Kathy Sheridan: Only ideological blindness could dismiss the past 20 years in Afghanistan as waste

In Kabul in 2004, the scale of the United States’ ambitions for the region was apparent in the massive footprint of its new embassy then under construction.

Yar Mohammad Bahrami, a young university teacher with perfect English was unmoved. “When the Russians came, they built many blocks at their embassy and many families lived there. But look at it now. They are gone and the building is empty. It will be the same with the Americans – and that great building will be for Afghanistan.”

Walking alone in Afghanistan I found the intense stares, hissing and occasional shoves exhausting. As a female NGO worker put it, you could never be unaware of your sex

I was in Afghanistan to cover the presidential election, a first exercise in democracy in 12 years for a country ravaged by two decades of war, an era triggered by the Soviet invasion and 10-year occupation in which they were harried and defeated by the CIA-funded Mujahideen, then a bloody civil war followed by five years of Taliban barbarism.

Driven out in 2001 by US military, the Taliban had nothing but time.

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Terror of the next Taliban spectacular was palpable. Buildings were – still are – protected by steel and 30ft blast walls and nervy, heavily armed security guards.

I tried to ignore a nostalgic edge in Bahrami’s voice. He was too young, too educated surely to hanker after Taliban rule. It was just three years since the public executions, since images of living creature had been forbidden and music was banned; just three years since women were hunted out of work and education could appear only in public spaces with a male chaperon, effectively leaving lone women and their children to starve.

The hypocrisy was infuriating. My translator, a slight, young woman in voluminous robes, was brutally groped in crowds. Walking alone and similarly enveloped I found the intense stares, hissing and occasional shoves exhausting. As a female NGO worker put it, you could never, ever be unaware of your sex.

Even in this bleakest of weeks, only ideological blindness could dismiss the past 20 years as a total waste

A short experiment with life in a burka, invisible and unable to engage with people, ended when the lack of peripheral and downward vision forced the distracted wearer to sidle into a street sewer once too often.

How was this tolerable in the new Afghanistan, I asked Bahrami, the smiling young university teacher. “Only people originally from the city go out without the burka. I live 20-25km out and our women wear it,” he answered cheerfully.

But why? “We want them to wear it. I wouldn’t take my wife out without a burka. They like it, they have grown up with it.” But they can’t see where they’re going . . . “They can see enough. It’s our culture: it requires women to be like this. Also our religion.” If there were house guests the wife could make an appearance only if they were close relatives and she could never be allowed out to work of course. “I am Pashtun, and we are very strict with women.”

In 2004 it was possible for an optimist to see him as an anachronism.

There was a female presidential candidate after all and she was allowed to live. NGOs and dollars were flooding into Afghanistan.

Purpose

They served a purpose. Even in this bleakest of weeks, only ideological blindness could dismiss the past 20 years as a total waste.

Health services for women have grown from none to access within two hours’ distance for nearly nine in 10. Girls’ enrolment in primary and secondary education has grown from less than 10 per cent to nearly 40 per cent. Women have gained 10 years of life expectancy. Mortality during childbirth has fallen by nearly two-thirds. More than a fifth of Afghan civil servants are women with 16 per cent at senior management level. And 27 per cent of MPs are women.

With women's bodies chief among the weaponry, it was always going to be a long and bloody battle

Women also formed about a quarter of the 21-person negotiation team in the intra-Afghan peace talks with the Taliban. Hardly impressive but the Taliban team included no women at all. One of the women, Fawzia Koofi, has survived two attempted assassinations.

A few months ago Koofi’s hopes rested on the constitution and the belief that this time the Taliban in government would have a political and personal investment in the country thriving. They argued with the women in the room the same way as they argued with the men, she said.

And after all Afghanistan is a very different place to the 1990s; it’s not emerging from a bloody civil war, it’s connected now, even the Taliban use Zoom. Afghans in 2021 are attuned to the importance of education and freedom of speech. It’s not nothing as some now claim.

But with women’s bodies chief among the weaponry, it was always going to be a long and bloody battle. In a talks agenda classified into “easier” and “most difficult” issues to discuss, the Taliban placed “cease fire” as most difficult; just below that was women’s rights.

In the end they simply seized the country. Those currently gloating over the defeat of what Yanis Varoufakis calls “liberal-neocon imperialism” and celebrating the collapse of Afghanistan’s internationally recognised government do so in the company of the likes of al-Shabaab who gloried in the hoisting of “the flag of monotheism” in Kabul.

“Hang in there sisters!”, Varoufakis tweeted cheerfully. Right on.

Yar Mohammad Bahrami’s nostalgia for the Taliban was real. “I had no problem with them,” he said back then, it was “other people” who joined in and gave them a bad name. His time has come again. Hang in there sisters.