The New Afghanistan Through the Eyes of Three Women (2023)

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From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernise. This is "daily".

[theme music]

Two years after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, what was feared has now become a reality. The Taliban shut out women and girls. My colleague Christina Goldbaum has traveled throughout Afghanistan talking to women about how they are coping with these changes. What she found was not what she expected. Today she brings us the stories of three women.

Today is Monday, June 5th.

So, Christina, the last time we talked about Afghanistan on the show was last summer. And, at the time, the Taliban banned young women from high school. You went to Afghanistan earlier this year to report. Let's understand what's going on.

certainly. So keep in mind that after the Taliban take power in August 2021, there are a lot of questions about how far the Taliban will go in their treatment of women and girls. During that time, we saw governments start to take back some of their rights. But what we've seen in recent months is the introduction of increasingly restrictive policies by the Taliban government that in many ways have just erased women and girls from public life.

Last November, they completely banned women from public spaces such as parks and gyms.

Then in December—

[chatter]

— They expanded educational restrictions and barred women from college.

Then, shortly after that, they introduced another ban --

— This prevents women from working in international NGOs —

- Then, a few months later, they were also banned from working in all UN agencies in Afghanistan.

What we're really seeing now is how the Taliban's treatment of women has set the country on a path to total isolation on the world stage. These policies have been condemned almost universally, including by other Islamic governments such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. A few months ago, the United Nations also released a report that said the regime's policies towards women amounted to gender apartheid.

So it was just a relentless crackdown, and now it's getting worse. Women have lost almost all their freedom in Afghan society and everyone can see this. what do you do there What are you curious about?

Yes. So the latest restrictions really feel like a turning point for women's rights under the Taliban. It often feels like almost every door in this country is closed to women these days. But I know that as a response to these policies, the women we hear the responses most often — the most amplified responses — tend to be women in Kabul, well-educated English-speaking people. But that's really only a fraction of the women in the country.

So on this trip, I wanted to talk to other women from other parts of the country to gain a more nuanced understanding. So a couple of my colleagues and I traveled all over Afghanistan, talking to women from all walks of life and trying to understand all the changes they've gone through in the past few months.

So where did your journey begin?

So the first stop of our journey came to Wardak Province.

It's a province west of Kabul, and a very rural area at that.

The place we went was called Tangi Valley. It's a very conservative place with strong ties to this administration.

The province is mostly home to Pashtuns. This is the main ethnic group of the Taliban. So, given how intense the violence the region experienced during the war --

- I want to understand what this new era is like for the women out there.

So I entered this village.

[knocking]

I met a woman named Aisha.

She lived in a small brick house at the foot of the hill overlooking the valley. She has a wrinkled face, is not tall, and walks around the room.

She told me she was about 65 or 70 years old.

She doesn't know her exact age as they keep no official records of any kind. We sat on the dusty wool rug on the floor, along with several other elders from the village and several of her grandchildren, who ran in and out of the room. She started telling me about her life.

She said she grew up poor in rural Wardak.

I asked her if she ever went to school and she said no.

There wasn't even a girls' elementary school where she grew up. There is a boys' school, but girls are not allowed to go.

Then, when she was around 16, her father told her that she had to marry a man from a neighboring village. Shortly after her marriage, her first husband died. She then remarried to someone else in Tangi Valley and they started a family. She has three sons and four daughters. They have a small piece of land where they grow beans and wheat. There were never too many of them, but they at least had enough to live on.

Then the war started.

She told me how she remembered American tanks running through the village. At that time, initially, she kind of hoped that America might be there to help improve conditions in this community. Then, pretty quickly, she realized that wasn't the case.

As the years went by, the Taliban had a lot of indigenous support in the region. In her village, many young people have joined the movement. Many families offered support. That means the fighting there gets pretty intense.

Her version was that when they left the house, death was their companion. People are often killed. It got so bad that at one point, they even moved to another village to try and escape the fighting. But it didn't take long for the disaster to reach her home as well.

She told me about a night about ten years ago when she and her family went to a wedding in a nearby village. After the festivities, her second son Shirin stayed in the house where the wedding took place. He planned to spend the night there with a few people he knew, including some Taliban fighters. Although we cannot be sure, she insisted to me that her son was not a member of the Taliban.

That night, the house was hit in what she said was an air strike and her son was killed.

God. How old is her son?

22 years old.

From that moment on, she said, she decided not to help or work with either side of this war. She will not help the Taliban. She will not help Americans. She said she hated all soldiers. She hated the war. But it just keeps taking away from her.

After she told me that story, she took me outside the front door of her house—

- Explain the second tragedy that happened to her and her family. That was years later, after her son Shireen was killed.

She attended another wedding with her oldest son Farouk and his children and his wife. At this point, she said, she was so used to the war that she would often hold a flashlight and point it at herself so anyone who was looking would know she was a woman. She is not a fighter. She is not a soldier.

Wow.

And this night, it was already very late. It was about 9:30 when she heard the gunshot. Then she heard her son make a sound. She turned and shone the flashlight on him. She saw him stagger a few steps back and fell to the ground.

She said he was shot by U.S.-backed Afghan forces. So she ran to him.

And she still remembers leaning a little on him—

- put his hand on her leg, where he left it when he died.

Goodness, her second son.

Yes.

So you can imagine the celebrations in her village when the Taliban seized power and took over Kabul.

She remembers crying with joy that the war was finally over. Now, she says, she feels this sense of peace and security. She can travel and see relatives she hasn't seen in years. She can comfortably leave home.

Now she says that when she goes to the market or goes to the river to do her laundry, she doesn't worry if I will come home alive. How does she have this newfound freedom now that the war is over.

So normal life is back, which is a huge relief. But what about all the changes the Taliban have made since taking over? What does she say about it?

Well, she does admit that, in many ways, her life is more difficult now.

With the economy collapsing after the Taliban took power, her family was really just scraping by. Her one surviving son didn't have much work to do. Sometimes they had nothing to eat for their supper but bread and tea. When I asked her what she thought of the government's specific restrictions on women, she said she disagreed with them.

She believed that women should be educated. She argues that even though a woman's main role in Afghanistan is to lead a family, she would do better if she had been educated. At one point she pointed to her granddaughter, who was sitting beside her with her head on her lap. She also said that she was afraid that her granddaughter would grow up to be like her, uneducated and illiterate. She will not have a brighter future.

But for her, after 20 years of war — the loss she’s experienced, the violence her family has endured — the idea of ​​educating girls is seen as a luxury for her. To her, it's more important than just being alive and surviving.

So Ayesha is basically saying here that her willingness to tolerate these extreme policies against women and girls if it ultimately means safety is just a very real human response to the violence of war.

This is.

She even told me that she would gladly starve to death that night, as long as it meant the war wouldn't return.

These are the standards by which she judges this administration and the policies it is implementing. But we went to women in another nearby province and it felt very different.

We'll be right back.

So, Christina, tell me about the next province you go to. What happened there?

So a few weeks later I went to Bamiyan. It is located in the province west of Wardak, an area mainly home to the Hazaras. It is a minority in Afghanistan. They are Shia, not Sunni like the Taliban. The group has historically faced much persecution in the country.

Very different from Ayesha and her community in Wardak.

Exactly.

Then, after the first Taliban government was overthrown, Hazaras across Afghanistan benefited greatly from U.S. intervention. They went to college and got their degrees. It's like a 180 degree turn. Things have completely changed. So when the Taliban came back to power, there was great concern about what this chapter of Afghan history meant for them.

One reason I particularly wanted to be there was because we'd been talking to this teacher-turned-activist who runs a secret girls' school in Bamiyan.

Secret school?

Yes. An underground school.

Finally, we came to this house that looked like any other house. We went in.

Inside, these three rooms were transformed into three small classrooms.

We walked into one, and there were dozens of high school-age girls. In physics class, they sat on rickety wooden benches with this whiteboard in front of them. Most of them were wearing winter clothes because it was still cold and the rooms were not heated.

They're all sitting there with these battered notebooks and pencils in their hands.

So this might look like a normal classroom. But in fact, this is a very violent act of resistance.

This is. I mean, it's an incredibly risky job these students and these teachers are doing at this school.

But I'm looking at this teacher at the front of the room, and she's as confident as ever. You'd think nothing they did was illegal.

After class, we sat down with her to talk about the school and her students.

So tell me about her.

So her name is Hamida. She is 25 years old. She has dark auburn hair that falls out from behind a hood.

She explained to me that she used to teach at a private school in Bamiyan, which she really loved.

But at one point, about six months after the Taliban took power, things suddenly changed for her.

She said there were some local Taliban officials who asked several women to send the message that this large gathering was going to be held like a workshop in support of women and children.

She said it seemed like every woman in town came to the meeting.

But when they get there, they start to think they've actually been scammed.

These posters on the wall are kind of pro-Taliban. They thought it seemed like local Taliban officials wanted to use the rally to take pictures and say, look at all these women who have gathered here to support this new government.

Well. So, in fact, this is not a workshop to help women at all, but just for their own PR.

Exactly.

As soon as Hamida realized this, he flew into a rage. She went to the back of the room and tore off one of the posters.

She then dropped a fiery speech about how she believed the Taliban did not represent them. She won't be here to represent that.

Wow. That's brave.

Yes. And one such video has been circulating on social media.

[cheer]

I mean, you can imagine what a bold move that was. This is a government that arrests and detains protesters and dissidents. This is a huge risk.

So basically, from then on, she felt like she was on her back with this goal.

She said some local Taliban officials showed up at the school where she worked. So she had to resign because she feared for her safety there. She almost hid. She stopped living in her family's house and started living with a friend. She never really left the house.

She described this moment as this dark time. Because it goes against all the instincts of her body to not talk or do something and just stay at home.

So when she started looking at what was going on with all these restrictions a few months later, she basically said, enough is enough. Last fall, she gathered several other teachers she knew and they decided to open the underground school for girls.

So how did she do it? what does she do?

So one of the teachers offered her house and said they could use it for the classroom. They took some chairs and benches that the teacher had used at the private school where she worked and moved them into the house. They chipped in to buy a whiteboard and pens.

Then they walked for about a week, street to street, door to door in their neighborhood telling families they were starting school and trying to convince them they should send their daughter there.

What will the family say? I mean, what's the response?

I mean, a lot of parents are scared, and understandably so. But on the other hand, they are also very eager for their daughter to return to school. Because they've been sitting at home for months being very isolated, bored and depressed. A lot of them also really want their daughters to keep all the progress they made in school until then.

They had about 50 students show up the first day.

Then, by the end of the first week, that number had ballooned to 150 girls, all of whom were in classes there.

Wow.

Every family has something to contribute. The community provides material donations. And Hamida said she and the other teachers were as prepared as possible to hide the thing underground. They have students come at slightly different times, staggering their entrances and staggering their exits.

Wow.

Only people who are nearby really know about this school. They also keep an eye out for anyone they think might be a Taliban intelligence officer. It's really a whole community effort to keep this going and keep girls in the neighborhood going to school.

So are Bamiyan and secret schools an anomaly? Is this unusual for Afghanistan?

So it really isn't. Now there are probably hundreds of such underground schools for girls across the country.

hundreds? Wow.

Not long ago, we visited a school in Kandahar, the southern heart of the Taliban. There is an underground school there that operates in a very similar way. So across the country, since high schools closed, people have accepted that this is the new reality, and they feel like this administration under this leadership really has no chance of reopening high schools. They find ways to continue their education and continue to plant these seeds of hope for girls' futures.

But, Christina, isn't this a dead end at the end of these girls' days? Well, they can go to the secret school. But they don't have colleges to go to. They won't have jobs to go to.

This is real. And Hamida, these girls, they all recognize that. But I think what also motivates her is her knowledge that in order for women to have any hope of winning back their rights in Afghanistan, first they need to be educated. Hamida and the girls want to be ready for whatever comes next. Because they hope they can use this education to advance the country.

correct. So, Christina, you go to Wardak, where you meet Aisha, who feels freer since the return of the Taliban. Then you go to Bamiyan and meet Hamida who feels the opposite. where did you go next

Therefore, one of the most important restrictions introduced by the Taliban was the ban on women working for aid organizations and the United Nations. Because so many people in this country depend on these groups for their survival. I want to understand how the ban affects the women who depend on assistance every day.

So we went to Herat, a city in the northwest of the country. It borders Iran. It's known for the kind of poetry and art that comes out of it. But Herat is also surrounded by some of the country's poorest provinces.

As a result, over the past few decades, Hera has become a center for displaced people seeking assistance. Because many large aid organizations have bases in that city.

We went to one of the camps where about 600 families lived.

It was there that I met this lady named Jamila.

She moved to the camp after her husband died about five years ago. It was a really tough time. Because her husband, a casual worker, is the breadwinner for her and the children.

She thought, well, maybe if I move to Herat and go to one of these camps, she will be closer to some aid organizations that can help her family. And, in a way, the plan kind of worked.

She said they received food aid from organizations such as the World Food Programme. Over time, she kind of became a fixture of the aid groups working in the camps.

So if they were going to hand out food on a certain day, they would call her and she would tell people they needed to be at this certain place at this certain time. If the other women in the camp needed anything, they would go to her. Then she had a phone number that people could call and say, hey, we need more flour. Hey, we need more oil. We need medical help. Ultimately, it is this assistance that has helped her family survive over the past five years.

For a while, she even hoped that if things continued like this, she would be able to send her kids to school. She has such hopes.

But then the Taliban seized power. About a year later, they banned women from working in these aid organizations. Suddenly, it's much harder for women to get aid.

why?

So there are two parts to this. For one, even before the Taliban came to power, women in many parts of the country—especially those in rural areas—typically did not interact with men outside the home. So by banning women from working for aid organizations, it effectively cuts off women's direct access to aid allocations.

The second thing is that in response to the initial ban, some major aid organizations have also suspended their operations entirely while they try to figure out what to do.

OK So it's not just the Taliban that ban women from joining these aid groups. It is the aid groups themselves — their response to what the Taliban are doing — that are also making life harder for women. In other words, it's doubly bad for someone like Jamila.

Exactly.

In practice, what this means for Jamila is that, on the one hand, some organizations no longer function. So this lifeline that she had -- people she could call for help -- and suddenly they told her, sorry, our operations are on hold. We can't come and deliver food parcels to you.

On the other hand, there are still functioning aid organizations, many of which use only men for things like food distribution. Since Jamila was a widow, she had no husband to send in her place.

correct.

So it pretty much means she kind of loses access to the constant flow of food she used to have.

So it sounds like a really dire situation for her. How is her family surviving at this point?

So she currently lives on the meager income she earns from making these handicrafts from wool and harvesting saffron during saffron season. People in the camp did everything they could to help her. But it's very difficult.

She is really worried about her child's future now. Because she doesn't have food for them every day, and she also knows that she may not be able to send them to school. Because they will have to start making money as young as possible to help the family survive.

And she is particularly worried that if this continues, in a few years, she will have to marry off her young daughter, or promise her to marry someone, in order to get the dowry money from the man's family.

So he sold his own daughter to buy vegetables.

Yes. I mean, it's a devastating prospect. This is the question many women across Afghanistan now face.

She told me that now she feels completely hopeless. When she was young, she said, she had this hope that one day she would have a better life. Now -

- She told me she would take her dream of a better life with her to her grave. Here's how she sees the current situation.

Yes. She is single-mindedly focused on basic survival. What her story really shows is that the world hasn't figured out how to help women in this state of gender apartheid.

Exactly. I mean, what Jamila is going through right now is the epitome of that predicament. correct? How has the world interacted with and responded to the Taliban? When I asked her what she thought of all this—

— and she said she felt women suffered on both sides of the equation. On the one hand, Taliban policies are so restrictive for women that they don't have any chance to go to school, get a job, or provide for their families.

On the other hand, she said, if she could talk to the heads of these international organizations, she would say, look at how my family is suffering.

To be fair, these organizations are in an impossible situation. I mean, they are faced with a choice: either provide life-saving aid that might not reach women at all if they were only using men, or stick to these gender equality principles that are at the heart of many of their missions. It's a very tough place. But meanwhile, ordinary Afghans in the country are suffering while the rest of the world is trying to figure out what to do.

So back here, Christina, you traveled all over Afghanistan, far away from Kabul, and heard all these perspectives from women in different parts of the country. Basically, what have you learned from traveling and all these conversations?

So I know that under the leadership of the current Emir, it is clear that the Taliban government is determined to roll back women's rights. His vision of women in this country is a lot like the 90s. That hasn't changed.

Another thing that hasn't changed is that the international community, especially the West, is really struggling to develop any kind of coherent policy against Afghanistan. But one of the things that amazes me is how much women in different parts of the country have changed over the past 20 years. You can really hear that in the stories of these women.

Jamila has only a primary education. And yet she sat down with me so deeply against the recent policies of the Taliban. Hamida is from Bamiyan, a place with a horrific and devastating history with the Taliban. Yet she defies the Taliban's edicts day in and day out, at great risk.

Ayesha, a grandmother from a Taliban stronghold, was never educated herself. Yet even though she prefers life under Taliban rule, she still advocates for her granddaughter to attend high school. I mean, all of this is pretty incredible. It shows that while it may be easy for this administration to implement these restrictive policies, it will take longer and be more difficult to undo the values ​​that have taken root in the country over the past 20 years.

Especially Hamida, who spoke to me about this very powerfully. But she also offered a caveat.

Women now have this window where they can maintain some of the gains they've made over the past 20 years, she said. But she worries about what will happen in five, 10 or 15 years if things continue the way they are now. In her words, it really sounds like a race against time.

It is a race against time as many women and girls now remember the times when women of that generation did have freedom. This does change things.

Exactly. She said if young girls today are not like their mums and sisters — if they don't see girls going to school, if they don't see women having any power in society, then it's over. All those gains are lost.

Thank you Christina.

Thanks so much for having me.

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you should know today.

President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act into law on Saturday, ending the threat of economic disaster from a debt default, just two days after the government was running out of cash to pay its bills.

In an address to the nation from the Oval Office on Friday night, Biden praised the bipartisanship that led to the deal.

A train accident in eastern India on Friday killed 275 people in one of the deadliest accidents in Indian history. Officials investigating the crash are focusing on the possibility of a signal failure leading to disaster. The accident has cast a pall over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts to modernize India's infrastructure, which he has made a central theme of his campaign for a third term.

Today's show is produced by Asthaa Chaturvedi and Clare Toeniskoetter with help from Eric Krupke and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Anita Badejo and features original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell and Dianne Wong, and was designed by Chris Wood.

Our theme music was composed by Wonderly's Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk. Special thanks to Susan Lee, Yakub Akbari, Safi Padshah, Kiana Hayeri, and Fahim Abed.

This is "daily". I'm Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.