The Afghanistan Story

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the trouble with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”  —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story”

“There is no story that is not true.”  —Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

 

Here in the United States, there is a single story told about Afghanistan. That story is this: Afghanistan is a country with a history of nonstop chaos characterized by ceaseless factional, intertribal warfare and wars for domination by successive foreign powers—punctuated by periods of soul-curdling terror wrought by groups of Islamic extremists. Afghan society, we hear, is comprised of violent, tyrannical husbands and universally oppressed and terrorized abused and submissive women. We receive frequent reports that Afghanistan is a place where girls have been refused education and forced into marriages with much older men at very young ages. 

 

I have learned while facilitating writing groups for Afghan girls and women at universities in the Middle East and South Asia, as well as within Afghanistan itself, that all of these generalizations hold truth. But I have also learned that there are coexisting, competing truths, exceptions to the generalizations, and great nuances to the Afghan story. There are important, little-heard stories about Afghan history, the composition of Afghan society, the role of women in Afghanistan, and the relationships between Afghan men and women which wrinkle and challenge the commonplace, simple story we hear of Afghanistan.

 

The seventeen-to-twenty-six-year-old young Afghan women I have come to know grew up in shattering times of great uncertainty and violence, and their mothers did as well. The mothers’ and daughters’ stories, however, are different. Each cohort was shaped by the geopolitical circumstances and societal gyrations particular to the years in which they grew up. The young women’s mothers were born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s and raised during the Soviet occupation of their country. From the 1950s through most of the 1970s, (contrary to the single story often assumed to be true in the US), the pro-Soviet, pro-communist prime minister Mohammed Daoud Khan sought to modernize the state and introduced some reforms that promoted women’s rights. Women were allowed to attend university and to work outside the home. This period through which the mothers passed as children was also a time of ceaseless strife between Mujahideen rebels (armed by the US, Britain, and China) and the USSR-backed Afghan army. After Russia invaded the country in 1979, Soviet troops came to dominate the urban zones while violent rebellious guerilla groups of Mujahideen held sway in the countryside. Meanwhile, some rural Afghans were beginning to coalesce around al-Qaida, a group devoted to establishing a state governed by a strict version of Islam.  

 

Just as the mothers of the young women in the writing groups were entering adolescence, their country underwent a huge upheaval. In 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, and three years later, the Soviet-backed president was ousted. Ten years of struggle between communist-leaning and Islam-affiliated parties and factions followed the Russian withdrawal; first five years of factional infighting, then five years of Taliban rule. By 1995, this Islamic militia, promising peace and traditional Muslim values, had gained full control. The Taliban required women to be fully veiled and prohibited them from leaving the home alone. Public executions and amputations enforced their strict version of Islamic law. Girls were no longer permitted to go to school or learn to read. Many women, including mothers of the young women I have come to know, were married off at age thirteen or fourteen.  

 

The Taliban was the dominant group in Afghanistan in 1997 when the oldest of my students were born—but various ethnic groups were fighting them to take control of the country, and Bin Laden was training al-Qaida terrorists in training camps tucked in the Afghan mountains. My younger students were born soon after 9/11. They, as well as my older students, spent most of their childhoods (under the care of their often forcibly little-educated, early-married mothers) in a country headed by democracy-aspiring Afghan leaders overseen and aided by US advisors and troops under the American banner of “Operation Enduring Freedom.”  

 

This new generation of Afghan girls grew up in an era of American influence during which women’s education and employment outside the home were again promoted—with greater and lesser success in the urban and rural areas. The young women in my groups embraced and benefited from this zeitgeist in which women’s education was bolstered. But, as had been the case with their mothers who grew up under Soviet occupation, the girls’ childhoods were also marked by widespread violence and tumult as fighting continued between al-Qaida and Taliban forces and the US-backed Afghan government army. Suicide attacks against international troops were ongoing. The lives of Afghan families, far and wide, were disrupted by frequent, random IED explosions and targeted acts of violence (as Western forces and the US-backed Afghan army fought to subdue those opposed to democracy-oriented rule). Life in Afghanistan was dangerous. Anything could happen at any time.  

 

On July 5, 2021, after twenty years of uphill, unending war, the US forces departed Bagram Airfield without telling Afghan officials. On August 15, 2021 the Taliban took control of the country. 

 

In one sense, as this complicated history attests, the single story of Afghanistan as a country of chaos and a country that represses women holds profound truth. On the other hand, it does not.  Yes, both the mothers and the daughters whose lives I have learned of experienced youths rent by tumult and violence. The adolescence and early adulthood of each generation was dictated by repressive Taliban rule, but each also tasted and experienced childhoods during which women’s education and empowerment were promoted to a degree, the first via communist reforms, and the second by Western-oriented ones.

 

Here is another story about Afghan history and Afghan girls that is absolutely true: The day the Taliban seized control of their country, the lives of the young women in my groups were turned upside down. They were devastated. Those attending university at the time of the Taliban takeover did not receive the degrees they had worked hard to earn. The girls still in high school were forced to quit learning and stay home. As a consequence of the Taliban takeover, there is currently an epidemic of girl suicide in the country. Little reported is the fact that the mental health of Afghan boys, too, is under increased threat due to the repression of the women and girls in their lives. On the familial front under the Taliban, some Afghan mothers of girls and young women are forbidding their girls education out of conviction that the Islamic leaders’ rulings are correct, while others forbid it out of quaking fear for their daughters’ lives. At the same time, many of the illiterate or minimally schooled mothers of the young women are passionately determined that their daughters be educated and are trying to facilitate this, even under the Taliban’s noses. As for the young women who I have come to know, they have impressed me no end. Somehow, they have garnered the strength to pursue their studies in the face of and despite extreme duress—either after fleeing to study in challenging university conditions far from their families or within the prisons their homes have become under the Taliban.  

 

The story of Afghanistan, my young women informants have taught me, is yet more complicated even than a battle between communism, democracy, and Islamic forces or a battle over women’s position in society. Stories upon stories, I have learned, compose the story of a country. But just being a woman of a certain generation is not the whole story, either. My young informants have disabused me of the notion that there is one Afghanistan story.   

 

Here is one more story within the innumerable that complicates, broadens, and enriches the single story of Afghanistan. The young Afghans have emphasized to me that their country is not composed of a single group of people with a single heritage. The country has more than fourteen ethnic-linguistic groups, the largest being Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks. The Hazara, an ethnic group of Turkic, Mongolic, and Iranic origins, who make up about 11 percent of the population, have long been marginalized, discriminated against, and persecuted because they embrace Shia Islam, while the majority of Afghans are Sunni. More than half of the Hazara population was massacred by the Emirate of Afghanistan in the late 1800s. For the last century and longer, their rural lands have been confiscated; they have been denied housing in cities and forced into urban ghettos; they have been denied jobs and a means of making a living; they have had their businesses confiscated; and they have been freely and randomly murdered due sheerly to their ethnicity. Subjected to repeated suicide bombings and attacks by other groups throughout the American presence, the Hazara are now specifically targeted by the Taliban, who are largely supported by the Pashtun and others adherents to the Sunni branch of Islam. A large portion of the young women I work with are of Hazara background. The Hazara are remarkable for the adaptation they have made in response to the repression they’ve received. This adaptation defies assumptions commonly made about marginalized people: Despite concerted pressures against it, the Hazaras have come to highly value education as one thing that can never be taken away from them—and, to a greater extent than some other Afghan groups, more commonly promote education of their female offspring. The college students have told me of Hazara fathers who have taken great risks to ensure that their daughters continue their educations despite Taliban edicts.

 

These brief stories of Afghan history and society offer a very partial backdrop and context for the many stories young Afghan women have to offer the world. Their perspectives and words, each unique as well as part and parcel of their country’s story, need to be heard.