The Other Afghan Women

In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women

against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.
By Anand Gopal
September 6, 2021
 More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities. In rural areas, life under
the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan allies became pure hazard; even drinking tea in
a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly
gamble.Photograph by Stephen Dupont / Contact Press Images
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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?”
Cartoon by Brendan Loper
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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.
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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.