In 2001 when the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 terror attacks, then First Lady Laura Bush said, “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” The U.S. State Department hastily released a report on how the Taliban restricted the rights and freedom of women, as if Afghanistan was unique in that respect.
Now, as Afghanistan topples back to Taliban control, former President George W. Bush says, “I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm.”
But was it ever about the women and girls of Afghanistan?
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 comes up, America does not want to keep fighting the Afghan war. A former U.S. foreign policy advisor bluntly told The New Yorker: “This is tragic, but it’s not our tragedy.” President Joe Biden explained, “There are a thousand places we could go to deal with injustice. The question is, is America’s vital self-interest at stake...?”
Spectacular collapse
When President Biden announced the American pull-out he was asked by an Afghan woman about his message for women in Afghanistan. Biden remembered meeting a group of young women years ago in Afghanistan. One woman told him, “You can’t leave. I want to be a doctor. If you leave I’ll never be a doctor.” Biden said that was why the U.S. had invested so much money and time training the Afghan Security Forces — to safeguard the ambition of young women like her. That was back in July. Within a month that line of defence Biden had talked about collapsed spectacularly. Even the most corrupt regime builds up its army to at least stay in power. But the Afghan army fell apart. One trillion dollars invested in Afghanistan seemed to have gone up in smoke, leaving the gains of 20 years in jeopardy.
But again, was it ever about the women and children of Afghanistan? Or of anywhere else?
Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, infamously told 60 Minutes that despite an estimated half a million children dying because of the Iraq sanctions, “we think the price is worth it”. For the Bush administration, women and children provided a humanitarian fig leaf for the invasion of Afghanistan. The Biden administration promises to “speak out” on issues concerning women and children. But during the Obama years, Vice-President Joe Biden said he was not sending his son to Afghanistan to “risk his life on behalf of [Afghan] women’s rights”. Afghan women were not the reason America went into Afghanistan. And Afghan women are not reason enough for them to stay on.
As a character in Khaled Hosseini’s novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, tells her daughter, “It’s our lot in life, Mariam. Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have.” In that novel, Hosseini talks about “Rocket Flowers” — flowers potted in empty rocket shells.
As outsiders looking at Afghanistan, we want those Rocket Flower stories, like the one about a mother of two from Michigan going to Kabul and opening a beauty school. The novel became a bestseller but many of the women who shared their stories of abuse were threatened by gun-wielding men for “defaming” Afghanistan. Our best intentions do not follow the script we want them to.
The Bengali wife
Sushmita Banerjee understood that only too well. She became a sensation in Kolkata when she, a woman from a middle-class Bengali family, defied her parents to marry an Afghan moneylender in 1988. The story of her tribulations in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and her ultimate daring escape from that country became a Bengali bestseller (The Bengali Wife of a Kabuliwalla) and a forgettable Manisha Koirala film. But when she returned to Kolkata, her husband was cold-shouldered by the city’s Afghan community. They felt his wife had defamed their homeland, calling it a “dungeon of darkness”.
Banerjee again defied all well-wishers and returned to Afghanistan in 2013, to tell the stories of the women there. Her cousin, Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, told me she wanted to show the world that Afghanistan had not changed once you left the limits of Kabul. Now, even Kabul has fallen although Banerjee didn’t live to see it — her bullet-ridden body was found in September 2013, a victim, her in-laws claimed, of the Taliban.
Some hope that Taliban 2.0 will be less overtly brutal than Taliban 1.0, but that is based more on wishful thinking than fact. Stories already abound of women told not to return to their jobs as the Taliban swept into their towns. Marianne O’Grady of CARE International grasped for a silver lining, telling AP , “You can’t uneducate millions of people.” Even if women are back behind walls, she hoped they would be able to educate their families and neighbours.
But it was never about the women of Afghanistan at all.
Sandip Roy, the author of Don’t Let Him Know, likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not .
