The Other Afghan Women Notes

Life in Rural Afghanistan

More than 70% of Afghans live in rural areas.
Life under the U.S.-led coalition became hazardous; even simple activities were potentially deadly.

Shakira's Story

Shakira, a woman in her early forties from Sangin Valley, Helmand Province, faced a warning from the Taliban to leave or die.
Her family includes her opium-merchant husband and eight children, one named Nilofar, who is twenty years old.
They fled their village, joining others escaping the Taliban assault, and sought shelter in a destroyed market, where Shakira used cloth dolls to distract her children from the war.
They considered heading to Lashkar Gah but decided to stay due to Shakira's weariness of constant fleeing.

The End of the American War and the Taliban's Rise

The longest war in American history ended when the Taliban captured Kabul on August 15th without resistance.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was established, causing panic among women fearing a return to restrictive Taliban rules.
The article explores the dilemma of recommitting to war versus abandoning Afghan women by examining the lives of women already living under Taliban rule.
Visiting women in rural areas is challenging due to cultural norms.
The author met women through grandmothers, finding dozens of women of all ages, and first encountered Shakira in a safe house.

Shakira's Background and Early Life

Shakira grew up in the Sangin Valley, a green area between mountains watered by the Helmand River and a canal built by Americans in the $1950$ s.
She heard stories of a peaceful past in her village, Pan Killay, with children swimming in the canal with women pounding grain in stone mortars.
In 1979 when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power and initiated a female-literacy program, which was resisted by tribal elders and landlords.
The traditional way of life was disrupted by outsiders promoting women’s rights, leading to a rebellion by the mujahideen.
The Mujahideen kidnapped and killed schoolteachers, while the government arrested tribal elders, and the Soviet Union intervened to support the Communist government and enable women.
In the countryside, resistance to new ways of life persisted, while cities saw women’s rights advance with girls enrolling into schools; women holding parliamentary seats as well as the Vice-President office.
Shakira's childhood was marked by frequent evacuations due to violence.
At age five, she experienced her village being attacked by Soviets; her grandfather was caught and executed.
She learned to find humor and value in difficult situations, such as collecting metal shards from explosions to build a doll house.
At eleven, Shakira’s world shrank to her home as she learned domestic skills.
She secretly taught herself to read using an alphabet book that belonged to her grandfather.

The Rise of Amir Dado and the Taliban

After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, competing mujahideen factions created turmoil and targeted villages for resources.
Amir Dado, a wealthy fruit vendor turned commander, terrorized the area.
Dado’s men demanded taxes and ransacked homes, violating the sanctity of the homes.
In 1992, Lashkar Gah fell to a mujahideen faction, and Shakira’s relatives fled to Pan Killay.
Dado’s men captured Sana, Shakira's uncle's wife who had escaped a forced marriage, and sentenced her and her husband to death, but after the mujahideen toppled the Communists in Kabul they issued decrees restricting women’s freedom.
The new government quickly fell apart, and the country descended into civil war.
The family was stuck between Amir Dado and the Ninety-third Division. When she was sixteen, the Taliban arrived, promising to end the violence.
The Taliban dismantled the Ninety-third Division and dissolved Dado’s court, freeing Sana and her husband.
After 15 years, the Sangin Valley was finally at peace.

Life Under Taliban Rule

Women in the valley judged the Taliban based on what came before, viewing them as “softer” and respectful.
Shakira experienced newfound serenity, leading to her betrothal to a distant relative.
She worried about the Taliban's conscription campaign, which targeted impoverished young men.
In 2000, Mullah Omar banned opium cultivation during a drought, causing the valley’s economy to collapse and driving Shakira’s husband to Pakistan.
The Taliban’s injustice was clear.
The attack on America which stirred hope of deliverance, was announced on the radio.

The Return of Amir Dado and American Occupation

In 2003, Shakira was awakened by American soldiers and Afghans, including Amir Dado, who had become the chief of intelligence after befriending American Special Forces.
Life regressed to civil war conditions with Dado back in charge.
Dado’s fighters committed atrocities including killing people and stringing their bodies up from a tree.
The Americans resuscitated the Ninety-third Division, which plundered travelers and collected bounties for captured Taliban.
The Ninety-third Division began accusing and branding innocent people as the Taliban.
The U.S. Special Forces suspected Dado of staging an attack that resulted in American combat fatalities in Helmand to maintain reliance on him.
Despite this, Dado's relationship with U.S. Special Forces continued, as they deemed him too valuable; patrolling together and searching Shakira's village for suspected terrorists.
The U.N. agitated for Dado’s removal, but the U.S. blocked the effort.
Helmandis were taken away on flimsy pretexts and some even died in U.S. custody due to mistreatment.
The U.S. continued to support the Ninety-third Division, violating the Leahy Law.
In 2004, the U.N. launched a program to disarm pro-government militias, but the Ninety-third Division rebranded to remain armed.
Messaging by the U.S.-led coalition portrayed the growing rebellion as extremists battling freedom, but nato documents conceded that the Ishaqzais had “no good reason” to trust the coalition forces.
Elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village in Pan Killay.
In 2005, Shakira, pregnant with her third child, lost the sense of promise she’d once felt from the Americans and her husband was unemployed, recently becoming addicted to opium use. Her marriage soured. An air of mistrust settled onto the house which was matching the village's grim mood.

Escalation of Violence

In 2006, the U.K. joined forces to quell rebellion and “hell began.”
Taliban attacked patrols; coalition responded and earth shuddered.
During one battle, an air strike killed Abdul Salam, Shakira's husband's uncle, along with his cousin and nephews.
Shakira was now 27; and she slept fitfully, as if at any moment she’d need to run for cover.
One night, Shakira and her mother noticed the coalition military vehicles passing by, they roused the family. She and her mother in law then doused a tire and the engine of the foreigner's vehicle with diesel fuel.
From the house, they watched the sky turn ashen from the blaze, after striking a match and dropping it onto the tire.
The women of Pan Killay came to congratulate Shakira; she was, as one woman put it, “a hero.”

The Mounting Civilian Death Toll

In 2008, the U.S. Marines deployed to Sangin, reinforcing American Special Forces and U.K. soldiers.
Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths.
There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin along with entire branches of Shakira’s family tree who turned up dead.
In all, she lost sixteen family members.
On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.
By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge.
Some British officers on the ground grew concerned that the U.S. was killing too many civilians, and unsuccessfully lobbied to have American Special Forces removed from the area.
To them, the occupiers were simply “Americans.” Pazaro, the woman from a nearby village, recalled, “There were two types of people—one with black faces and one with pink faces. When we see them, we get terrified.”
The coalition portrayed locals as hungering for liberation from the Taliban.
The foreigners’ efforts to embed among the population could be crude.
With the hearts-and-minds approach floundering, some nato officials tried to persuade Taliban commanders to flip.

The Aftermath and Desolation

The Marines finally quit Sangin in 2014; the Afghan Army held its ground for three years, until the Taliban had brought most of the valley under its control.
The U.S. airlifted Afghan Army troops out and razed many government compounds—leaving, as a nato statement described approvingly, only “rubble and dirt.”
Still, a sense of optimism took hold in Pan Killay.
But in 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time.
After the bombing, Mohammad’s brother travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.
On the strength of a seemingly endless supply of recruits, the Taliban had no difficulty outlasting the coalition.
The Taliban call their domain the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and claim that, once the foreigners are gone, they will preside over an era of tranquil stability.

A Post-American Afghanistan

The author traveled through Helmand Province to see what a post-American Afghanistan might look like.
The most striking difference between Taliban country and the world we’d left behind was the dearth of gunmen.
The checkpoints are in our hearts.” If people feared their new rulers, they also fraternized with them.
The country opened up as we jounced along a dirt road in rural Sangin.
We approached Gereshk, then under government authority. Because the town was the most lucrative toll-collection point in the region, it was said that whoever held it controlled all of Helmand. Gereshk had fallen.
I asked them about their plans for when the war was over.
It was clear that the Taliban are divided about what happens next.
During my visit, dozens of members from different parts of Afghanistan offered strikingly contrasting visions for their Emirate.
On the most sensitive question in village life—women’s rights—men like him have not budged.
Travelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state.
Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban rule— including the women I interviewed.

The Grim Calculus of Survival

The implicit trade-off: Obey us, and we will not kill you.
The next morning, villagers descended on the outpost, scavenging for something to sell.
The gunship fired, and villagers began falling right and left.
As we spoke, Afghan Army helicopters were firing upon the crowded central market in Gereshk, killing scores of civilians.
Unlike the Amir Dado generation of strongmen, who were provincial and illiterate, Sadat obtained a master’s degree in strategic management and leadership from a school in the U.K. and studied at the nato Military Academy, in Munich.
The Blackhawks under his command were committing massacres almost daily.
“Helmand is beautiful—if it’s peaceful, tourism can come,” he said.
The choppers killed him and Wali’s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma.

The Unsettled Divides

In 2006, the Taliban killed thirty-two friends and relatives of Amir Dado, including his son.
What’s clear is that the U.S. did not attempt to settle such divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other.
It is the hopeful Afghanistan that’s now under threat, after Taliban fighters marched into Kabul in mid-August—just as Hamdullah predicted.
Until recently, the Kabul that Sadat fled often felt like a different country, even a different century, from Sangin.
The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness.
In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision.
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 gun—and 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.
Just as Islam offers fairer templates for marriage, divorce, and inheritance than many tribal and village norms, these women hope to marshal their faith—the shared language across their country’s many divides—to carve out greater freedoms.
Though Shakira hardly talks about it, she harbors such dreams herself.
Even as Shakira contemplates moving Pan Killay forward, she is determined to remember its past.
Otherwise, what was it all for?”