The Future of Afghanistan and Women's Rights

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as our coverage of the situation in Afghanistan continues for the rest of this hour. How much displacement is there within the country and at the borders because of the anticipation of what's going to happen to women and girls? Last Friday, the AP reported, "The UN Refugee Agency says nearly 250,000 Afghans have fled their home since the end of May, amid fears the Taliban would reimpose their strict and ruthless interpretation of Islam, all but eliminating women's rights. 80% of those displaced are women and children," said the AP on Friday.

Joining me now to discuss the past, present, and future of women's rights in Afghanistan is Sarah Chayes, former NPR reporter who covered the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. She went on to advise the topmost levels of the US military, serving as Special Adviser to two commanders of the International Forces in Kabul, and then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen. She's the author of, most recently, On Corruption in America And What Is at Stake. Sarah, it's been a long time. Welcome back to WNYC.

Sarah Chayes: Brian, it's a pleasure to be speaking to you except for the context.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. Listeners, I'm wondering if we have any Afghan women or people with ties to Afghan women or girls listening. Can you help us report this story? What are you hearing on the ground, especially when it comes to the women in Afghanistan? Or if you've lived in Afghanistan, what was it like for women before or during, or after the Taliban? Tweet @BrianLehrer or you can give us a call now at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Sarah, I'm sure you're seeing in the global headlines today, that Taliban are saying women's rights will be respected and girls can go to school. Do you believe them?

Sarah Chayes: Well, no. I think our view of all of this as always is a little bit complex. Let me say that prior to working for those generals and the admiral whom you mentioned, I lived in Kandahar. I think it's important to make that distinction. I lived in the Taliban's former capital of Kandahar, and most of my friends and members of my cooperative, both male and female, were villagers. My picture, frankly, of women's rights over the past 20 years has been rather different from a lot of what we're getting on the media, and I'm not trying to denigrate the advances that were made.

What I'd like to ask us to reflect on is whether just as we have an urban and rural divide in this country, whether there might not be a similar urban and rural divide in Afghanistan. Similarly, your colleagues over at On the Media did a terrific multi-part series on evictions. I will never forget-- I can't remember the gentleman who was the pilot, along with Brooke Gladstone, explaining that most media coverage-- [phone rings] Sorry about that. It's been a little bit of a crazy week.

Brian Lehrer: That's okay. I used to have the same ringtone. Go ahead.

Sarah Chayes: Let me just try to get this to turn off.

Brian Lehrer: You're drawing the distinction between what happens in the cities and what happens in more rural areas. We've lost Sarah for the moment as she tries to turn off the ringer on her phone, and I think she disconnected herself. We'll get her back in just a second. Let's take a phone call in the meantime. Wesley [unintelligible 00:04:30] in Ditmas Park. Hi, Wesley. You're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Wesley: Hi. I want to say-- Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got you, Wesley. Go ahead.

Wesley: I totally agree with what the reporter was just saying about the urban and rural divide. I was just a bit lost about how to feel about all of this because on one hand, we're talking about women's rights and things like that. I don't know how many women were killed when we had to call a close air support and [unintelligible 00:05:16] above villages. I'm not buying the headlines-

Brian Lehrer: Unfortunately, you have a terrible connection and now we do have Sarah back. Are you talking about the relative destruction of people's lives imposed by the Taliban as opposed to our bombing of parts of the country?

Wesley: Yes, but then also just, as far as women's rights [inaudible 00:05:47] women's rights in America for women to control their body.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Wesley, I apologize. Please call us again. I know you've been on before, please call us again. We just didn't have a good enough connection to keep going right now. Sarah, we have you back. Do you want to pick up where you left off before or if you were listening to Wesley?

Sarah Chayes: Yes. What I was saying is that as we're talking about evictions, there's a bias to talk about cities where reporters live, San Francisco and Washington DC, and things like that. On that, The Scarlet E, it was made clear that the real places to look are Richmond, Virginia, and Indianapolis, and things like that. I would just say I'm not trying to say that the future of women under the Taliban is going to be great. What I'm saying is that the life of women over the last 20 years, for the great majority of women in Afghanistan was not really what we are hearing.

Every woman in my cooperative had been beaten by her husband. Every single one. My male cooperative members were taking their little girls out of school in 2010. Now I get it, that's Kandahar, but that's what I'm trying to say, is that the picture under the Afghan government that we were supporting was not universally the picture that we're hearing now from a lot of the highly-educated, highly-socially inserted professional women, basically in Kabul, in Mazar-i-Sharif, and in Herat. That's not representative of how most Afghan women have been living for the last 20 years.

That being said, it is no question in my mind that Afghan women are going back to jail. Theoretically, there was a respect for certain opportunities and rights, and that theoretical respect will likely disappear.

I'd like to say a couple of other things. One is that I do not foresee Taliban going house to house and committing femicide, the mass slaughter of females. It's just not in their interests. They're interested in tapping into the international money spigot. They know that if the scenes of panic at Kabul airport humiliated us, fine. That's fine with them, but scenes of women being slung into mass graves would not. It wouldn't serve their interests. That's not to say that there won't be individual assassinations of particularly prominent or high-ranking or emblematic women, but I do not foresee mass casualties among women.

Brian Lehrer: For the past couple of years, the Western media has covered Afghan women as an invaluable part of the nation's rebuilding. How much do you think that was actually the case in terms of women in leadership, politically, women in leadership, in business, et cetera, in the 20 years of American presence, maybe even just in the major cities?

Sarah Chayes: That's the point. I think it's a great way of framing that question. I think that that's a Kabul story, but it's not really what I witnessed. I would say there were teachers, there was medical staff, and that's very problematic, the future of those women. I do think the picture that we're getting is heavily influenced by where most reporters are reporting from or have been reporting from, particularly in the last couple of years.

Brian Lehrer: How does this analysis inform the choices that you think face the Biden Administration now with respect to Afghan women and girls?

Sarah Chayes: Brian, I'm not sure I have the words to make any suggestions to the Biden Administration. After the tone that we had last night, it's one thing to refuse to admit that anything in the way you conducted US policy was wrong, but the tone of contempt for Afghans that came across last night says it all. I'm not sure-

Brian Lehrer: When you say "last night," you mean in the president's speech?

Sarah Chayes: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play one clip, and you tell me if this is what you're referring to in part.

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President Joe Biden: The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. What's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, some time without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that any US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.

Brian Lehrer: Was his characterization of the Afghans unwilling to fight part of what you were just referring to?

Sarah Chayes: It's the tone of voice, Brian. Yes, the words, but the tone of voice, the contempt in his voice. Look at this highly-wanted visa process for those who worked even directly for years with US men and women in uniform. If you look at the fine print of that program, it's no program. The amount of paperwork, the amount of time that applicants are expected to be able to support themselves in a third country that they're supposed to have gotten themselves to, it was a program in name only as we're now seeing.

Who knows who was hanging off of those C-17s? Who knows how long they had worked with us? That was their idea of how to get to a third country, is hang on to the runners of a C-17 cargo plane. I don't hold the Biden Administration responsible for this outcome. I was predicting this kind of outcome by 2010, but I don't hold out hope for much constructive behavior, including toward Afghan women and girls on the part of the Biden Administration.

I think it's important to remember that many of these officials were also part of the Obama Administration. Really, so far as foreign policy is concerned, we're looking at Obama three. These are people who were responsible for eight years of the 20-year story. I'm both disappointed and ashamed.

Brian Lehrer: Barbara in Littleton, Colorado, you're on WNYC with Sarah Chayes. Hi, Barbara.

Barbara: Hi. I just was curious where all the women are because when you see the airport and the people fleeing, it's all men. When you see at the borders all the people cordoned off to go into Pakistan or wherever, it's all men. Where are the women that are supposed to be fleeing?

Sarah Chayes: That's a great question, and I think it points to something that's not really getting much air. The people being dragged out of their houses and shot at night, and it's a couple of dozen every single night in Kandahar anyway, are men. They are young men who either themselves served in the police or in other arms of government, or are the sons of people who served in government. Those are who are being killed, and that's why the men are running.

A friend of mine was in the Aghan government and happened to be in Tajikistan for an official visit, and I'd been worried about his family. Fundamentally, he thinks he's the target. Like me, it's not that he didn't move his family around and is continuing to have friends move them around and things, but he doesn't expect the Taliban to engage in the wholesale slaughter of women.

I think what we're missing at the moment is the toll on men. Again, I'm a woman, I'm not trying to downplay the plight of Afghan women. I just think that we're not quite seeing this clearly enough.

Brian, I'd like to add something else. We keep talking about the Taliban and the Taliban's attitude to women and the Taliban's interpretation of basically extremist Islam. I think what we're missing here is the role of the neighboring country, Pakistan, which has been very, very closely and tightly involved with the Taliban since-- Frankly, we can talk about that, but it was really the Pakistani Military Intelligence Agency that ginned up the Taliban in the first place. Most of the madrasas that trained them and that taught them this, totally distorted brand of Islam, were located in Pakistan.

The other foreign country that had a great deal to do with the Salafist distortion of Islam is Saudi Arabia. These are two countries that we continue to call our allies while we're blaming terrific oppression of women and terrifically misconstrued Islam on this supposedly ragtag band of bushy-bearded Afghans. That's another element of willful blindness that's really troubling me here.

Brian Lehrer: Nomina in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Sarah Chayes. Hi, Nomina.

Nomina: Hi, Brian. Thank you for picking my call. I am so upset because I have a friend whose father was in [unintelligible 00:17:31] that when Robin mentioned that they just take the Quran and put it on their faces, right away she called me, she was crying on the phone. I didn't know when I'm going to call. Oh, I can't breathe. I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: It's okay.

Nomina: What I'm seeing, I'm a parent, I have a child, these people helped the West, more so the United States of America. There are people dying. There are wives, children, especially children. It makes me weep because if I turn my back [unintelligible 00:18:09] my daughter dies, I don't know what I will do. God give us children to have empathy, to be kind. Through the eyes, we see good. Let's not bring religion into it. Let's think about these mothers. Wherever there's war in this world, it's always mothers and children, mothers and children.

This man is dead. This woman is here, she's distressed. She doesn't know where her mother and the rest of her family is. We have to leave religion out of this. We have to feel for other people. When America is killing Black bodies, nobody is talking about their religion, nobody is calling them terrorists, nobody is calling them monster. The leaders are supposed to stop blaming each other. Do not blame Obama, do not blame Biden.

Nobody is blaming Trump. People have to come together. That's why they're leaders, so they can make this work for the good, if not for the men who went and sacrificed their lives for the so-called West and the United States, at least for the wife and the children.

Wherever America goes, America creates chaos. They leave the chaos and then they come and start blaming everybody else, they start blaming the people. That's what they did with Osama Bin Laden. They called him to fight whatever war they want him to fight for them, and then they just left him and they turn against him. America has to stop. America has children. America has families. We have to leave religion out of this and have empathy as parents, as human beings. We're human beings.

That's all I call to say for Robin to sit down. They have to meet in between their hearts and say, "You know what? These are human beings. These are children of God, just like you. What if this happens to their family? What would they do? We have to stop blaming these leaders. We have to stop blaming [unintelligible 00:20:09] Thank you [inaudible 00:20:11] I am just an emotional parent.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much for your call and call us again. Sarah, any reaction to any of that?

Sarah Chayes: She's right. She's right, and yes, Trump too. Of course, Trump too. I just am stunned. That's why I mentioned the tone, President Biden's tone. I want to say something else, Brian, that will be hard for us to take and may take me a minute or two to convey, but why should Americans care? Someone asked me that recently, not that they thought that, but they were saying that most Americans are not as tuned into this as many people in the media and many vets who have been over there and all the civilians who've been over there and, and things like that, people who've been connected personally.

Much of the American population is concerned with COVID, it's concerned with our own political chaos with the economic situation that is hard to fathom. Here's my answer. Afghanistan is a mirror of us, and I think in a way that's what our caller was saying, I didn't quite hear her name, that if we talk about a feckless Afghan government that really spent a lot of time enriching itself, rather than conducting itself in the interest of its own people, and I've got plenty to say about that and not just the government, but its cronies that were reaping a lot of the contracts and a lot of the development contracts and the speaker of parliament who is a multimillionaire because of the fuel and security contracts that he had with the US military in Bagram.

I have to say, we might talk about, "Well, that's a fragile or a failing or a failed government. We've heard a lot about failed states out there in the developing world. I had reason to say, as I was looking at a number of those countries, including Afghanistan, that these governments or states are failing at being states, but the networks that run them are incredibly sophisticated and successful in achieving their own objective, which is personal enrichment.

Let's take a look at us. I'm speaking to you from Washington DC. In the last 20 years, there is another Washington DC, a donut, that has sprung up around the capital city that are these McMansions. It's just obscene, but with the lavish contracts that grew out of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are a lot of people. Let's throw in the banking sector while we're at it. You have a lot of people who are very highly remunerated for supposedly knowing how to run government policy, and their policies, be it the great recession, or be it Iraq, or be it Afghanistan, or be it how we've handled COVID under the Trump administration.

What I'm saying is, don't we look a little bit like a failed state with a network of elites that have been feeding off of this while their own policies have been spectacularly damaging?

Brian Lehrer: Let me play one clip from 2001 and get your reaction to it and then we're out of time because after 9/11 that year, the narrative from the White House went very quickly from "We have to capture Osama bin Laden," to also incorporate, "We have to liberate the women of Afghanistan." Here's 30 seconds of a speech that First Lady Laura Bush gave on November 17th, 2001.

Laura Bush: Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror, not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan, we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us. We will be especially thankful for all the blessings of American life. I hope Americans will join our family in working to ensure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan.

Brian Lehrer: How does that sound to you with 20 years of history besides quaint? The idea that, seems to be implied that Muslim cultures in general, oppress women, not just the Taliban, or at least that's the way it's landed with a backlash.

Sarah Chayes: There's so much in that statement. I don't think it was ever the Taliban's intention to spread their rule around the world. I don't think Osama bin Laden wanted to impose an Islamic Emirate in the United States of America. That was not their objective. That premise is ridiculous. The next premise is that we're going to liberate the women and girls, we want dignity for women and girls. What does that entail? You don't just liberate a bunch of people who have lived under Taliban rule and then 20 years of war prior to that. That's what we've seen, is, "Oh, let's topple the regime and then suddenly liberty will sprout." It's ridiculous.

If that was at all an objective, and it had to be, once you topple a government, you own the result. We learned that in Japan, we learned that in Europe, after World War II, we learned that in Korea. We still have troops in Japan and Korea and in Europe. Suddenly, we have to take the last 5,000 US troops out of Kabul? It's absolutely crucial that they come back in this instant?

If you even compare how much careful focus there was on rebuilding structures of democratic governance in Europe, for example, which was a recently democratic region, we didn't do that in Afghanistan. We never focused on holding or helping the Afghan people hold their own government to account. Instead, what we did was pat their government on the back whenever they shot some Talibs and never called them on their wholesale looting and extortion of the Afghan population.

I was in there. At the end of the decade I worked in Afghanistan I worked for the two commanders of the international troops in Kabul, and then I worked for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I was in on the inter-agency policy process when we decided to explicitly, we were not going to address Afghan corruption, let alone even addressing our own role in enabling, reinforcing, and almost enforcing it.

I just think, again, the level of self-delusion not only, again, about what we were doing in Afghanistan and how our presence was experienced by Afghans, but frankly, the level of self-delusion that we entertained and continue to entertain about who was the America that was doing that? Who are we? What American kind of democracy were we supposedly bringing and actually bringing?

Frankly, as I said, it's a hall of mirrors here. If we don't have the courage to look at our own reflection that is presented to us by the current events in Afghanistan, I predict that you will see scenes like those at the Kabul Airport before too many years have passed here in America.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Sarah Chayes, former NPR reporter who covered the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. She went on to advise the top-most levels of the US military. Her latest book is On Corruption in America And What Is at Stake. Sarah, thank you so much, very brazen.

Sarah Chayes: Thank you, Brian.

 

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