Understanding Afghanistan

This fictional account of what it’s like for girls and women is included because I’ve always felt like I learned more from fiction at times. I chalk this up to the immersive experience it grants. Here, in Kabul in 2007, young Rahima and her sisters can’t leave the house and can only occasionally go to school because they are girls. She finds out that a great-aunt used a custom to change her life around a hundred years ago called “bacha posh,” which allows one to live as a boy/man (so, pretty much to be free), and decides to do the same. With her new found freedom she can go to school and be a chaperone for her sisters. The only issue is, girls are supposed to go back to having women’s lifestyles once they mature, but how will Rahima be able to give up her freedom when the time comes?

To say that the timing of this book is impeccable would be an understatement. Good timing or not, though, this account of the war in Afghanistan by an investigative reporter from The Washington Post is scathing. Whitlock draws understandable parallels between the Vietnam war and the one in Afghanistan. Apparently, the U.S.’s efforts were a mess from the start in Afghanistan as well, and it was never set up to be a successful endeavor. The documents that The Washington Post unearthed and share here show all of the inadequacies that got us to where we are now.

This is it. This is the one. Qaderi writes of her extraordinary life where she survived a brutal Russian occupation of Afghanistan, only to have to suffer through the Taliban rule of the early 90s right after. As they took over the country, the Taliban immediately started their campaign of misogyny by closing girls’ schools and forbidding them to read. Engaging in these forbidden things might result in being whipped or worse. To put this more in perspective, if I had been caught writing this newsletter by the Taliban in the 90s (and now?), I would have been gravely punished. Lucky for those around her, Qaderi was a rebel and held private tutoring lessons where she taught boys and girls and even some Taliban members at home and at a mosque. She clearly has Mother Teresa-level forgiveness capabilities, because I could never. In this account, Qaderi also tells of the everyday dangers she faced simply for being a woman, what other women and girls suffered, and how she had to ultimately leave her son behind.