It was at a dinner party in a diplomatic residence in Kabul one summer evening when I began to doubt the sincerity of the international community’s commitment to Afghan women. This was a decade ago, and we sat around an oblong table on a sprawling patio, the air thick with the heady scent of rose bushes. Our host, a senior Western official, brandished a bottle of liqueur crowned with a miniature burka, the full-body covering that many Afghan women wear, and that the Taliban enforce. It even had a tiny mesh peephole.
“What’s underneath is haram,” the diplomat said as he flicked up the sky blue polyester at its bottom hem. “Geddit?” The guests, journalists, and aid workers, erupted into laughter.
I did get it, but I didn’t find it funny. How was conflating the bodies of Afghan women and illegal booze acceptable?
Or maybe that incident wasn’t the source of my disillusion. Perhaps it was when my colleagues pooled enough money for a dowry, a gift for our aging driver, so that he could take a second wife. The Western men in my bureau piled on with gusto. I’d been kept in the dark because the girl he was marrying was exactly that—a girl. She was 14 years old.
At the heart of the U.S.–led war in Afghanistan, which ended over the weekend in total ignominy and failure as the Taliban rapidly swept back to power, was the campaign to improve the lives of Afghan women and girls. So many in the world believed in this mission. How could we not? Change was everywhere; by 2019, there was a larger percentage of women in Afghanistan’s parliament than the U.S. Congress.
But, beneath the surface, there have long been signs of betrayal. There was the time a senior American official described issues of gender as “pet rocks in our rucksack taking us down.” Then there was the method deployed by the CIA of exchanging Viagra pills for intel on Taliban whereabouts, so that, in the words of an Afghan journalist friend, “old men can rape their wives with America’s blessing.” Let’s not forget the polemic two years ago by academic Cheryl Benard, wife of the Afghan-born American Taliban negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, chastising Afghan women for not fighting for their rights, which they are not owed “by someone else’s army or taxpayer dollars.” And when Joe Biden was asked last year by CBS if he bears “some responsibility” should Afghan women lose their rights under a Taliban takeover, the U.S. president responded to the reporter, Margaret Brennan, with “No, I don’t!”
Watching the events unfold in Afghanistan over recent weeks has been nothing short of agonizing. A dual American-British citizen, I am full of shame: My two countries had the largest contingents of troops in the 20-year war. Throughout this time, these nations, along with the international community, built up Afghan women, continually telling them to chase their dreams. Then, in an act of unbelievable cruelty, they abandoned them overnight.
How did we get here?
I first moved to Afghanistan in 2011 as a senior correspondent for Reuters, at the height of the NATO war. President Barack Obama’s surge was in full swing, meaning 140,000 foreign troops were stationed in the country. Afghan security forces were being trained at lightning speed to combat the Taliban. Cash flowed in all directions. NGOs mushroomed. High-rises shot up, steel bursts of optimism punctuating the Kabul skyline.
One of the first times in history, America took an unprecedented interest in women’s rights in a foreign land. Indeed, the United States used them to sell a war. “The terrorists do not believe women should be educated, or should have health care, or should leave their homes,” President George W. Bush said in November 2001, weeks after U.S.-backed forces drove the Taliban from power, starting America’s longest-ever war.
The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even a billion—by its own admission, it does not know—improving the plight of Afghan women since 2002. There were hard-won gains: millions of girls attended school; the country saw women ministers, judges, governors, and police officers.
For those of us reporting the war on the ground, the conflict often became synonymous with women’s rights. If an Afghan woman was the first to achieve something, it was news, and we produced a steady stream of stories for a readership keen to see the fruits of the West’s decades-long engagement there. We breathlessly reported on the Afghan women taking up driving, swimming, skateboarding, graffiti, music, and every other activity under the sun which Afghan women were now able to do—thanks to the intervention of America and its allies. Complementing this reporting were sobering dispatches from the darkness. The country still has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, almost 90% of Afghan women experience abuse in their lifetimes, and while a landmark 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women law was passed, the Afghan government and its justice system largely ignored it.
We operated in a world where womensrights became a singular word, the buzzword to be thrown around, from interviews with U.S. generals to friendly chats with waitresses in Kabul cafes. When an Afghan man interviewed for a job, he was sure to list his knowledge of womensrights among his credentials. When an Afghan woman applied for a visa to study abroad, she emphasized how her womensrights needed to be protected.
By the time I left that posting, two years later, my own disillusionment with womensrights had turned toward something closer to home: the press corps. For all the bluster, the good intentions, the West’s money and resources, in 2013 there wasn’t a single Afghan woman working at any of the English-language, foreign media outlets in Afghanistan, according to my research. The country had thousands of female journalists, but none of them worked for the better-paying, higher-profile foreign media. As a result, Afghan women were often portrayed as either record-breaking heroes or pitiful victims. Not much came in between. Womensrights were used to justify an increasingly colonial invasion of Afghanistan, yet there were no Afghan women relaying their experiences and lives to the world at large. The hypocrisy of this kept me up at night.
It was in this vein that in 2015 I founded Sahar Speaks, a program offering training, mentoring, and publishing opportunities for Afghan female journalists. The majority of our participants were first graders when U.S. troops first appeared on their streets. Now, these journalists were preparing to report on a new Afghanistan, as the NATO-led combat mission had just ended, and the security handover to Afghans was under way. Sahar Speaks was a success: We trained 23 reporters from across the country, from university first years to veteran reporters, on how to work for international media. Everyone soon wanted a piece of them: Our alumnae went on to work for the Kabul bureaux of the BBC and Agence France-Presse, and contributed to German and Norwegian newspapers. They were flown to peace forums in Switzerland and feminist workshops in Nepal. Some of their stories were adapted for the London stage.
I’d like to think we kick-started a tradition of The New York Times having an Afghan woman reporter in its Kabul bureau. Our alumna, Zahra Nader, was their first-ever full-time, succeeded by the indefatigable Fatima Faizi.
I returned to Afghanistan every year, to run my program but also for reporting trips, such as with The Washington Post. I would meet with as many alumnae as possible, passing laughter-drenched afternoons at nearby Qargha Lake, visiting their favorite bookstores, meeting their (often) extensive families, where I was treated to home-cooked meals of ashak, small chive-filled dumplings topped with a fragrant tomato sauce. We became friends; we shared secrets; we danced together.
But with each visit, the number of women in Kabul reduced. Looking at photographs of the graduating classes is a chilling exercise: more than half have fled. The world is now waking up to the horrors facing Afghan women in public life, but so many in the Sahar Speaks cohort could see the writing on the wall long before. Soon I found myself talking to them, not on the flat pillows of their living room floors in Kabul, but in London, in Washington, in Toronto, in Stockholm, in Germany, and in Turkey. If these women, some of the best educated their country has to offer, with access to gratifying jobs and relative freedom over their personal lives, chose to leave at the first opportunity, what did that mean for the rest of Afghan women?
And now, with the Taliban back in power, and with restrictions on women’s lives already being imposed by the insurgents, from shutting university doors to ordering them home from work, I have been desperately trying to get the remaining Sahar Speaks women out of the country. They are in total and utter shock—at the speed of events but mostly at the sense of desertion by America. As the Taliban encroached on the Afghan capital over the weekend, one chopped off her hair, continuing a global tradition of female politicking. “It’s my way to protest Taliban rule,” she told me. By Monday morning, several had spotted armed Talibs roaming their neighborhood streets, making lists of where the female reporters lived. The Taliban has said it will “respect” the rights of women, including access to work, but these words did little to ameliorate the journalists’ sense of pending doom. They holed up in their homes, terrified. They scrambled to burn books, diplomas, ID cards. One messaged to say goodbye; she was deleting the foreign numbers in her phone. Another told me she already missed her camera, now alone at her office desk.
Another simply asked, “But what about my dreams?”
— Inside the Feverish Mind of Postpresidential Donald Trump
— Joe Manchin Ghosts Workers Whose Jobs His Daughter Helped Outsource
— Fauci Tells Anti-Vaxxers to Sit Down and STFU as COVID Cases Surge
— What If Jeff Bezos’s Big Space Adventure Saves Us All?
— Report: Trump Allegedly Implicated in Company Crimes
— Venture Capital’s Most Contentious Breakup Just Added a Messy New Chapter
— The 2022 Candidate Slate: Send In the Clowns!
— Of Course Trump Has Scammed Millions From His Supporters
— From the Archive: The Star-Crossed, Politicized, Complexified Romance of Jeff Bezos
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.