Consider This from NPR - In A New Afghanistan, Some Women Fear For Their Rights — But Others Are Hopeful

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

This week, women protested in Kabul after the Taliban announced an all-male interim government. One woman who helped organized the protests told NPR "the world should feel" what Afghan women are facing. That woman — and another who was desperately trying to leave the country — spoke to Rachel Martin on Morning Edition. More from their interviews here. While some women fear the rights they've gained in the last 20 years will disappear, other women — particularly in rural areas — are hopeful for a future with less violence and military conflict. Anand Gopal wrote about them for The New Yorker in a piece called "The Other Afghan Women." He spoke to Mary Louise Kelly. Special thanks to NPR's Michele Keleman for production help on this episode. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Ten million dollars. That's how much the U.S. is offering for information that leads to the arrest of Shirajadeen Haqqani, a man on the FBI's most wanted list. His father founded the Haqqani Network a man on the FBI's most wanted list. His father founded the Haqqani Network, which the FBI considers a terrorist group. Thing is, he's not hard to find.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have announced an interim government three weeks after they took control of most of the country. Shirajuddin Haqqani is a member of the new Taliban government in Afghanistan. Shirajuddin Haqqani has been named as the acting interior minister. He is wanted by the FBI. The rest of the Taliban's cabinet includes plenty of notorious Taliban leaders and their allies. What it does not include, a woman. There were protests in Kabul this week captured by NBC News, a reaction to the new interim government and its perceived support from Pakistan.

One of the protest organizers was a 25-year-old woman named Sabira. NPR reached her this week in Kabul. There are a group of women's affairs. The new one does not. Sabira said some women who've been protesting and some of her friends were beaten and shot at by the Taliban. And her mother begged her not to protest again. Sabira understands. Her mother is worried about her safety.

But she says she's worried about something bigger. We have to raise our voice to help my countrymen. To raise the voice of Afghan women especially. To the world, that the world should feel in what kind of situation we are. Consider this. Women in Afghanistan grew up in a country where they could go to school, play sports, get a job. But also a country ravaged by war and violence. And now those women are wondering just how different the new Afghanistan will be.

From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Thursday, September 9th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Photos that emerged from Afghanistan this week show a university classroom with male and female students separated by a curtain drawn

through the middle of the room. It's one of the many practices outlined in a new proposal approved by the Taliban government. Women should also use separate entrances, it says. In classes with more than 15 male students, they should be taught in a separate room altogether. Like, I was a girl which was not wearing burqa. I had my freedom, actually. But right now, I don't have any. That's a woman NPR reached this week in the Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

We're not using her name. She's been trying to get out of the country. She's worried the Taliban will strip women of so many freedoms that they've gained over the last 20 years. Already in recent weeks, the Taliban have said they will ban women from playing sports where their bodies might be seen. And a Taliban spokesperson urged women to stay in their homes because some militants have not yet been trained not to hurt them. How I will live in here, like all the time in a room, in my home, in my nowhere else. Like I will have no exact future in here. That's worrying me a lot.

The new Taliban government announced this week is an interim caretaker government, there to set up shop until a more permanent government can be formed. Despite professing that a new government would be inclusive, the announced list of names consists exclusively of individuals who are members of the Taliban or their close associates and no women. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signaled this week that would have to change before the Taliban gets the legitimacy it wants.

We understand the Taliban has presented this as a caretaker cabinet. We will judge it and them by its actions. A more permanent Taliban government, he said, must allow free travel, humanitarian access, and respect the rights of women and other minorities. The Taliban seek international legitimacy and support. Any legitimacy, any support will have to be earned. We've heard from some Afghan women about their hopes for that government, that it will recognize and protect their rights. But for many other women in Afghanistan, particularly those in rural areas, their hopes are different. Anand Gopal wrote about them for The New Yorker after spending the summer traveling through one of the country's most remote regions, speaking to women in tiny villages.

He spoke about what he learned with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly. Start by painting me a picture of where you were reporting from in Afghanistan, where and how these women live. This was in Helmand province, which is in southern Afghanistan. It is really the epicenter of the war in the last two decades. It's an extremely underdeveloped area. Despite the billions of dollars that the U.S. has spent, if you visit Helmand, you'll hardly see any paved roads, electricity. And so people there, women there, are living mostly in mud-walled villages, not that different than they have been for the previous two decades. Of the many fascinating women who you met, I want to focus us on one, Shakira. Who is she?

So Shakira comes from Northern Helmand Province, and she was born in the late 1970s. And shortly after she was born, Afghanistan plunged into violence, really for the first time. It's when the Soviets invaded the country. And she lived through the Soviet invasion and really horrific occupation in which she saw loved ones being killed by Russian jets, family members disappeared. So she kind of grew up around this violence. And then the anti-Soviet forces, after the Soviets left, turned their guns on each other, and that led to a civil war. So by the time the Taliban came to power in the 90s, they just saw this as, well, at least this is not fighting. But then the whole cycle started again when the U.S. invaded.

So she's now 41 years old, and she's lived her entire life in conflict. She's now 41, and she has eight kids. And the way that you trace her view of what these last two decades have looked like, what they have meant, when she first heard American soldiers were coming to overthrow the Taliban, that her heart filled with hope. She thought these were the good guys. These guys might help her life, her family's life improve. Absolutely. I mean, the way she put it to me is these are the soldiers in the richest country on earth coming here. And this is at a time when there was a pretty devastating drought in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban were running a very vicious conscription campaign, taking young men off to fight on the front lines.

And so there was very little support for the Taliban, and there was a lot of hope that the U.S. would turn things around. And what happened? Well, the U.S. came and they brought in these warlords or strongmen who had previously terrorized the community. These are people who had initially fought against the Soviets, but really were mostly fighting against each other for opium profits or for smuggling and other such things. And so these warlords started to prey on the local population again. And so really in the years between 2001 and 2004 or so, it felt in Shakira's community, it felt like she was living through a civil war again. But it was a one-sided civil war where the fighting was only done by the government forces, and the victims were all local villagers that she knew. Yeah. I mean, it's remarkable, really, how quickly her view turned. You're

right that by 2005, and I so felt for her in this moment, she's dealing with all these kids. Her husband does not much help. He's smoking opium and sleeping too much. And by then, she's lost faith in the Americans. She sees a Taliban convoy and thinks, huh, maybe things might be different. Yeah, it's a really tragic moment. And it's a choice that a lot of Afghans were making at that point in her community, which is these are the people that we previously saw as our tormentors, but maybe they're actually a little bit better than the current tormentors. You chronicled the list of Shakira's family members who've died in these 20 years since the U.S. invaded, and some

by coalition forces, U.S. forces, some shot by Afghan security forces, and one at least died in a drone strike. But it is, it's such a long list, entire branches of her family tree just vanishing. How did she talk about that, about the impact of that? You know, this kind of violence was so baked into people's lives that in the beginning, when I was interviewing her and other women, they didn't really center their interviews around these stories. They would mention in passing, oh yeah, that was my cousin so-and-so who got killed by a drone, or my cousin so-and-so who hit a roadside bomb. For me as an outsider, though, it was

shocking. And I've been covering Afghanistan for a long time. And even for me, the level of suffering and death I hadn't expected to see. And so I realized I should start getting lists and finding out in each family how many people have died. So in Shakira's case, she said she's lost 16 members of her family in the last 20 years. 16. And you cross-checked with other families. What did you find? So I went house to house. I did basically like a random sample survey in her village and then checked with other villages. And I found that on average, families lost between 10 to 12 members of their family in the last two decades. Bring us up to this summer. When you were there talking to her, what was the situation? What was her view as the U.S. had announced, we're out, we're winding down this war, we're done?

She looked at this purely as, is this going to help me and my children survive or not? And so she was saying, thank God the U.S. is leaving. Maybe this is our chance for peace. And so when I traveled through Helmand Province this summer, I met many people who, on the one hand, they were afraid that maybe there would be a new civil war. But on the other hand, they were hopeful that, okay, if one side takes over, that's better than two sides fighting.

And where is Shakira now? How's she doing? So Shakira is living in a, I guess, a makeshift displaced persons area that used to be decades ago, a thriving market, but has basically been bombed out. And so she's living in a storefront that's, and she's put like curtains in front of the storefront for privacy. And her family of eight children and her and her husband live in this, probably a room the size of ordinary American living room. I can't imagine. Her youngest is what, two?

Two years old, yes. And her house, part of the reason she can't go back is that right before U.S. forces left, they dynamited part of it? That's right. There was a Taliban fighter that was near her house, so the U.S. forces went and dynamited the house as part of the fight against the Taliban fighter. And she's hoping she can go back, live in the intact part,

and then rebuild the rest at the end of your piece you give shakira the last words and after all of this as she's speaking living in this one room market storefront she is hopeful why i think because at this point she has no choice but to be hopeful you know after living through what she's lived through the possibility that there'll be no more living through what she's lived through, the possibility that there'll be no more fighting is what she's been waiting for her whole life. And, you know, the last things, where the piece closes with one of the things she told me,

which is that I have to believe this, you know, otherwise, what was all this for? Anand Gopal. His recent piece for The New Yorker is called The Other Afghan Women. The two young Afghan women you heard earlier spoke to Rachel Martin. That was on a longer segment on NPR's Morning Edition. You can get more from that at the link in our episode notes.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish. Support for NPR and the following Audie Cornish.