In 2020, the US government announced that it would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and was in talks with the Taliban. The educated urban upper and middle class women in Kabul and other cities were concerned, if not appalled. They saw in the deals that American diplomats wanted to make with the Taliban – to the exclusion of the Afghan government and the Afghans themselves – the legitimacy of an organization that had already shown in the 1980s that it trampled on women’s rights. There was great fear that the Taliban might regain power.
But the will to oppose the resistance was just as great. “We are no longer the women we used to be” was a phrase that came up in almost every conversation. Politicians, journalists, artists, yoga teachers, business women said it. “Today we know our rights and we will not let them be taken from us,” it said. “The Taliban will not force us back into the burqa.”
The Kabul journalist and activist Farahnaz Forotan launched a video campaign that year, funded by the United Nations and US foundations, which she called “my red line”. She interviewed women – and later also men – in cities and in the provinces to ask them where their “red line” was. What would they not take if another age of oppression should dawn. Most respondents said: education, work, freedom, economic and political participation. The women in the countryside declared: no new violence. No surrender of the sons. Not hungry. No discrimination against their daughters.
In January 2022, the leaders of those who were seen in the West as a new generation of self-determined women are largely no longer in Afghanistan. They were evacuated. Those who were fit enough to provide evidence that the occupation period in Afghanistan was also in the best interests of women had visas or dual citizenship. Or at least you were well connected.
Long time in the USA
Forotan now lives in the United States. She is one of those whose names have been mentioned over and over again when the Western media looked for heroines to show that thanks to Western aid, military and financial, the previously oppressed Afghan woman was now “empowered” – with power and strength fitted. Also the feminist politicians Shukria Barakzai and Fausia Kufi, the journalists of Tolo News, the activists of the many women’s organizations, some of which were just small organizations – many of them are in London, New York, Tirana, Doha or Berlin. Their stories were the stuff from which the liberation myths were woven before the Taliban. Now they continue to be quoted and portrayed when it comes to hearing the female voice of battered, betrayed Afghanistan, even if it’s only from the off.
Saved, perhaps indeed from death or disappearance in prisons, are all those who were visible to the West.
Left behind are the millions who were denied this visibility – the not-so-urban, not-so-affluent, not-so-educated women. Her life may not be in jeopardy, but her future is certainly in danger. First they were deprived of their security and hopes, their dreams and freedoms, then they fell into the abyss of financial hardship because they are no longer allowed to work and the country of the Taliban is now broke, hungry, cold and gray without Western support. They are those who did not work for any charity, foreign military, foreign newspaper, who were not sponsored by any foundation and therefore are not and never will be on any evacuation list.
All they can do is cooperate, hide, remain silent, or fulfill oaths of defence, which the evacuees have broken. That is why – also because they hope that their resistance will bring them enough attention to be saved too – hundreds of young women are secretly active as activists. They meet in secret rooms because they are no longer allowed to protest publicly and formulate their goals there. They take photos for social media, the only form of expression left to them. They beg for the support of the West. They ask for the solidarity of “their sisters” in all countries. A miracle that will bring them back to their old lives. But the further the winter and the financial hardship progress, the more existential her wishes become. They have long been far removed from the humanistic catalog of rights that the western gymnastics trainers set up for them. What they want is work, education, bread.
And then there are the others who only appear in the media as anonymous masses who don’t know the word “empowerment”. And who could probably do little with the concept of freedom that the West brought to Afghanistan. It is the women in the countryside who live in mountain valleys that seem like light years away from Kabul. In the past twenty years, during which the “war on terror” was also supposed to be a struggle for liberation for the Afghan people, they only participated marginally.
Perhaps aid organizations brought them food and clothing, warm blankets and building materials. Maybe a school and a clinic would be built, maybe their children would be literate, maybe a few hundred fewer women would die in childbirth. But that hardly changed their poverty and isolation, didn’t protect them from the bombs and drones of the war, from the hunger that came with years of drought. And when they finally fled in desperation to the capital, they continued to live in abject poverty, sending their children out into the streets to beg or pick up rubbish. Nobody went and interviewed her for an article about Afghan power women.
Now that people are not looking for reports of success in Afghanistan, but reports of misery, it is said that these women are selling their organs or one of their children so that the others don’t die of starvation. About how much strength, courage and will to survive it takes to endure such an existence, how much these women fought and are fighting for their right to non-violence, a piece of land, a little participation in village life, a better future for their children, from nobody tells these exemplary acts of courage and self-determination.