a very rural country, so this article may well be more representative than articles about women in Kabul. In any case, Anand Gopal really went above and beyond in Hellman province.
Yes, yes. You've told us for two decades that America is worse than the nation that crashed planes into buildings and forces women to cover their heads in public.