George W. Bush Institute - We are Afghan women : voices of hope

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Interior design by Jill Putorti

Jacket design by Pete Garceau

Jacket photographs: Front Afghan Institute of Learning

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015033590

ISBN 978-1-5011-2050-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-2052-7 (ebook)

Born in Kabul, 1967

Lives in Ghazni

Born in Ghazni, 1996

Lives in Ghazni

Born in Kabul, 1972

Lives in Washington, D.C.

Born in Jajikan village of Bamiyan province, 1970

Lives in Shash Pul

Born in Bamiyan province, 1978

Lives in Shash Pul

Born in Kabul, 1986

Lives in Washington, D.C.

Born in a central Afghan province, 1944

Lives in Massachusetts and Afghanistan

Born in Kabul, 1988

Lives in New York City

Born in Herat, 1950

Lives in Afghanistan

Born in Chack, Wardack, 1988

Lives in Kabul

Born in the Fariat region, 1972

Lives in Herat

Born in Kandahar, 1989

Lives in Kabul

Born in Kabul, 1961

Lives in Kabul

Born in Dehe Surkhak village of Yakawlang district, 1972

Lives in Shash Pul

Born in Kabul, 1982

Lives in Kabul

Born in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province, 1964

Lives in Herat

Born in Herat, 1989

Lives in Herat

Born in Kabul, 1968

Lives in Kabul

Born in Kabul, 1986

Lives in Kabul

Born in Jordan, 1982

Lives in Washington, D.C.

Born in Bamiyan, 1983

Lives in Kabul

Born in Kabul, 1975

Lives in New York and Kabul

Born in Kabul, 1968

Lives in Kabul

Born in Logar, 1980

Lives in Kabul

Born in Nangarhar, 1988

Lives in Kabul

Born in Herat City, 1982

Lives in Herat City

Born in Kabul, 1990

Lives in Kabul

Born in Parwan province, 1975

Lives in Kabul

Born in Herat, 1984

Lives in Herat

I think Afghan women are capable of a lot and they do a lot, but they still are considered just secondhand humans. The moment you talk to men and you mention womens rights and equality and freedom, the response is What are women? What do they do? Theyre not capable of doing anything. Most of them are not ready to hear that women are human beings.

NASIMA RAHMANI, LAWYER, EDUCATOR, AND ACTIVIST

My dream for the future of women in Afghanistan is to achieve bird-wing. In Afghanistan, men are like birds that fly with one wing. Women need to fly right alongside the men, to be the other wing.

MANIZHA WAFEQ, BUSINESS OWNER

Like most Americans, my own recent history with Afghanistan begins on September 11, 2001. Before then, Afghanistan had received little sustained attention in the West. We knew it primarily as a cold war hotspot, and perhaps some of us as a centuries-old crossing point on the ancient Silk Road linking China, India, and Europe. Growing up in Midland, Texas, when my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Bain, told us to write a country report, I decided that I wanted to pick a nation completely exotic and remote from anything I had ever seen, so I traced my finger halfway around a map of the world and chose Afghanistan. But after I wrote out my report in my best handwriting in a green notebook, I did not expect ever again to encounter this landlocked nation, which had enticed the likes of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, as well as the nineteenth-century British Crown and Russian tsars.

Then, more than four decades later, America and the world awoke to the barbaric Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

As I learned more about what had happened to this nation, what I discovered left me heartbroken. In September 1996, after the Taliban reached the capital of Kabul and captured it in a day, they imposed a form of gender apartheid never before seen in the modern world. A hallmark of the Talibans rule was the brutal repression of women. Women were shut up in their homes. Women were forbidden from attending school, forbidden from working. They were even forbidden from showing their faces in public. Male drivers had their rearview mirrors removed so they would not have to bear the indignity of inadvertently gazing upon a woman.

The Talibans religious police patrolled the streets, beating women who might venture out without a male guardian, or women who were not dressed properly or who dared to laugh out loud. Women were beaten if they wore shoes that made too much noise. They had their fingernails ripped off for the crime of wearing nail polish. Year after year, women and girls were stripped of their identity and dignity, until as one woman who lived through those days explains, I would no longer think of myself as a human.

I was horrified by the extreme cruelty directed at Afghan women and appalled by the conditions in which they lived. By 2001, some 70 percent of Afghan people were malnourished, one in four children would not live past age five, and women often died in childbirth. Old age was forty-five. Children were deeply scarred. A UNICEF report stated that nearly three-quarters of the children living in Kabul had lost a family member during the preceding years of conflict, and half of the children in the city had watched someone being killed by a rocket or artillery attack. Corpses and dismembered body parts lay on the streets.

This devastation was not simply the result of five years of Taliban rule. It arose from a culture of war and fear that stretched back twenty-two years, all the way to the Soviet invasion of the country in late December 1979. That invasion led to the creation of an Afghan insurgency, the mujahideen, which was bent on defeating their Soviet invaders. When the Soviets withdrew their last troops in February 1989, those same mujahideen forces and factions turned on one another, resulting in a violent civil war. All of this occurred before the coming of the Taliban.

The human cost was devastating: at the height of the chaos during the Soviet occupation, more than six million refugees had fled across Afghanistans borders and as many as two million had become displaced persons inside their own nation. It is estimated that in the 1980s, roughly half of the worlds refugees were Afghan. The prolonged war left a staggering number of dead and woundedbest estimates are 1.5 million dead, more than 10 percent of the population at the time, and another four million or more who were disabled, maimed, or injured. Cities, villages, basic infrastructure, such as vital irrigation systems, and farmland and livestock had been destroyed. The nation once renowned for its fruit orchards, for its grapes and pomegranates, was stripped bare. In the frigid winters, people burned whatever they could find to stay warm. Among the survivors of these decades of conflict are millions of children and millions of young adults who have never known peace.