The Daily - The New Afghanistan, Through the Eyes of Three Women

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

This episode contains descriptions of violence.In the two years since the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban has shut women and girls out of public life.Christina Goldbaum, a correspondent in the Kabul bureau for The New York Times, traveled across Afghanistan to talk to women about how they’re managing the changes. What she found was not what she had expected.Guest: Christina Goldbaum, a correspondent in the Times bureau in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.Background reading: The Taliban’s takeover ended decades of war. But their restrictions, and the economic fallout, have thrown many women into a new era of diminished hopes.In an uncommon display of consensus, the U.N. Security Council has called for the Taliban to end their prohibitions on women working and attending school after sixth grade.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. In the two years since the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, what was feared has now come to pass. The Taliban has shut women and girls out of public life. The Taliban has shut women and girls out of public life. My colleague, Christina Goldbaum, traveled across Afghanistan to talk to women about how they're managing these changes. What she found is not what she expected. Today, she brings us the stories of three women. It's Monday, June 5th.

So, Christina, the last time we talked about Afghanistan on the show was last summer. And at the time, the Taliban had banned young women from high school. You went to Afghanistan earlier this year on a reporting trip. Catch us up on what's been going on. Sure. So remember, after the Taliban seized power in August 2021, there were a lot of questions around just how far the Taliban would go in their treatment of women and girls. And in that time, we saw the government begin to roll back some rights. But what we've seen in more recent months is the Taliban administration introducing more and more restrictive policies that in a lot of ways have just erased women and girls from public life. While Afghanistan's Taliban rulers have imposed yet another restriction on women.

Last November, they banned women completely from public places like parks and gyms. The Ministry of Virtue and Vice says the ban is being introduced because people were ignoring gender segregation rules and women were not wearing the hijab. And then in December... Tears in the classroom as female students realize the Taliban are banning them from university.

They expanded their education restrictions and banned women from attending universities. Effectively banning women and girls from middle school through college. And then soon after that, they introduced another ban. We have some big aid groups now stopping operations in Afghanistan. That prevented women from working in international NGOs. Any such group that continues to employ women will lose its license, according to the economic ministry. And then a couple of months later, barred them also from working at all UN agencies in Afghanistan. What we're really seeing now is how the Taliban's treatment of women is setting the country on course for complete isolation on the world stage. These policies have been pretty much

universally condemned, including by other Islamic governments like Saudi Arabia and Iran. And a few months ago, the U.N. also released a report saying that the regime's policies towards women were tantamount to gender apartheid. So this has just been a relentless crackdown, and it's now gotten even worse. Women have lost pretty much every freedom in Afghan society, and everyone can see it. So what did you go there to do? What were you curious about? Yeah, so the latest restrictions really felt like a turning point for women's rights under the Taliban. You know, it often feels nowadays like almost every door has been closed to women in the country. But I knew that in response to these policies, the women whose reactions we tend to hear the most, the ones that are most amplified, tend to be women who are in Kabul, you know, educated English speakers.

But that's really only a small subset of the women who are in the country. So on this trip, I wanted to speak to other women from other parts of the country to get a more nuanced picture. So a few colleagues and I traveled across Afghanistan to speak to women of all walks of life and try to understand how they were experiencing all of the changes over the last several months. So where did your journey start? So where did your journey start? So the first stop in our journey was in Wardak province. It's around 12 o'clock. We've just spent the last hour or so driving through these kind of winding roads in central Afghanistan.

It's a province that's just west of Kabul, and it's a very rural area. Everything around here, the mud brick homes, the earth, are all this kind of ash and gray color. And the village is kind of nestled in the foothills of these mountains and it overlooks this valley. The area we went to is called the Tangi Valley, and it's a pretty conservative place that has had pretty strong ties to this government. The valley actually became known for the pretty large number of U.S. troops that were killed here.

The province is home mostly to Pashtuns, so that's the main ethnic group of the Taliban. And so given how intensely this area had experienced the violence during the war. So we're walking down this very narrow, kind of icy pathway. I wanted to understand what this new era was like for women there. And we're going to the home of a woman. And we're going to go talk to her about how she... So I got into this village. So I got into this village. And I met with a woman named Aisha.

Thank you so much for having us to your home. I really appreciate it. And she lives in this small brick home that's on the foothills of the mountain overlooking the valley. She has this really kind of wrinkled face and is sort of short and kind of shuffles about to get around the house. She told me that she was around 65 or 70 years old. She doesn't know her exact age because they didn't keep any kind of formal records.

And we sat down on this dusty wool carpet on the floor with a few other elders from the village and a couple of her grandchildren who were kind of running in and out of the room. And she started to tell me about her life. And where did she grow up? Where was she born? She said that she grew up in rural Wardak, and she grew up pretty poor. And I asked her if she ever went to school, and she said that she didn't. You know, there wasn't even a girls' primary school where she grew up.

There was a school for boys, but girls weren't allowed to go. where she grew up. There was a school for boys, but girls weren't allowed to go. And then when she was around 16 years old, her father told her that she had to marry a man in, you know, a neighboring village. And shortly after she got married, her first husband died, and then she got remarried to somebody else in the Tangi Valley, and they started a family. And she had three sons and four daughters. They had a small plot of land where they grew beans and wheat, and they never had very much, but they had at least enough to get by.

And then the war started. And she told me about how she remembers American tanks rolling through the village. And at that point, initially, she felt kind of hopeful that maybe the U.S. was there to help improve conditions in this community. And then pretty quickly, she realized that that wouldn't be the case. You know, as the years progressed, there was a lot of homegrown support in this area for the Taliban. And in her village, a lot of young men joined the movement. A lot of families provided support. And that meant that the fighting there became pretty intense. The way that she put it was that, you know, when they would leave the house, death was their companion. It happened that frequently that people were

killed. And it got so bad that at one point they even moved to a different village trying to get away from the fighting. But it wasn't long until the devastation reached her home too. She told me about one night, about a decade ago, when she and her family went to a wedding in a village nearby. And after the celebration, her second oldest son, Shireen, stayed in the house where the wedding took place. He was going to spend the night there with a few people he knew, including some Taliban fighters.

And while we can't know for sure, she insisted to me that her son was not a member of the Taliban. And that night, the house was hit in what she said was an airstrike, and her son was killed. Oh, man. How old was her son? 22 years old. And she said that from that moment forward, she decided that she wasn't going to help or cooperate with either side of this war. She would not help the Taliban. She would not help the Americans. She said that she hated all soldiers. She hated this war. But it just kept taking from her. After she told me that story, she led me just outside the front door of her house.

To explain the second tragedy that happened to her and her family. It was a few years later after her son Shireen was killed. And she was walking back from another wedding with her oldest son, Farouk, and his kids and his wife. And she said at this point she was so used to the war that she used to carry a flashlight and point it at herself so that anyone who was watching would know that she was a woman. She wasn't a combatant. She wasn't a soldier. Wow. And this night, it was late. It was around 9.30. And she heard this gunshot. And then she heard her son let out a sound. And she turned around and she pointed her flashlight

at him. And she saw him kind of stumble a few steps back and fall to the ground. Where was the checkpost? On the top of that hill. Yeah. On the top of that hill? Yeah. She said he had been shot by American-backed Afghan forces. So she ran up to him.

And she still remembers kind of leaning over him. And when he was on the ground there, she grabbed onto his hand. She put his hand on her leg. And taking his hand in her lap and having it there as he died. So after that, she always said, don't walk me on this path. God, so her second son. Yeah. So when she comes out her front door, she sees the tomb of her youngest son. And when she goes out the back door, she sees the tomb of her eldest son.

Oh my God. Oh, what a terrible story. The back door, she sees the tomb of her eldest son. So you can imagine that when the Taliban seized power and took over Kabul, there were celebrations in her village. She remembers crying from happiness that this war was finally over. And she said that now she feels this sense of peace and of security. She can travel and see relatives that she hadn't seen for years. She can leave her house comfortably. And nowadays she was saying that when she goes to the market or when she goes to the river to wash her clothes,

she's not anxious about, am I going to make it home alive? And how now that the war is over, she has this kind of newfound freedom. So normal life has come back, which is a huge relief. But what about all the changes the Taliban's made since they took over? What does she say about that? Well, she did acknowledge that in a lot of ways, her life has gotten more difficult now. With the economic collapse after the Taliban seized power, her family is really only scraping to get by. There isn't much work for her one

surviving son. Sometimes they don't have any food to eat for dinner besides bread and tea. And when I asked her what she thought about the government's restrictions specifically on women, she said that she disagrees with them. She thinks that women should get an education. She thinks that women should get an education. She thinks that even if a woman's main role in Afghanistan is leading her family, that she will do that better if she's educated. And at one point, she kind of pointed to her granddaughter, who was sitting right beside her with her head in her lap. And she said that she's afraid that her granddaughter will grow up,

and just like her, be uneducated, be illiterate. You know, she won't have a brighter future. But for her, after what she experienced over the 20 years of war, the loss that she experienced, the violence that her family experienced, for her, the idea of an education for girls is seen as kind of a luxury. It's something that to her is less important than just staying alive and surviving. So Aisha is basically saying here that she's willing to tolerate these really extreme policies against women and girls if ultimately it means being safe, which is just a really practical human response to the violence of war.

It is. And she even told me that she would be happy dying from hunger that night as long as it meant that the war did not return. be happy dying from hunger that night as long as it meant that the war did not return. You know, those are the standards by which she's judging this government and the policies that it's implementing. But women in another province we went to nearby felt very differently. We'll be right back so christina tell me about the next province you went to what happened there so it's around 10 30 a.m and we're in bamian so a few weeks later, I went to Bamiyan. It's the province just west of Wardak.

And this area is home mostly to Hazaras. It's an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. They're Shia, not Sunni, like the Taliban. And the group has historically faced a lot of persecution in the country. So very different from Aisha and her community in Wardak. Exactly. When the Taliban first came to power in the 90s, a lot of people here were killed at that time.

And then after the Taliban's first government was toppled, Hazaras across Afghanistan benefited a lot from the U.S. intervention. They went to universities, got degrees. It was like a 180. You know, things kind of completely changed. And so when the Taliban seized power again, there was a lot of fear about what this chapter in Afghanistan's history would mean for them. We're here to meet a woman who's continuing to

teach girls who are in high school. So I've got a face mask on. We're trying to go a little bit low profile. And one reason I wanted to go there in particular is because we had been talking to this teacher-turned-activist who was running a secret school for girls in Bamian. A secret school? Yes, an underground school. We're in now this kind of neighborhood that's kind of tucked away into the mountainside.

We're just trying to figure out where exactly it is. And eventually we got to this house that looked like any other. And we walked in. we walked in. And inside it, there were these three rooms that had been transformed into three small classrooms. And we went into one and there were a few dozen girls who were high school age and they were sitting on these rickety wooden benches in a physics class with this whiteboard in front of them. Most of them had winter coats on because it was still pretty cold and the room wasn't heated.

And they were all sitting there with these kind of old torn notebooks and pencils in hand. So this may look like an ordinary classroom, but actually it's a very feisty act of resistance. It is. I mean, this is a hugely risky undertaking that these students and these teachers have at the school. But I was looking at this teacher in the front of the room, and she was as confident as ever. You would think that nothing they were doing was illegal. You would think that nothing they were doing was illegal. And after the class let out, we sat down with her to talk about the school and her students. So tell me about her.

We start with Hamida. How old are you, Hamida? 25. So her name is Hamida. She is 25 years old. She had this dark auburn hair that was falling out from behind her headscarf. And she was explaining to me that she used to teach at a private school in Bamiyan. And she really loved it. But then there was one moment, about six months after the Taliban seized power, when things

suddenly changed for her. She said that there were some local Taliban officials who had asked a handful of women to put out the word that there would be this large gathering, like a workshop, about supporting women and children. And she said it felt like every woman from the city came to this meeting. But when they got there, they started to think that they were actually being duped. There were these posters on the back of the wall that were kind of pro-Taliban, and they thought it looked like local Taliban officials wanted to use the gathering kind of like a photo op,

to take a picture and say, look at all these women who gathered, you know, here to support this new government. So not, in fact, a workshop to help women at all, but just something for their own PR. Exactly. And the minute that Hamida realized that, she became furious. And she went to the back of the room and she ripped down one of those posters.

And then she gave this fiery speech about how she didn't think the Taliban represented them. And she wouldn't be here to stand for this. Wow, it's pretty brave. Yeah, and there was a video of that that kind of made the rounds on social media. I mean, you can just imagine how bold a move that is. This is a government that has arrested and detained protesters and dissidents. It's a huge risk. that has arrested and detained protesters and dissidents. It's a huge risk. And so basically from that point forward,

she felt like she had this target on her back. She said that a few local Talib officials showed up at the school where she was working, and so she had to quit because she was worried about her security there. She pretty much went into hiding. She stopped living in her family's house and started living with a friend. She never really left the house. And she described this moment as being this kind of dark period because it just went against every instinct she had in her body to not be speaking out or doing something and just be staying at home. And so when she started to see what was,

you know, happening with all these restrictions a couple months later, she basically said, enough is enough. She gathered a few other teachers she knew in the fall of last year, and they decided to start this underground school for girls. So how does she go about doing that? Like, what does she do? So one of these teachers offered up her house and said they could use that for the classrooms. And they took some like chairs and benches that the teacher once used at a private school she worked at and brought them into the house. And they pooled money together to buy whiteboards and pens. And then they went for about a week, street to street, door to door in their neighborhood, telling families that they were going to open the school and trying to convince them that they should send their girls.

And what did the family say? I mean, what was the response? I mean, a lot of parents, you know, were understandably afraid. But on the other hand, they were also really eager to have their daughters go back to school because they had been sitting at home pretty isolated and bored and depressed for months. And a lot of them also just really wanted their daughters to retain all the progress they had made in school up until that point.

And the first day, they had about 50 students show up. And then by the end of their first week, that number had shot up to 150 girls who were all there sitting in classes. Wow. Every family contributes whatever they can. The community offers up donations for supplies. And Hamida also said that she and other teachers prepared as best they could to keep this thing

underground. They have students come at slightly different times to kind of stagger their entrance and stagger their exits. Only people in the neighborhood really know about the school, and they'll keep an eye out, too, for anyone who they think is maybe a Taliban intelligence officer. It's really this whole community effort to keep this going and keep girls in the neighborhood going to school. So, is Bamiyan and the secret school an outlier?

Like, is this very unusual for Afghanistan? So, it's really not. There are probably now hundreds of these kind of underground schools for girls all across the country. Hundreds? Wow. And not long ago, you know, we visited a school in Kandahar, right, the southern heartland of the Taliban. And there was an underground school there that worked in pretty similar ways. So really across the country, since high schools have closed, people have accepted that this is the new reality, that they don't feel like there is really any chance that this government under this leadership

will reopen high schools. They found these ways of continuing to get educated and continuing to kind of cultivate these seeds of hope for girls' futures. But Christina, at the end of the day, for these girls, isn't it a dead end? Okay, they can go to school in this secret school, but there won't be a college for them to go to, and there won't be a job for them to go to. That's true. And you know, Hamida, these girls,

they all recognize that. But I think also what motivates her is knowing that in order for there to be any hope that women win back their rights in Afghanistan, first, they need to be educated. You know, Hamida and these girls want to prepare for whatever comes next because they hope they might be able to use this education and bring the country forward. Right. Right. So, Christina, you went to Wardak, where you met Aisha, who feels freer since the Taliban returned. And then you went to Bamiyan and met Hamida, who feels the opposite. Where did you go next? So one of the most consequential restrictions that the Taliban introduced was the ban on women working for aid groups and the U.N. Because so many people in the country rely on those groups to survive.

And I wanted to understand how that ban was affecting women who relied on aid every day. So it's around 5 p.m. We're on the outskirts of Herat, this big city in northwestern Afghanistan. So we went to Herat, which is a city in the northwest part of the country. It's along the border with Iran. It's known for the kind of poetry and art that comes out of it. But Herat's also surrounded by some of the country's poorest provinces. There's Fara to the south, which is pretty much just desert. There's Gor to the east, which has historically been one of the poorest areas of Afghanistan.

And Bagdis to the north, which has been hit by drought for the last couple of years. And so over the past couple of decades, Herat's become this kind of hub for people who were displaced from their homes and were looking for aid because a lot of the big aid groups have bases in that city. And we're in the settlement that's on just the outskirts of the city where a lot of those families have come in recent years. And we're here to... And we went to one of those camps where there are about 600 families living. And we're here to meet with this woman, Jamila, who's 27. She's a widow, and she's helped organize a lot of the aid that's come in here. And that's where I met this woman named Jamila. And that's where I met this woman named Jamila.

So, Jamila, can you tell me a little bit about yourself? She moved to the camp around five years ago after her husband died. And it was a really rough time because her husband, who was a day laborer, was the breadwinner for her and her children. And she thought, OK, maybe if I move to Herat, one of these camps, that she'd be closer to some of the aid organizations that would be able to help her family. And to an extent, that plan kind of worked. She said that they got food aid from groups like the World Food Program. And over time, she kind of became a fixer of sorts for aid groups working in the camp. We get food once every 7 or 8 months.

We get food once every 9 months. We get food once every 10, 11 months. We get food once every 10, 11 months. the camp. So if they were going to do a food distribution on a particular day, they would call her up and she would get the word out to people that they needed to be at this particular place at this particular time. If other women in the camp needed anything, they would go to her. And then she had the number for people to call to say, hey, we need some more flour, hey, we need some more oil, we need medical help. And ultimately, over the last five years, that aid is what helped her family survive. And for a while, she was even hopeful that if things continued in that way, that she'd be able to send her kids to school.

And she had this kind of hope. But then the Taliban seized power. About a year later, they banned women from working in these aid organizations. And it suddenly became a lot harder for women to access aid. And why was that? So there are two parts to that. For one, even before the Taliban came to power, in many parts of the country, women, especially in rural areas, typically don't interact with men outside their families. And so by banning women

from working for aid groups, it effectively cut women off from being able to directly access aid distribution. And the second thing is that in response to the initial ban, some of the major aid organizations also suspended their operations entirely while they tried to figure out what to do. Okay, so it's not just the Taliban banning women from these aid groups, it's the aid groups themselves. Their response to what the Taliban did that's also making women's lives more difficult. In other words, doubly bad for someone like Jamila. Exactly. Practically, what it's meant for Jamila is that, on the one hand,

you know, some organizations aren't working anymore. So this lifeline she had, people she could call and get help, suddenly they're telling her, you know, sorry, our operations have been suspended. We can't come deliver you a food parcel. And on the other hand, the aid organizations that are still working, many of them are only using men for, say, food distribution. And because Jamila is a widow, she doesn't have a husband she could send in her place.

So what this means pretty much is that she's kind of lost access to the steady stream of food that she once had. stream of food that she once had. So this just sounds like a pretty dire situation for her. How is her family surviving at this point? So, you know, for now, she's surviving on the little money she's making from kind of creating these handicrafts with the wool and harvesting saffron during the saffron season. People in the camp give her what they can to try to help, but it's incredibly difficult. And she really worries now about her children's future because she doesn't have food for them on a day-to-day basis. And then she also knows that she probably won't be able to send them to school because they're going to have to start

earning money as young as they can in order to help the family survive. And she's especially worried that if things continue like this for a long time, she'll have to marry off her very young daughter in a couple of years or promise her for marriage in order to get the dowry money from the groom's family. So selling off her own daughter to buy food. Yeah. I mean, it's a devastating prospect. It's one that a lot of women across Afghanistan now are faced with. cross Afghanistan now are faced with. And, you know, she told me that right now she just feels totally hopeless.

She said when she was younger, she used to have this hope that one day she would live a better life. And now, she told me that she'll take the dream of a better life with her to her grave. You know, that is how she feels about the current situation. Yeah, she is single-mindedly focused on basic survival. focused on basic survival. And what her story does really show is that the world hasn't figured out how to help women in this gender apartheid state. Exactly. I mean, what Jamila is living through now just really epitomizes that dilemma, right? How does the world interact with and respond to the Taliban? And when I asked her about, you know, what she thought of all of this.

She said she felt like women were suffering from both sides of this equation. On the one hand, the Taliban's policies have been so restrictive towards women that they don't have any opportunities to go to school or get jobs and pay for food for their own families. So that's what she would say to the Taliban. What would she say to the NGOs who are saying, we'll just leave? And on the other side of it, she said that if she could talk to the heads of these international organizations, she would say, look at how my family is suffering. And to be fair, these organizations are in a kind of impossible situation. I mean, they're faced with this choice between either delivering life-saving aid

that may not reach women at all if they're only using men to deliver it, or upholding these principles of gender equality that are at the core of a lot of their missions. It's an incredibly tough spot to be in. But in the meantime, as the rest of the world tries to figure out what to do, ordinary Afghans in the country are suffering.

So stepping back here, Christina, you traveled all over Afghanistan, far from Kabul, heard all of these perspectives from women in different places in the country. all of these perspectives from women in different places in the country. Fundamentally, what did you take away from your trip and from all those conversations? So I knew going into this that it had become pretty clear that the Taliban government under this leadership with its current Amir is determined to roll back the clock on women's rights. You know, his vision for women in the country is much like it was in the 90s. That hasn't changed. Another thing that hasn't changed is that the international community, especially the West, is really struggling to create any kind of coherent policies towards Afghanistan.

But one thing I was surprised by was just how much women had changed in such different parts of the country over the last 20 years. And you can really hear that in the stories of these women. You know, Jamila only has an elementary school education, and yet she was sitting and talking to me so in-depth against the Taliban's recent policies. Hamida is from Bamiyan, a place that has a terrifying, devastating history with the Taliban. And yet she is defying the Taliban's edicts day in and day out at great risk to herself. And Aisha is a grandmother from a Taliban stronghold who never got an education herself. And yet, even though she prefers life under the Taliban,

she is still advocating for her granddaughter to go to high school. I mean, all of that is pretty incredible. And it shows how while it might be easy for this government to enact these restrictive policies, it's going to take a lot longer and be a lot harder for them to weed out these values that have taken root across the country over the last 20 years. And Hamida in particular spoke to me really powerfully about that. But she also offered a kind of warning. She said that right now, women have this window where they can maintain some of the gains they've made in the last 20 years. But she worries about what happens in 5 or 10 or 15 years down the line

if things continue the way that they are now. The way that she put it, it really sounds like the situation is like a race against time. A race against time because right now many women and girls remember what it was like during the generation that women did have freedoms. And that did change things. Exactly. You know, she said if young girls today, unlike their moms and their older sisters, if they don't see girls going to school, if they don't see women with any kind of power in society, then that's it. All of those gains will be lost. Christina, thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. And now, a bipartisan budget agreement. We'll be right back. to pay its bills. Passing this budget agreement was critical. The stakes could not have been higher. In remarks to The Nation from the Oval Office on Friday night, Biden praised the bipartisanship that led to the deal. And it's very good news for the American people. No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed. And a train crash in eastern India on Friday left 275 people dead, marking one of the deadliest crashes in India's history. Officials investigating the crash are focusing on the possibility that a signal failure caused the disaster. The crash has cast a pall over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts to modernize India's infrastructure, which he's made a central theme in his campaign for a third term. Today's episode was produced by Aastha Chaturvedi and Claire Tanisketter, with help from Eric Krupke and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Anita Batajo,

contains original music by Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Susan Lee, Yakub Akbari, Safi Padshah, Kiana Hayeri, and Fahim Abed. Ovid. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.