{"id":2333,"date":"2022-09-30T14:51:01","date_gmt":"2022-09-30T14:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2022\/09\/30\/afghanistan-taliban-womens-rights-burqa\/"},"modified":"2024-10-19T20:26:31","modified_gmt":"2024-10-19T20:26:31","slug":"afghanistan-taliban-womens-rights-burqa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2022\/09\/30\/afghanistan-taliban-womens-rights-burqa\/","title":{"rendered":"Hearing stories from behind the burqa"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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In the spring of 2021, when President Biden announced the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, Anand Gopal knew there was an untold story concealed in the flood of media attention that the withdrawal would trigger.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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About a decade earlier, Gopal, a journalist, sociologist and contributing writer to The New Yorker<\/a>, <\/em>was living in Afghanistan when he noticed \u201ctwo realities when it came to women: those who live in areas where there is no fighting, particularly in large cities like Kabul, and those who live in violence-wracked rural areas like Kandahar and Helmand.\u201d During the 20-year U.S. occupation following 9\/11, the media had focused much of its attention on the nation\u2019s women whose lives had been transformed. Freed from the strictures of its patriarchal, theocratic rule, many urban women shed their burqas and ventured back into the bustling streets of Kabul, the capital. They returned to work,<\/strong> and the classroom as students and teachers.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cI knew that the views of women living in Kabul would be well represented in stories about the collapse of the U.S.-backed regime,\u201d Gopal told me. \u201cBut we would not hear from those who\u2019d borne the brunt of the violence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Gopal wanted to hear those stories. It wouldn\u2019t be easy: Most rural women still lived under rigid religious restrictions; they weren\u2019t allowed to be in public without the full covering of the burqa or speak to men outside their family. Yet Gopal had managed to gain access to some for his book, \u201cNo Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes,\u201d<\/a> which was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and the National Book Award. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it \u201cessential reading for anyone concerned about how America got Afghanistan so wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Gopal used that knowledge and started with previous contacts to report \u201cIn The Other Afghan Women,\u201d<\/a><\/strong> a 10,000-word New Yorker narrative published in September 2021. It gives voice to the experience of women, more than 70 percent of whom live in rural areas, who were shoved back under the strictest Islamic norms by the restored Taliban rule. Women are hidden in their homes from puberty until they are grandmothers, concealed from the world at large and, especially, from journalists. Gopal succeeded in gained rare access to that closed society for a story that was named a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.<\/a><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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To do so, he worked his way from the outside-in, first reaching out to male sources \u2014 sons and grandsons \u2014 who connected him with grandmothers who eventually provided introductions to dozens of women in villages across the region.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Anand Gopal<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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His immersion reporting yielded a remarkable protagonist, Shakira, a wife, mother and force of nature in her 40s whose war-blighted life story Gopal employs to tell a compressed yet comprehensive and disturbing history of what the Afghans call \u201cThe American War.\u201d He conveys the horror that war inflicted on rural Afghans through a litany of killings of Shakira\u2019s family members by U.S. forces and U.S.-backed paramilitary units, for which there was no recognition or accountability. The villagers most feared drones which they called buzzbuzzak.  <\/em>A drone took out Shakira\u2019s cousin Muhammad, 15,  while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. \u201cThat sound was everywhere,\u201d Shakira recalled. \u201cWhen we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Gopal has been a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of a National Magazine Award, George Polk Award and multiple Overseas Press Club awards for his reporting on Iraq and Syria. He has a Ph.D. from Columbia University.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Nieman Storyboard interviewed Gopal about how he gained interviews with Afghan women, the intensive reading and research behind his story, the challenges of fact-checking in rural Afghanistan and why he considers his story investigative despite it\u2019s narrative approach. Our email conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and is followed by an annotation of the story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What drew you back to Afghanistan in the summer of 2021?
<\/strong>I had not reported from Afghanistan in many years when, in the spring of that year, President Biden announced the full withdrawal of U.S. troops by September. It was obvious to me that the U.S.-installed Afghan government would not be able to survive very long without Western support, so I expected the country to fall to the Taliban in short order. The prospect of the end of the war provoked conflicted feelings: On the one hand, the U.S. and the Afghan government were the principal sources of violence and insecurity in the country, so the Taliban takeover would bring much-needed peace; on the other, it would also usher in new, terrible restrictions on freedom of expression and women\u2019s rights. From the beginning, the question of women\u2019s rights has been central to the way reporters and government officials have talked about the Afghan war. I was interested in exploring this tragic conflict of rival goods \u2014 peace versus freedom.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What is your writing process?
<\/strong>Normally, I like to have my research completed before I embark on writing. But in this case, because we were hoping to run the piece around the September deadline for troop withdrawal, I had to do reporting, writing and fact-checking all at once. Fortunately, phone receptivity in northern Helmand was still intact, so I was able to conduct follow-up interviews with Shakira and many women and conduct fact-checking interviews \u2014 finding witnesses to incidents that Shakira and others had described \u2014 remotely. I was aided by a research assistant (who prefers not to be named) who visited many of the areas in question to help track down witnesses.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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As for the writing itself, I typically set a target (e.g., 1,000 words a day) and use Pomodoro<\/a> or other timer methods.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Were there writers, stories or books that you drew on for inspiration as you worked on the story?
<\/strong>That spring, I had reread a classic short story by Ursala LeGuin, \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,\u201d<\/a> about a utopia that depends on the torture of a single child to function. This was a parable about the moral doctrine of utilitarianism, and I could not help but think of Afghanistan, where the rights and freedoms enjoyed by some Afghans depended on the continuation of the war, and therefore the continuation of suffering, for other Afghans. It was this short story, ultimately, that inspired me to explore the d\u00e9nouement of our longest war through the lens of impoverished Helmandi women.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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While in Helmand, I happened to be reading \u201cThe Unbearable Lightness of Being\u201d<\/a> by Milan Kundera. His opening riff on Nietzsche\u2019s \u201ceternal recurrence\u201d brought to mind the nature of the war in the Helmandi village: I wondered what the world must have looked like from the perspective of those caught in the throes of a 40-year conflict \u2014 the recurrence of foreign powers (the Soviets, the Americans), holy warriors (the mujahideen, the Taliban), armies (Soviet-trained, American-trained) \u2014 as if, through these perverse reincarnations, time for the villagers was cyclical. I was compelled to take a longitudinal approach, to report out what the war felt like in the hearts and minds of a single village over 40 years and what that might suggest about the clashing concepts of time and \u201cprogress\u201d for village life and the American occupation.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Why did you become a war correspondent?
<\/strong>I witnessed the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers from across the street, and since that time I\u2019ve been keen to better understand our country\u2019s interventions abroad. I have no interest in war qua<\/em> war; I care little for the minutiae of military tactics or materiel, nor am I particularly drawn to the adrenalin of the frontlines. Instead, I am interested in understanding why people believe the things they do, especially when what seems from afar to be a rigid, alien ideology dissolves upon inspection into everyday concerns about safety, friendship, esteem, ambition, pride, loyalty, and love \u2014 to universally human concerns. In one sense, the story of the American war in Afghanistan is about Islamic fundamentalism versus Western liberalism, and in another, equally true sense, it is about vulnerability and revenge. With this in mind I aim, through journalism, to challenge the false narratives of those in power \u2014 not simply as a contrarian exercise but rather in an attempt, however small it may be, to improve our country and imagine a different way of being in the world. In this sense, I view journalism as a practice of citizenship, understood in the republican sense of the word.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Annotation:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red, Gopal\u2019s answers in blue.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\n \nLate one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren\u2019t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate.\u00a0Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, \u201cIf you don\u2019t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.\u201d<\/a>Why did you start with this brief scene, which seems like foreshadowing? <\/span>It is meant to quickly establish one of the key narrative tensions of the piece–the fact of female seclusion–while also gesturing to the sense of danger that pervaded the lives of these women.<\/span><\/span>

\nShakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, <\/a>Ilove this phrase. At what stage of the process \u2014reporting drafting or revision \u2014 did you write it?<\/span>This was from the first draft. Opium is so thoroughly integrated into the northern Helmand economy that sadly his state is not unusual.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar\u2014as old as the war itself\u2014whom Shakira called her \u201cdeputy,\u201d because she helped care for the younger ones. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty.
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\nShakira\u2019s family walked for hours under a blazing sun. She started to feel the rattle of distant thuds, and saw people streaming from riverside villages: men bending low beneath bundles stuffed with all that they could not bear to leave behind, women walking as quickly as their burqas allowed.
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\nThe pounding of artillery filled the air, announcing the start of a Taliban assault on an Afghan Army outpost. Shakira balanced her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her hip as the sky flashed and thundered. By nightfall, they had come upon the valley\u2019s central market. The corrugated-iron storefronts had largely been destroyed during the war. Shakira found a one-room shop with an intact roof, and her family settled in for the night. For the children, she produced a set of cloth dolls\u2014one of a number of distractions that she\u2019d cultivated during the years of fleeing battle. As she held the figures in the light of a match, the earth shook.
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\nAround dawn, Shakira stepped outside, and saw that a few dozen families had taken shelter in the abandoned market. It had once been the most thriving bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, carts loaded with women\u2019s gowns, and storefronts dedicated to selling opium. <\/a>What did you base this description on?<\/span>I had visited the bazaar multiple times before, beginning in 2008. The description was drawn from my notes from 2009.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Now stray pillars jutted upward, and the air smelled of decaying animal remains and burning plastic.
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\nIn the distance, the earth suddenly exploded in fountains of dirt. Helicopters from the Afghan Army buzzed overhead, and the families hid behind the shops, considering their next move. There was fighting along the stone ramparts to the north and the riverbank to the west. To the east was red-sand desert as far as Shakira could see. The only option was to head south, toward the leafy city of Lashkar Gah, which remained under the control of the Afghan government. <\/a>Why did you begin the story in this scene?<\/span>As this ultimately is a piece about the consequences of the U.S. withdrawal, we hoped to place the reader in the center of the action, and in particular, amid the Taliban’s march on Kabul. We expected most readers would be familiar with the chaos and strife that the Taliban’s march was inducing, and so we wanted to begin the piece by meeting them where they were at and then slowly bring them into the world of Shakira and her family.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe journey would entail cutting through a barren plain exposed to abandoned U.S. and British bases, where snipers nested, and crossing culverts potentially stuffed with explosives. A few families started off. Even if they reached Lashkar Gah, they could not be sure what they\u2019d find there. Since the start of the Taliban\u2019s blitz, Afghan Army soldiers had surrendered in droves, begging for safe passage home. It was clear that the Taliban would soon reach Kabul, and that the twenty years, and the trillions of dollars, devoted to defeating them had come to nothing. Shakira\u2019s family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. The gunfire sounded closer. Shakira spotted Taliban vehicles racing toward the bazaar\u2014and she decided to stay put. She was weary to the bone, her nerves frayed. She would face whatever came next, accept it like a judgment. \u201cWe\u2019ve been running all our lives,\u201d she told me. \u201cI\u2019m not going anywhere.\u201d <\/a>Your launch \u2014 680 words \u2014 is reconstructed and acutely detailed. Within it, you convey that you were not present for the family\u2019s escape for their lives. What was the source of the reconstruction and what steps did you take to verify the specific facts?<\/span>This reconstruction is based on interviews with Shakira and multiple others who took part in the exodus. The Taliban ordered everyone in the village to evacuate ahead of their battle, so multiple groups made the same journey as Shakira’s family. In her flight, she was accompanied by some neighbors. In addition to interviewing her in detail, I fact-checked specific details with others who also took part in the trek. Finally, about a month after my visit, a researcher retraced my steps and made additional interviews to double-check facts.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe longest war in American history ended on August 15th, when the Taliban captured Kabul without firing a shot. Bearded, scraggly men with black turbans took control of the Presidential palace, and around the capital the austere white flags of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan went up. Panic ensued. <\/a>You follow a 19-word and a 28-word sentence with one just two words long. Why that pacing?<\/span>The variation captures the sense of progression that summer \u2014 a slow, steady Taliban march on Kabul followed by a sudden collapse. And variation keeps the reader on their toes.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Some women burned their school records and went into hiding, fearing a return to the nineteen-nineties, when the Taliban forbade them to venture out alone and banned girls\u2019 education. For Americans, the very real possibility that the gains of the past two decades might be erased appeared to pose a dreadful choice: recommit to seemingly endless war, or abandon Afghan women.
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\nThis summer, I travelled to rural Afghanistan to meet women who were already living under the Taliban, to listen to what they thought about this looming dilemma. <\/a>How long did you spend there?<\/span>About three weeks, although I had visited multiple times in years past, and continued to interview women after i met them over WhatsApp.<\/span><\/span> More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities, and in the past decade the insurgent group had swallowed large swaths of the countryside. Unlike in relatively liberal Kabul, visiting women in these hinterlands is not easy: even without Taliban rule, women traditionally do not speak to unrelated men. Public and private worlds are sharply divided, and when a woman leaves her home she maintains a cocoon of seclusion through the burqa, which predates the Taliban by centuries. Girls essentially disappear into their homes at puberty, emerging only as grandmothers, if ever. It was through grandmothers\u2014finding each by referral, and speaking to many without seeing their faces\u2014that I was able to meet dozens of women, of all ages. <\/a>Can you describe the process that you took to meet first find the grandmothers and then the women?<\/span>I put out feelers with a number of contacts I’d accrued over the years in Helmand and Kandahar, including a few female midwives who were working in Taliban-controlled areas. After two months of searching, a friend\/colleague I’d known for some years mentioned that he knew a woman who was willing and interested to meet me. She was a grandmother, which perhaps explained her openness to meet. Through her I met others of her age. After a few rounds of interviews with them remotely, before I visited the region, I met a few again in person. After these meetings, they put me in touch with other, younger women.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Many were living in desert tents or hollowed-out storefronts, like Shakira; when the Taliban came across her family hiding at the market, the fighters advised them and others not to return home until someone could sweep for mines. I first encountered her in a safe house in Helmand. \u201cI\u2019ve never met a foreigner before,\u201d she said shyly. \u201cWell, a foreigner without a gun.\u201d <\/a>Why did Shakira agree to be a source? Did she know she was going to be the main character?<\/span>I initially interviewed Shakira about the incident in which she sets fire to a military vehicle (described below). She was quite proud of her exploits, which had won her considerable fame in the region. She was eager to speak about the incident, but as I began to ask about her life in general, particularly her childhood growing up under the Soviet occupation, it felt as if she was unburdening to me. Often she spoke so fast, and so many words tumbled out, that I had trouble keeping up and would ask her to repeat many points. This may have been the first time she’d ever narrated her life story, from the beginning. I think the experience was cathartic for her, as for many other women I spoke with. I think she believed she would be the main character, although I was not certain. I interviewed many women, in part to build a representative sense of their experiences but also to find someone who could carry the narrative. I needed to ensure that the main character could provide the type of detailed specificity that I could fact-check. So it was only after multiple interviews that I settled on Shakira as the main character.<\/span><\/span>
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\nShakira has a knack for finding humor in pathos, and in the sheer absurdity of the men in her life: in the nineties, the Taliban had offered to supply electricity to the village, and the local graybeards had initially refused, fearing black magic. \u201cOf course, we women knew electricity was fine,\u201d she said, chuckling. When she laughs, she pulls her shawl over her face, leaving only her eyes exposed. <\/a>Why did you choose to describe this gesture?<\/span>The norms of propriety are powerful. This gesture conveyed how the logic of female modesty and seclusion is a pervasive feature of life in her village, influencing even her bodily hexis.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>I told her that she shared a name with a world-renowned pop star, and her eyes widened. \u201cIs it true?\u201d she asked a friend who\u2019d accompanied her to the safe house. \u201cCould it be?\u201d
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\nShakira, like the other women I met, grew up in the Sangin Valley, a gash of green between sharp mountain outcrops. The valley is watered by the Helmand River and by a canal that Americans built in the nineteen-fifties. You can walk the width of the dale in an hour,\u00a0 passing dozens of tiny hamlets, creaking footbridges, and mud-brick walls. <\/a>How do you know this?<\/span>From interviews and from Google Earth.<\/span><\/span><\/a>Do you take photos and\/or videos as part of your reporting?<\/span>I did not take any photos of the women as it would be considered improper. But when I was with the Taliban fighters I took photos of the passing scenery, mostly as a means of note-taking. I also took photos of facilities that were targeted by the Afghan government forces as part of documenting civilian deaths.<\/span><\/span> As a girl, Shakira heard stories from her mother of the old days in her village, Pan Killay, which was home to about eighty families: the children swimming in the canal under the warm sun, the women pounding grain in stone mortars. In winter, smoke wafted from clay hearths; in spring, rolling fields were blanketed with poppies.
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\nIn 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmand\u2014a province the size of West Virginia, with few girls\u2019 schools. <\/a>It seems you used Shakira\u2019s life as a narrative device to retrace the region\u2019s recent modern history.<\/span>I often seek to tell big stories through a depiction of intimate life. What we may lose in generalizable conclusions we gain in texture and nuance. Shakira’s story gives a window into the 40-year history of war and occupation. Not the only window, to be sure, but one without which we cannot have a full understanding of why America lost this war.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Tribal elders and landlords refused. In the villagers\u2019 retelling, the traditional way of life in Sangin was smashed overnight, because outsiders insisted on bringing women\u2019s rights to the valley. \u201cOur culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school,\u201d Shakira recalled. \u201cIt was this way before my father\u2019s time, before my grandfather\u2019s time.\u201d When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls\u2019 education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.
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\nTanks from the Soviet Union crossed the border to shore up the Communist government\u2014and to liberate women. <\/a>Why?<\/span>Women’s liberation was a central plank of the platform of the Afghan Communists, as well as of left-wing and progressive movements around the world, including national liberation and anti-colonial movements that were supported or influenced by the USSR. From the beginning of the Soviet intervention, supporting the “enlightened” or “progressive” segments of the population against the “feudal” and “patriarchal” segments was a key rationale for the occupation.<\/span><\/span> Soon, Afghanistan was basically split in two. In the countryside, where young men were willing to die fighting the imposition of new ways of life\u2014including girls\u2019 schools and land reform\u2014young women remained unseen. In the cities, the Soviet-backed government banned child marriage and granted women the right to choose their partners. Girls enrolled in schools and universities in record numbers, and by the early eighties women held parliamentary seats and even the office of Vice-President. <\/a>You compress years in a matter of several sentences. Was this section longer in draft? Did it require extensive cutting to make it so concise?<\/span>It was close to this length in the original draft.. The challenge was to move quickly to the present. The danger in spending too much time on this period is that the article might lose momentum and the reader’s interest would not survive to reach the sections about more recent events.<\/span><\/span> <\/a>How did you keep track of the timelines of Shakira\u2019s life and its relationship to Afghan history?<\/span>I was already well acquainted with the history of Helmand. Through years of reporting, I knew tribal affiliations and local histories on a district-by-district level, so i was able to map her life experiences onto this background knowledge. When approaching a reporting topic, I like to delve deep into the academic literature, including ethnographies and histories, to help provide context for people and events I\u2019m reporting.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>
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\nThe violence in the countryside continued to spread. Early one morning when Shakira was five, her aunt awakened her in a great hurry. The children were led by the adults of the village to a mountain cave, where they huddled for hours. At night, Shakira watched artillery streak the sky. When the family returned to Pan Killay, the wheat fields were charred, and crisscrossed with the tread marks of Soviet tanks. The cows had been mowed down with machine guns. Everywhere she looked, she saw neighbors\u2014men she used to call \u201cuncle\u201d <\/a>What does this signify?<\/span>This was a tight-knit community, and these men provided love and affection. They may not have literally been her uncle, but perhaps the word helps conjure briefly for us the trauma from a child’s eyes.<\/span><\/span>\u2014lying bloodied. Her grandfather hadn\u2019t hidden with her, and she couldn\u2019t find him in the village. When she was older, she learned that he\u2019d gone to a different cave, and had been caught and executed by the Soviets.
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\nNighttime evacuations became a frequent occurrence and, for Shakira, a source of excitement: the dark corners of the caves, the clamorous groups of children. \u201cWe would look for Russian helicopters,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was like spotting strange birds.\u201d Sometimes, those birds swooped low, the earth exploded, and the children rushed to the site to forage for iron, which could be sold for a good price. Occasionally she gathered metal shards so that she could build a doll house. Once, she showed her mother a magazine photograph of a plastic doll that exhibited the female form; her mother snatched it away, calling it inappropriate. So Shakira learned to make dolls out of cloth and sticks. <\/a>Why? In the culture she was raised in, wasn’t doll-playing inappropriate?<\/span>I believe her mother did not recognize the makeshift dolls as real dolls, allowing a young Shakira to play with them without getting in trouble.<\/span><\/span>
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\nWhen she was eleven, she stopped going outside. Her world shrank to the three rooms of her house and the courtyard, where she learned to sew, bake bread in a tandoor, and milk cows. One day, passing jets rattled the house, and she took sanctuary in a closet. Underneath a pile of clothes, she discovered a child\u2019s alphabet book that had belonged to her grandfather\u2014the last person in the family to attend school. During the afternoons, while her parents napped, she began matching the Pashto words to pictures. She recalled, \u201cI had a plan to teach myself a little every day.\u201d
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\nIn 1989, the Soviets withdrew in defeat, but Shakira continued to hear the pounding of mortars outside the house\u2019s mud walls. Competing mujahideen factions were now trying to carve up the country for themselves. Villages like Pan Killay were lucrative targets: there were farmers to tax, rusted Soviet tanks to salvage, opium to export. Pazaro, a woman from a nearby village, recalled, \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a single night of peace. Our terror had a name, and it was Amir Dado.\u201d <\/a>Some narrative writers have told me they \u201caudition\u201d subjects for their stories, talking with many to determine whose story is the best narrative vehicle. Did you do this?<\/span>Yes, that’s precisely what I did. I was piqued by the fact that Shakira set fire to a military vehicle so leaned towards her from the beginning, but I also interviewed many others. I was looking for someone who had a strong storytelling sense and could provide the types of details that are checkable. I believe that our lives take on a narrative structure, though not everyone is adept at capturing that structure in conversation; some of us are impressionistic, non-linear storytellers, others more systematic and linear. A person who understands my intent to capture that structure on the page and will work with me by providing details and have the patience to put up with my (sometimes intrusive) fact-checking, makes the ideal subject.<\/span><\/span>


\nThe first time Shakira saw Dado, through the judas of her parents\u2019 front gate, he was in a pickup truck, trailed by a dozen armed men, parading through the village \u201cas if he were the President.\u201d Dado, a wealthy fruit vender turned mujahideen commander, with a jet-black beard and a prodigious belly had begun attacking rival strongmen even before the Soviets\u2019 defeat. <\/a>What did you base this physical description on?<\/span>Some photographs of Amir Dado that I’d unearthed. I also met him once, long ago, though by then (if I recall correctly) his beard had grayed.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>He hailed from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, had held vast feudal plantations for centuries. The lower valley was the home of the Ishaqzais, the poor tribe to which Shakira belonged. Shakira watched as Dado\u2019s men went from door to door, demanding a \u201ctax\u201d and searching homes. A few weeks later, the gunmen returned, ransacking her family\u2019s living room while she cowered in a corner. Never before had strangers violated the sanctity of her home, and she felt as if she\u2019d been stripped naked and thrown into the street. <\/a>Were these her words? If so, why did you paraphrase instead of directly quoting her?<\/span>She spoke of a deep shame that came from a violation of honor, namus<\/em> in Pashto, which is an important virtue in rural Pashtun communities, along with other so-called honor societies such as existed in the old American south. For most rural Pashtuns, female seclusion is an important part of maintaining familial honor and honor itself is the coin of the realm. These are fairly alien concepts for most Western readers, so I felt that simply quoting her here would fail to convey the sense of damage that this act induced. (Despite this cultural gulf, interestingly the word itself reflects a shared heritage: namus<\/em> comes, by way of Arabic, from the ancient Greek word nomos<\/em>, which means law). So to adequately convey the sense of shame that came with this violation of honor, I searched for a rough equivalent in Western society. The violation of dignity induced by stripping someone naked and throwing them onto a crowded street is similar to what Shakira and other women say they feel when unrelated men violate the sanctity of the home.<\/span><\/span>

\nBy the early nineties, the Communist government of Afghanistan, now bereft of Soviet support, was crumbling. In 1992, Lashkar Gah fell to a faction of mujahideen. Shakira had an uncle living there, a Communist with little time for the mosque and a weakness for Pashtun tunes. He\u2019d recently married a young woman, Sana, who\u2019d escaped a forced betrothal to a man four times her age. The pair had started a new life in Little Moscow, a Lashkar Gah neighborhood that Sana called \u201cthe land where women have freedom\u201d\u2014but, when the mujahideen took over, they were forced to flee to Pan Killay.
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\nShakira was tending the cows one evening when Dado\u2019s men surrounded her with guns. \u201cWhere\u2019s your uncle?\u201d one of them shouted. The fighters stormed into the house\u2014followed by Sana\u2019s spurned fianc\u00e9. \u201cShe\u2019s the one!\u201d he said. <\/a>What gives you the confidence to use direct quotes in a scene you didn\u2019t personally witness?<\/span>I interviewed multiple people for this scene, which is the usual method I rely on when quoting second-hand.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>The gunmen dragged Sana away. When Shakira\u2019s other uncles tried to intervene, they were arrested. The next day, Sana\u2019s husband turned himself in to Dado\u2019s forces, begging to be taken in her place. Both were sent to the strongman\u2019s religious court and sentenced to death. <\/a>How do you know and how did you verify this fact?<\/span>I was able to track down Sana’s’ husband’s family, who corroborated the story and added many compelling details that, unfortunately, I was unable to include due to space considerations. Sana’s saga itself could be the basis of a feature story. I was also able to find others who witnessed Amir Dado’s court firsthand. Finally, there were some contemporaneous accounts of his court and other similar mujahideen courts that emerged during that time.<\/span><\/span>
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\nNot long afterward, the mujahideen toppled the Communists in Kabul, and they brought their countryside mores with them. In the capital, their leaders\u2014who had received generous amounts of U.S. funding\u2014issued a decree declaring that \u201cwomen are not to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely.\u201d Women were likewise banned from \u201cwalking gracefully or with pride.\u201d Religious police began roaming the city\u2019s streets, arresting women and burning audio- and videocassettes on pyres. <\/a>On what did you base this mini-history lesson?<\/span>There has been some excellent scholarship on the mujahideen period. I drew on multiple sources for the information in this paragraph. For example, the snippet about women being banned from “walking gracefully or with pride” refers to a Supreme Court decree issued on August 27, 2003 and is recorded in Hafizullah Emadi’s \u201cRepression, Resistance, and Women in Afghanistan.\u201d<\/a> The full decree, which I could not include for space considerations, is even more shocking: \u201cWomen are not to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely; are not to wear attractive clothing and decorative accessories; are not to wear perfume or jewelry that makes any noise; are not to walk gracefully or with pride in the middle of the sidewalk; are not to talk to strangers; are not to speak loudly or laugh in public; and they must always ask their husbands\u2019 permission to leave the home.\u201d<\/em> To be clear, the people who instituted such policies were, by and large, the same who the U.S. allied with after 2001.<\/span><\/span>
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\nYet the new mujahideen government quickly fell apart, and the country descended into civil war. At night in Pan Killay, Shakira heard gunfire and, sometimes, the shouts of men. In the morning, while tending the cows, she\u2019d see neighbors carrying wrapped bodies. <\/a>Was Shakira the only source for this information? How did you verify what she was telling you?<\/span>I managed to interview many people from Pan Killay and they all related stories of killings and massacres in that period. I was able to document names and circumstances of many deaths. I knew such information would never make the piece, but I tend to be obsessive about collecting such facts since one never knows when there might be an opportunity to make use of them in the future.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Her family gathered in the courtyard and discussed, in low voices, how they might escape. But the roads were studded with checkpoints belonging to different mujahideen groups. South of the village, in the town of Gereshk, a militia called the Ninety-third Division maintained a particularly notorious barricade on a bridge; there were stories of men getting robbed or killed, of women and young boys being raped. Shakira\u2019s father sometimes crossed the bridge to sell produce at the Gereshk market, and her mother started pleading with him to stay home.
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\nThe family, penned between Amir Dado to the north and the Ninety-third Division to the south, was growing desperate. Then one afternoon, when Shakira was sixteen, she heard shouts from the street: \u201cThe Taliban are here!\u201d She saw a convoy of white Toyota Hiluxes filled with black-turbanned fighters carrying white flags. <\/a>Why did you use the specific brand of vehicle?<\/span>I like to give specificity when I can, as long as it doesn’t clutter up the text. It’s a common device in realist fiction \u2014 literary critic James Wood calls it “thisness” \u2014 which is like bricks to the mortar of imagination. For narrative non-fiction, specificity can help bring the reader into a world. Moreover, in this case, the Hilux is an iconic Taliban vehicle.<\/span><\/span> In subsequent years, they and other insurgent groups would be known for speeding past in Hiluxes, sometimes with PK-machine guns poking out the back.Shakira hadn\u2019t ever heard of the Taliban, but her father explained that its members were much like the poor religious students she\u2019d seen all her life begging for alms. Many had fought under the mujahideen\u2019s banner but quit after the Soviets\u2019 withdrawal; now, they said, they were remobilizing to put an end to the tumult. In short order, they had stormed the Gereshk bridge, dismantling the Ninety-third Division, and volunteers had flocked to join them as they\u2019d descended on Sangin. Her brother came home reporting that the Taliban had also overrun Dado\u2019s positions. The warlord had abandoned his men and fled to Pakistan. \u201cHe\u2019s gone,\u201d Shakira\u2019s brother kept saying. \u201cHe really is.\u201d The Taliban soon dissolved Dado\u2019s religious court\u2014freeing Sana and her husband, who were awaiting execution\u2014and eliminated the checkpoints. After fifteen years, the Sangin Valley was finally at peace. <\/a>It\u2019s fascinating the way that you use Shakira\u2019s life as the touchstone to describe the history of conflict in a rural Afghan region. How did you settle on the structure of the story? Do you use organizing tools: timelines, whiteboards,\u00a0 notecards, etc.?<\/span>I write in Scrivener and I like to use the split horizontal screen functionality. I work on one section at a time. Typically, on the right side, I will have an outline of the section, containing all of the reporting I need, including quotes, laid out in the order that it will appear in the text. On the left side, I write the section.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u00a0<\/strong>When I asked Shakira and other women from the valley to reflect on Taliban rule, they were unwilling to judge the movement against some universal standard\u2014only against what had come before. \u201cThey were softer,\u201d Pazaro, the woman who lived in a neighboring village, said. \u201cThey were dealing with us respectfully.\u201d The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under Dado and the mujahideen\u2014minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints. <\/a>What precisely did you tell these grandmothers and women when you asked if you could interview them?<\/span>I told them that I was interested in capturing their life stories from the beginning. I wanted to know how life was like before the war \u2014 -meaning before the Soviets \u2014and how life changed during the war. I did not approach them asking about the American occupation because that might have frightened them off. I spent a lot of time just trying to understand what daily life had been like, what they used to enjoy doing, etc. I wanted to connect with them on these terms because I was genuinely interested and because it helped build a rapport. Eventually we moved into discussing the Soviet occupation, the Taliban and the Americans. By then, the women were quite eager to share their experiences of the American war.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u00a0<\/strong>Shakira recounted to me a newfound serenity: quiet mornings with steaming green tea and naan bread, summer evenings on the rooftop. Mothers and aunts and grandmothers began to discreetly inquire about her eligibility; in the village, marriage was a bond uniting two families. She was soon betrothed to a distant relative whose father had vanished, presumably at the hands of the Soviets. The first time she laid eyes on her fianc\u00e9 was on their wedding day: he was sitting sheepishly, surrounded by women of the village, who were ribbing him about his plans for the wedding night. \u201cOh, he was a fool!\u201d Shakira recalled, laughing. \u201cHe was so embarrassed, he tried to run away. People had to catch him and bring him back.\u201d
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\nLike many enterprising young men in the valley, he was employed in opium trafficking, and Shakira liked the glint of determination in his eyes. Yet she started to worry that grit alone might not be enough. As Taliban rule established itself, a conscription campaign was launched. Young men were taken to northern Afghanistan, to help fight against a gang of mujahideen warlords known as the Northern Alliance. One day, Shakira watched a helicopter alight in a field and unload the bodies of fallen conscripts. Men in the valley began hiding in friends\u2019 houses, moving from village to village, terrified of being called up. Impoverished tenant farmers were the most at risk\u2014the rich could buy their way out of service. \u201cThis was the true injustice of the Taliban,\u201d Shakira told me. She grew to loathe the sight of roving Taliban patrols. <\/a>You don\u2019t indicate that any of the women you quote are identified by pseudonyms, so I assume these are their real first names. Was there any concern that being in the story would cause them or their families blowback from the Taliban?<\/span>I\u00a0explained to the women how and where the piece would be published and gave them the opportunity to decide whether they wanted to include their real names or not. Almost all of them preferred their real names. The main concern for the women was not the Taliban but their own families. Every woman who met me did so because she had the permission of her family. Some were grandmothers, who enjoyed a bit more freedom than younger women. Others were like Shakira, whose husbands were unable or unwilling to interfere due to drug addiction, injury, etc.<\/span><\/span>
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\nIn 2000, Helmand Province experienced punishing drought. The watermelon fields lay ruined, and the bloated corpses of draft animals littered the roads. In a flash of cruelty, the Taliban\u2019s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, chose that moment to ban opium cultivation. The valley\u2019s economy collapsed. Pazaro recalled, \u201cWe had nothing to eat, the land gave us nothing, and our men couldn\u2019t provide for our children. The children were crying, they were screaming, and we felt like we\u2019d failed.\u201d Shakira, who was pregnant, dipped squares of stale naan into green tea to feed her nieces and nephews. Her husband left for Pakistan, to try his luck in the fields there. Shakira was stricken by the thought that her baby would emerge lifeless, that her husband would never return, that she would be alone. Every morning, she prayed for rain, for deliverance.
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\nOne day, an announcer on the radio said that there had been an attack in America. Suddenly, there was talk that soldiers from the richest country on earth were coming to overthrow the Taliban. For the first time in years, Shakira\u2019s heart stirred with hope. <\/a>Is this a plot point?<\/span>Yes, to signal a turn in the narrative.<\/span><\/span>


\nOne night in 2003, Shakira was jolted awake by the voices of strange men. She rushed to cover herself. When she ran to the living room, she saw, with panic, the muzzles of rifles being pointed at her. The men were larger than she\u2019d ever seen, and they were in uniform. These are the Americans, she realized, in awe. Some Afghans were with them, scrawny men with Kalashnikovs and checkered scarves. A man with an enormous beard was barking orders: Amir Dado.
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\nThe U.S. had swiftly toppled the Taliban following its invasion, installing in Kabul the government of Hamid Karzai. Dado, who had befriended American Special Forces, became the chief of intelligence for Helmand Province. One of his brothers was the governor of the Sangin district, and another brother became Sangin\u2019s chief of police. In Helmand, the first year of the American occupation had been peaceful, and the fields once again burst with poppies. Shakira now had two small children, Nilofar and Ahmed. Her husband had returned from Pakistan and found work ferrying bags of opium resin to the Sangin market. But now, with Dado back in charge\u2014rescued from exile by the Americans\u2014life regressed to the days of civil war.
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\nNearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled,\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cWe went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.\u201d <\/a>Why didn\u2019t you identify this villager by name the way you did with Shakira and Pazaro?<\/span>I did not want to slow down the reading experience by introducing a new name, especially as this source is not quoted from or referred to again.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>In another village, Dado\u2019s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who\u2019d never belonged to the movement was shot dead.
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\nShakira was bewildered by the Americans\u2019 choice of allies. \u201cWas this their plan?\u201d she asked me. \u201cDid they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?\u201d She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Division\u2014and made it its closest partner in the province. The Division\u2019s gunmen again began stopping travellers on the bridge and plundering what they could. Now, however, their most profitable endeavor was collecting bounties offered by the U.S.; according to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote a history of Helmand, they earned up to two thousand dollars per Taliban commander captured. <\/a>Did you interview Martin or is this based on his history?<\/span>I’ve spoken to Martin many times but this particular fact is drawn from his history of Helmand, entitled an \u201cAn Intimate War,\u201d<\/a> which is perhaps my favorite book on the conflict.<\/span><\/span><\/a>How much reading and research went into your reporting?<\/span>I must have read every piece of scholarship and analysis produced about Helmand in the English language. My general approach is to be exhaustive; when I recently co-wrote a piece on vaccines, I read every scholarly book on vaccinations in America I could find, along with 50 or 60 academic studies. This approach certainly slows me down but I live in terror that I might get something wrong or that I may write about something I don’t fully understand. Every assignment is an opportunity for me to enter a novel world, to immerse myself in a new field of inquiry.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThis posed a challenge, though, because there were hardly any active Taliban to catch. \u201cWe knew who were the Taliban in our village,\u201d Shakira said, and they weren\u2019t engaged in guerrilla warfare: \u201cThey were all sitting at home, doing nothing.\u201d A lieutenant colonel with U.S. Special Forces, Stuart Farris, who was deployed to the area at that time, told a U.S Army historian, \u201cThere was virtually no resistance on this rotation.\u201d <\/a>What is your source for this?<\/span>This was from an interview conducted by the Combat Studies Institute, which is part of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. I found it in material produced by the U.S. military on Sangin, as well as in soldiers’ and Marines’ memoirs and third-party analysis of the U.S. deployment in Sangin. I believe that in reporting this story I read most of what has been produced about the U.S. military experience in Sangin, which contained much fascinating insight but I was unable to include due to space considerations.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0So militias like the Ninety-third Division began accusing innocent people. In February, 2003, they branded Hajji Bismillah\u2014the Karzai government\u2019s transportation director for Gereshk, responsible for collecting tolls in the city\u2014a terrorist, prompting the Americans to ship him to Guant\u00e1namo. With Bismillah eliminated, the Ninety-third Division monopolized the toll revenue.
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\nDado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin\u2019s governor\u2014Dado\u2019s brother\u2014to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado\u2014a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord\u2019s former commanders,\u00a0<\/strong>who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. <\/a>How did you locate this source and what were the ground rules of the interview?<\/span>I met this source many years ago when visiting Helmand province. I managed to reconnect with him while reporting on this piece. We agreed that he would not be named in the piece.<\/span><\/span> Nonetheless, when Dado\u2019s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin\u2014an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil\u2014the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guant\u00e1namo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil\u2019s classified Guant\u00e1namo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to \u201ccover for\u201d the fact that Dado\u2019s forces had been \u201cinvolved with the ambush.\u201d <\/a>This is such an outrage. How did you obtain Jalil\u2019s classified Guant\u00e1namo file? Did you use Freedom of Information laws?<\/span>Jalil’s GITMO file was made available through the Wikileaks release of prisoner files. I did not use FOIA for investigating this piece because the timeline for receiving documents tends to be long, and we were on a tight deadline. Fortunately, through the actions of Wikileaks along with material the U.S. military has made available, there was plenty of evidence for the events I describe. I also managed to track Jalil down and speak with him, and I found a detailed analysis of the attack (and effective admission that it had been a set-up) in a U.S. special forces journal.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe incident didn\u2019t affect Dado\u2019s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable in serving up \u201cterrorists.\u201d They were now patrolling together, and soon after the attack the joint operation searched Shakira\u2019s village for suspected terrorists. The soldiers did not stay at her home long, but she could not get the sight of the rifle muzzles out of her mind. The next morning, she removed the rugs and scrubbed the boot marks away.
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\nShakira\u2019s friends and neighbors were too terrified to speak out, but the United Nations began agitating for Dado\u2019s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort, and a guide for the U.S. Marine Corps argued that although Dado was \u201cfar from being a Jeffersonian Democrat\u201d his form of rough justice was \u201cthe time-tested solution for controlling rebellious Pashtuns.\u201d <\/a>What\u2019s your source for this?<\/span>This is from a guide for the U.S. Marine Corps produced by Courage Services, Inc., a company that has provided “sociocultural analysis” for various clients, including the military. It is available in the open source.<\/span><\/span>
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\nShakira\u2019s husband stopped leaving the house as Helmandis continued to be taken away on flimsy pretexts. A farmer in a nearby village, Mohammed Nasim, was arrested by U.S. forces and sent to Guant\u00e1namo because, according to a classified assessment, his name was similar to that of a Taliban commander. A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah visited an American base to inform on two Taliban members; no translator was present, and, in the confusion, he was arrested himself and shipped to Guant\u00e1namo. Nasrullah, a government tax collector, was sent to Guant\u00e1namo after being randomly pulled off a bus following a skirmish between U.S. Special Forces and local tribesmen. \u201cWe were so happy with the Americans,\u201d he said later, at a military tribunal. \u201cI didn\u2019t know eventually I would come to Cuba.\u201d <\/a>How did you learn this?<\/span>The information in this paragraph is primarily drawn from the classified Guantanamo files released by Wikileaks. Those files include detainee assessments written by U.S. military or intelligence officials, as well as transcripts of the proceedings of military tribunals. I also managed to track down the individuals in question to ask follow-up questions. Two of the three people mentioned here were still in Helmand at the time of my reporting.<\/span><\/span>
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\nNasrullah ultimately returned home, but some detainees never made it back. Abdul Wahid, of Gereshk, was arrested by the Ninety-third Division and beaten severely; he was delivered to U.S. custody and left in a cage, where he died. U.S. military personnel noted burns on his chest and stomach, and bruising to his hips and groin. According to a declassified investigation, Special Forces soldiers reported that Wahid\u2019s wounds were consistent with \u201ca normal interview\/interrogation method\u201d used by the Ninety-third Division. A sergeant stated that he \u201ccould provide photographs of prior detainees with similar injuries.\u201d Nonetheless, the U.S. continued to support the Ninety-third Division\u2014a violation of the Leahy Law, which bars American personnel from knowingly backing units that commit flagrant human-rights abuses. <\/a>Were there ever any ramifications for this behavior?<\/span>There have been no ramifications for this or any of the other behaviors described in the piece.<\/span><\/span><\/a>Do you consider this story an investigative story?<\/span>Yes. In addition to making use of public source and Wikileaks material, I obtained top-secret documents and conducted a rigorous field survey of Pan Killay and two other villages.<\/span><\/span>
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\nIn 2004, the U.N. launched a program to disarm pro-government militias. A Ninety-third commander learned of the plan and rebranded a segment of the militia as a \u201cprivate-security company\u201d under contract with the Americans, enabling roughly a third of the Division\u2019s fighters to remain armed. Another third kept their weapons by signing a contract with a Texas-based firm to protect road-paving crews. (When the Karzai government replaced these private guards with police, the Ninety-third\u2019s leader engineered a hit that killed fifteen policemen, and then recovered the contract. The remaining third of the Division, finding themselves subjected to extortion threats from their former colleagues, absconded with their weapons and joined the Taliban.
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\nMessaging by the U.S.-led coalition tended to portray the growing rebellion as a matter of extremists battling freedom, but nato documents I obtained conceded that Ishaqzais had \u201cno good reason\u201d to trust the coalition forces, having suffered \u201coppression at the hands of Dad Mohammad Khan,\u201d or Amir Dado.<\/a>How did you obtain them?<\/span>Without giving away any information that could comprise the security of my source, I can say that I benefited from developing contacts within the U.S. military and the U.S. foreign service over many years. I obtained these documents from one such source. I obtained it some years ago, but never had the right opportunity to use it in a story until this one.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>In Pan Killay, elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village, and some reached out to former Taliban members. Shakira wished that her husband would do something\u2014help guard the village, or move them to Pakistan\u2014but he demurred. In a nearby village, when U.S. forces raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son with paraplegia, women shouted at their menfolk, \u201cYou people have big turbans on your heads, but what have you done? You can\u2019t even protect us. You call yourselves men?\u201d
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\nIt was now 2005, four years after the American invasion, and Shakira had a third child on the way. Her domestic duties consumed her\u2014\u201cmorning to night, I was working and sweating\u201d\u2014but when she paused from stoking the tandoor or pruning the peach trees she realized that she\u2019d lost the sense of promise she\u2019d once felt. Nearly every week, she heard of another young man being spirited away by the Americans or the militias. Her husband was unemployed, and recently he\u2019d begun smoking opium. Their marriage soured. An air of mistrust settled onto the house, matching the village\u2019s grim mood. <\/a>Here the story reads like a novel with its depth of characterization, plot points, narrative devices and elegant prose. When you\u2019re writing a story like this, are you conscious of using the literary devices employed by Balzac, Dickens and the other 19th century masters of fiction, or The New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese?<\/span>Yes, I am consciously employing literary devices when I write, in the tradition of the New Journalists. I don’t read a lot of journalism, but I do read a lot of fiction and I always seek to understand how writers handle their narrative challenges. Whenever I write i usually have a stack of good writing next to me, which serves as inspiration and to allow me to enter the appropriate head space. I find myself returning, again and again, to W.G. Sebald, James Salter, Marilynne Robinson, Rachel Cusk, along with the Russian masters like Dostoyevsky and Turganev. In non-fiction, Philip Gourevitch’s \u201cWe Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families\u201d<\/a> and the magazine journalism of David Grann<\/a> are my lodestars.<\/span><\/span>
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\nSo when a Taliban convoy rolled into Pan Killay, with black-turbanned men hoisting tall white flags, she considered the visitors with interest, even forgiveness. This time, she thought, things might be different.


\nIn 2006, the U.K. joined a growing contingent of U.S. Special Operations Forces working to quell the rebellion in Sangin. Soon, Shakira recalled, \u201chell began.\u201d The Taliban attacked patrols, launched raids on combat outposts, and set up roadblocks. On a hilltop in Pan Killay, the Americans commandeered a drug lord\u2019s house, transforming it into a compound of sandbags and watchtowers and concertina wire. Before most battles, young Talibs visited houses, warning residents to leave immediately. Then the Taliban would launch their assault, the coalition would respond, and the earth would shudder. <\/a>Such a poetic, awful phrase of war. Please describe its composition and revision.<\/span>This originated from a phrase I wrote in my notebook during one of the battles between Afghan forces and the Taliban: “the earth is shaking”. That tremor was something I felt many times during my stay, whenever the two sides were engaged. Later, looking through my interviews with villagers from Pan Killay, i was struck that they also described the battles as the earth “shaking.” When composing the first draft, I chose the word “shudder,” as it better captured the sense of fear that the battles invoked than the word “shake.”<\/span><\/span>
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\nSometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakira\u2019s husband, took refuge in a friend\u2019s home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.
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\nNot since childhood had Shakira known anyone who\u2019d died by air strike. She was now twenty-seven, and she slept fitfully, as if at any moment she\u2019d need to run for cover. One night, she awoke to a screeching noise so loud that she wondered if the house was being torn apart. Her husband was still snoring away, and se cursed him under her breath. She tiptoed to the front yard. Coalition military vehicles were passing by, trundling over scrap metal strewn out front. She roused the family. It was too late to evacuate, and Shakira prayed that the Taliban would not attack. She thrust the children into recessed windows\u2014a desperate attempt to protect them in case a strike caused the roof to collapse\u2014and covered them with heavy blankets.
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\nReturning to the front yard, Shakira spotted one of the foreigners\u2019 vehicles sitting motionless. A pair of antennas projected skyward. They\u2019re going to kill us, she thought. She climbed onto the roof, and saw that the vehicle was empty: the soldiers had parked it and left on foot. She watched them march over the footbridge and disappear into the reeds.
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\nA few fields away, the Taliban and the foreigners began firing. For hours, the family huddled indoors. The walls shook, and the children cried. Shakira brought out her cloth dolls, rocked Ahmed against her chest, and whispered stories. When the guns fell silent, around dawn, Shakira went out for another look. The vehicle remained there, unattended. She was shaking in anger. All year, roughly once a month, she had been subjected to this terror. The Taliban had launched the attack, but most of her rage was directed at the interlopers. Why did she, and her children, have to suffer?
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\nA wild thought flashed through her head. She rushed into the house and spoke with her mother-in-law. The soldiers were still on the far side of the canal. Shakira found some matches and her mother-in-law grabbed a jerrican of diesel fuel. On the street, a neighbor glanced at the jerrican and understood, hurrying back with a second jug. Shakira\u2019s mother-in-law doused a tire, then popped the hood and soaked the engine. Shakira struck a match, and dropped it onto the tire.
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\nFrom the house, they watched the sky turn ashen from the blaze. Before long, they heard the whirring of a helicopter, approaching from the south. \u201cIt\u2019s coming for us!\u201d her mother-in-law shouted. Shakira\u2019s brother-in-law, who was staying with them, frantically gathered the children, but Shakira knew that it was too late. If we\u2019re going to die, let\u2019s die at home, she thought.
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\nThey threw themselves into a shallow trench in the back yard, the adults on top of the children. The earth shook violently, then the helicopter flew off. When they emerged, Shakira saw that the foreigners had targeted the burning vehicle, so that none of its parts would fall into enemy hands.
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\nThe women of Pan Killay came to congratulate Shakira; she was, as one woman put it, \u201ca hero.\u201d But she had difficulty mustering any pride, only relief. \u201cI was thinking that they would not come here anymore,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we would have peace.\u201d <\/a>This is another finely etched scene. Did you ever consider opening your story with it?<\/span>In the original draft, this was the opening scene. My editor, Daniel Zalewski, felt that it did not establish the character in the right way. Why should we care about Shakira? Is she an extremist? By opening the story with her fleeing Taliban-Afghan army violence, we are better able to approach her as a subject through the framework that we all shared during the Taliban’s march to Kabul, that the collapse of the country was a tragedy unfolding before our eyes. Screenwriters talk about “saving the cat” \u2014 a moment, early in a film, where the hero or heroine does something human and identifiable, like rescuing a kitten from a tree, which will instinctively place us on their side. Opening with with her fleeing the violence, as opposed to setting fire to a military vehicle, gives us a save-the-cat moment.<\/span><\/span><\/a>How involved was your editor?<\/span>Daniel has a great storytelling eye, and suggested an important structural change to my draft, which had initially begun with a scene from a few years ago. He suggested starting the piece near the present day, in media res<\/em> as the Afghan government was collapsing. This brought more immediacy to the piece \u00a0and allowed us to unfold the deeper history of the village while foregrounding the stakes. The main task of a writer is to write a sentence that compels the reader to read the subsequent sentence. The stakes \u2014 Why should I care?<\/em> \u2014 has to carry through from the opening line to the coda, so Daniel\u2019s suggestion was an apt one.<\/span><\/span>


\nIn 2008, the U.S. Marines deployed to Sangin, reinforcing American Special Forces and U.K. soldiers. Britain\u2019s forces were beleaguered\u2014a third of its casualties in Afghanistan would occur in Sangin, leading some soldiers to dub the mission \u201cSangingrad.\u201d <\/a>How did you learn this?<\/span>I learned of this term from poring through soldiers’ memoirs and British reporting on the subject.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Nilofar, now eight, could intuit the rhythms of wartime. She would ask Shakira, \u201cWhen are we going to Auntie Farzana\u2019s house?\u201d Farzana lived in the desert.
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\nBut the chaos wasn\u2019t always predictable: one afternoon, the foreigners again appeared before anyone could flee, and the family rushed into the back-yard trench. A few doors down, the wife and children of the late Abdul Salam did the same, but a mortar killed his fifteen-year-old daughter, Bor Jana.
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\nBoth sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. \u201cThey would drop leaflets saying, \u2018Stay in your homes! Save yourselves!\u2019 \u201d Shakira recalled. In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, <\/a>This is such a powerful phrase. Could you describe its inspiration, composition and any revision?<\/span>I spend a lot of time on Google Earth, studying the topography, the buildings, the trees, just to get a sense of place. Because the houses are made of mud, they are not always clearly visible from above and it is easy to feel as if these regions are unpopulated. You get the same sense when traveling through the area, because the mud villages set off from the road look sleepy or even abandoned. But when you enter these villages, driving through narrow lanes, you will immediately sense the abundance of life \u2014 which is tragic given that it is in places like this, not in Kabul or where most media attention is, where the war was fought. The phrase therefore emerged early in the writing process, as I reflected on this reality.<\/span><\/span> and, if however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths\u2014anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war\u2019s civilian toll.
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\nIn this way, Shakira\u2019s tragedies mounted. There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin: he was killed by a buzzbuzzak<\/em>, a drone, while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. \u201cThat sound was everywhere,\u201d Shakira recalled. \u201cWhen we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.\u201d
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\nMuhammad Wali, an adult cousin: Villagers were instructed by coalition forces to stay indoors for three days as they conducted an operation, but after the second day drinking water had been depleted and Wali was forced to venture out. He was shot.
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\nKhan Muhammad, a seven-year-old cousin: His family was fleeing a clash by car when it mistakenly neared a coalition position; the car was strafed, killing him.
\n
\nBor Agha, a twelve-year-old cousin: He was taking an evening walk when he was killed by fire from an Afghan National Police base. The next morning, his father visited the base, in shock and looking for answers, and was told that the boy had been warned before not to stray near the installation. \u201cTheir commander gave the order to target him,\u201d his father recalled.
\n
\nAmanullah, a sixteen-year-old cousin: He was working the land when he was targeted by an Afghan Army sniper. No one provided an explanation, and the family was too afraid to approach the Army base and ask.
\n
\nAhmed, an adult cousin: After a long day in the fields, he was headed home, carrying a hot plate, when he was struck down by coalition forces. The family believes that the foreigners mistook the hot plate for an I.E.D.
\n
\nNiamatullah, Ahmed\u2019s brother: He was harvesting opium when a firefight broke out nearby; as he tried to flee, he was gunned down by a buzzbuzzak<\/em>.
\n
\nGul Ahmed, an uncle of Shakira\u2019s husband: He wanted to get a head start on his day, so he asked his sons to bring his breakfast to the fields. When they arrived, they found his body. Witnesses said that he\u2019d encountered a coalition patrol. The soldiers \u201cleft him here, like an animal,\u201d Shakira said. <\/a>Why did you present these deaths as a litany?<\/span>I wanted to hit the reader over the head, avoiding all subtlety, on this point. Most Americans were hardly aware of the war or its human toll. To present the deaths as a litany would, I hoped, convey to the reader the unremitting force of violence and suffering that the war had wrought. Moreover, I wanted to name these victims, since otherwise they belonged to the war’s anonymous, and therefore forgotten, toll.<\/span><\/span>
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\nEntire branches of Shakira\u2019s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.<\/a>Were you doing this verification while you were on the ground in Afghanistan? How long did it take?<\/span>I did the first round of this reporting while I was on the ground. In all, I visited close to 50 households. Then, after leaving, I hired a researcher to retrace my steps and find additional witnesses. I employed the rule that every recorded death should have two independent witnesses or be sourced to two independent testimonies.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThis scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones.
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\nSome British officers on the ground grew concerned that the U.S. was killing too many civilians, and unsuccessfully lobbied to have American Special Forces removed from the area. Instead, troops from around the world poured into Helmand, including Australians, Canadians, and Danes. But villagers couldn\u2019t tell the difference\u2014to them, the occupiers were simply \u201cAmericans.\u201d Pazaro, the woman from a nearby village, recalled, \u201cThere were two types of people\u2014one with black faces and one with pink faces. When we see them, we get terrified.\u201d The coalition portrayed locals as hungering for liberation from the Taliban, but a classified intelligence report from 2011 described community perceptions of coalition forces as \u201cunfavorable,\u201d with villagers warning that, if the coalition \u201cdid not leave the area, the local nationals would be forced to evacuate.\u201d
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\nIn response, the coalition shifted to the hearts-and-minds strategy of counter-insurgency. But the foreigners\u2019 efforts to embed among the population could be crude: they often occupied houses, only further exposing villagers to crossfire. \u201cThey were coming by force, without getting permission from us,\u201d Pashtana, a woman from another Sangin village, told me. <\/a>How did you decide out of all the women you interviewed which to include in the story? Were there more in early drafts?<\/span>Once I’d settled on Shakira as the main character, I used the voices of the other women only to amplify certain points or moments in the narrative. It was not always an easy decision, because many of the women had compelling stories in their own right, but I was conscious early on not to overburden the reader with too many names and voices. So at this point in the story, which describes how the population turned against the Americans, I reached for Pashtana’s testimony, as she spoke at length about the foreign forces commandeering houses.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cThey sometimes broke into our house, broke all the windows, and stayed the whole night. We would have to flee, in case the Taliban fired on them.\u201d Marzia, a woman from Pan Killay, recalled, \u201cThe Taliban would fire a few shots, but the Americans would respond with mortars.\u201d One mortar slammed into her mother-in-law\u2019s house. She survived, Marzia said, but had since \u201clost control of herself\u201d\u2014always \u201cshouting at things we can\u2019t see, at ghosts.\u201d
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\nWith the hearts-and-minds approach floundering, some nato officials tried to persuade Taliban commanders to flip. In 2010, a group of Sangin Taliban commanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, U.S. Special Operations Forces\u2014acting independently\u2014bombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.
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\nThe Marines finally quit Sangin in 2014; the Afghan Army held its ground for three years, until the Taliban had brought most of the valley under its control. The U.S. airlifted Afghan Army troops out and razed many government compounds\u2014leaving, as a nato statement described approvingly, only \u201crubble and dirt.\u201d The Sangin market had been obliterated in this way. When Shakira first saw the ruined shops, she told her husband, \u201cThey left nothing for us.\u201d
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\nStill, a sense of optimism took hold in Pan Killay. Shakira\u2019s husband slaughtered a sheep to celebrate the end of the war, and the family discussed renovating the garden. Her mother-in-law spoke of the days before the Russians and the Americans, when families picnicked along the canal, men stretched out in the shade of peach trees, and women dozed on rooftops under the stars.
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\nBut in 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. That January, they launched perhaps the most devastating assault that the valley witnessed in the entire war. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad\u2019s father and many others, eight of them children.
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\nThe next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid. <\/a>Why did these deaths go unrecorded by most news media?<\/span>Such deaths were rarely reported by the Western media, usually because it was difficult to access these areas (a fact for which the Taliban are to blame). They were sometimes reported in the local media or on Twitter in Pashto.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAfter the bombing, Mohammad\u2019s brother travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.
\n
\nOn the strength of a seemingly endless supply of recruits, the Taliban had no difficulty outlasting the coalition. But, though the insurgency has finally brought peace to the Afghan countryside, it is a peace of desolation: many villages are in ruins. Reconstruction will be a challenge, but a bigger trial will be to exorcise memories of the past two decades. \u201cMy daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,\u201d Pazaro said. \u201cWe have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, \u2018No, no, they won\u2019t come back.\u2019 \u201d


\nThe Taliban call their domain the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and claim that, once the foreigners are gone, they will preside over an era of tranquil stability. As the Afghan government crumbled this summer, I travelled through Helmand Province\u2014the Emirate\u2019s de-facto capital\u2014to see what a post-American Afghanistan might look like.
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\nI departed from Lashkar Gah, which remained under government control. At the outskirts stood a squat cement building with an Afghan-government flag\u2014beyond this checkpoint, Kabul\u2019s authority vanished. A pickup idled nearby; piled into the cargo bed were half a dozen members of the sangorian<\/em>, a feared militia in the pay of the Afghan intelligence agency, which was backed by the C.I.A. Two of the fighters appeared no older than twelve.
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\nI was with two locals in a beat-up Corolla, and we slipped past the checkpoint without notice. Soon, we were in a treeless horizon of baked earth, with virtually no road beneath us. We passed abandoned outposts of the Afghan Army and Police that had been built by the Americans and the Brits. Beyond them loomed a series of circular mud fortifications, with a lone Taliban sniper splayed on his stomach. White flags fluttered behind him, announcing the gateway to the Islamic Emirate. <\/a>Were you ever in any physical danger during your reporting trip to Helmand Province?<\/span> I was there as the province was collapsing. The skies were crowded with warplanes; long lines of refugees were walking along the roads, through the fields. Since I was with the Taliban at times, there was always the chance that a government or U.S. airstrike could target our position. But the danger I faced was minimal compared to those encountered by Afghans, who were being targeted mercilessly by Afghan government forces. They generally had nowhere to go, whereas I could always leave if I chose to.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe most striking difference between Taliban country and the world we\u2019d left behind was the dearth of gunmen. In Afghanistan, I\u2019d grown accustomed to kohl-eyed policemen in baggy trousers, militiamen in balaclavas, intelligence agents inspecting cars. Yet we rarely crossed a Taliban checkpoint, and when we did the fighters desultorily examined the car. \u201cEveryone is afraid of the Taliban,\u201d my driver said, laughing. \u201cThe checkpoints are in our hearts.\u201d
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\nIf people feared their new rulers, they also fraternized with them. Here and there, groups of villagers sat under roadside trellises, sipping tea with Talibs. The country opened up as we jounced along a dirt road in rural Sangin. In the canal, boys were having swimming races; village men and Taliban were dipping their feet into the turquoise water. We passed green cropland and canopies of fruit trees. Groups of women walked along a market road, and two girls skipped in rumpled frocks.
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\nWe approached Gereshk, then under government authority. Because the town was the most lucrative toll-collection point in the region, it was said that whoever held it controlled all of Helmand. The Taliban had launched an assault, and the thuds of artillery resounded across the plain. A stream of families, their donkeys laboring under the weight of giant bundles, were escaping what they said were air strikes. By the roadside, a woman in a powder-blue burqa stood with a wheelbarrow; inside was a wrapped body. Some Taliban were gathered on a hilltop, lowering a fallen comrade into a grave.
\n
\nI met Wakil, a bespectacled Taliban commander. Like many fighters I\u2019d encountered, he came from a line of farmers, had studied a few years in seminary, and had lost dozens of relatives to Amir Dado, the Ninety-third Division, and the Americans. He discussed the calamities visited on his family without rancor, as if the American War were the natural order of things. Thirty years old, he\u2019d attained his rank after an older brother, a Taliban commander, died in battle. He\u2019d hardly ever left Helmand, and his face lit up with wonder at the thought of capturing Gereshk, a town that he\u2019d lived within miles of, but had not been able to visit for twenty years. \u201cForget your writing,\u201d he laughed as I scribbled notes. <\/a>How did you decide when to include yourself in the narrative?<\/span>I tend to avoid the first person except when it is needed for either transparency or for narrative purposes. At this point in the story’s chronology, the American project had failed and the Taliban were poised to take over. It seemed appropriate to depict my trip to Taliban country here, since it marks a turning point in the piece from looking back to looking ahead.<\/span><\/span><\/a>How do you capture your interviews? Do you use a notebook or audio\/video recorder or both?<\/span>It will depend on the context. In rural Afghanistan, I tend to avoid a recorder as it elicits suspicion, instead relying on a notebook. In more stable environments like Syria, where I do a lot of reporting, I prefer to use my laptop \u2014 my handwriting in Arabic is terrible \u2014and will often record interviews as well.<\/span><\/span> \u201cCome watch me take the city!\u201d Tracking a helicopter gliding across the horizon, I declined. He raced off. An hour later, an image popped up on my phone of Wakil pulling down a poster of a government figure linked to the Ninety-third Division. Gereshk had fallen.
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\nAt the house of the Taliban district governor, a group of Talibs sat eating okra and naan, donated by the village. I asked them about their plans for when the war was over. Most said that they\u2019d return to farming, or pursue religious education. I\u2019d flown to Afghanistan from Iraq, a fact that impressed Hamid, a young commander. He said that he dreamed of seeing the Babylonian ruins, and asked, \u201cDo you think, when this is over, they\u2019ll give me a visa?\u201d
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\nIt was clear that the Taliban are divided about what happens next. During my visit, dozens of members from different parts of Afghanistan offered strikingly contrasting visions for their Emirate. Politically minded Talibs who have lived abroad and maintain homes in Doha or Pakistan told me\u2014perhaps with calculation\u2014that they had a more cosmopolitan outlook than before. A scholar who\u2019d spent much of the past two decades shuttling between Helmand and Pakistan said, \u201cThere were many mistakes we made in the nineties. Back then, we didn\u2019t know about human rights, education, politics\u2014we just took everything by power. But now we understand.\u201d In the scholar\u2019s rosy scenario, the Taliban will share ministries with former enemies, girls will attend school, and women will work \u201cshoulder to shoulder\u201d with men.
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\nYet in Helmand it was hard to find this kind of Talib. More typical was Hamdullah, a narrow-faced commander who lost a dozen family members in the American War, and has measured his life by weddings, funerals, and battles. He said that his community had suffered too grievously to ever share power, and that the maelstrom of the previous twenty years offered only one solution: the status quo ante. He told me, with pride, that he planned to join the Taliban\u2019s march to Kabul, a city he\u2019d never seen. He guessed that he\u2019d arrive there in mid-August.
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\nOn the most sensitive question in village life\u2014women\u2019s rights\u2014men like him have not budged. In many parts of rural Helmand, women are barred from visiting the market. When a Sangin woman recently bought cookies for her children at the bazaar, the Taliban beat her, her husband, and the shopkeeper. Taliban members told me that they planned to allow girls to attend madrassas, but only until puberty. As before, women would be prohibited from employment, except for midwifery. Pazaro said, ruefully, \u201cThey haven\u2019t changed at all.\u201d
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\nTravelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state. Unlike other rebel movements, the Taliban had provided practically no reconstruction, no social services beyond its harsh tribunals. It brooks no opposition: in Pan Killay, the Taliban executed a villager named Shaista Gul after learning that he\u2019d offered bread to members of the Afghan Army. Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban rule\u2014including the women I interviewed. It was as if the movement had won only by default, through the abject failures of its opponents. To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister\u2019s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble. What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.<\/em>
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\nThis grim calculus hovered over every conversation I had with villagers. In the hamlet of Yakh Chal, I came upon the ruins of an Afghan Army outpost that had recently been overrun by the Taliban. All that remained were mounds of scrap metal, cords, hot plates, gravel. The next morning, villagers descended on the outpost, scavenging for something to sell. Abdul Rahman, a farmer, was rooting through the refuse with his young son when an Afghan Army gunship appeared on the horizon. It was flying so low, he recalled, that \u201ceven Kalashnikovs could fire on it.\u201d But there were no Taliban around, only civilians. The gunship fired, and villagers began falling right and left. It then looped back, continuing to attack. \u201cThere were many bodies on the ground, bleeding and moaning,\u201d another witness said. \u201cMany small children.\u201d According to villagers, at least fifty civilians were killed.
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\nLater, I spoke on the phone with an Afghan Army helicopter pilot who had just relieved the one who attacked the outpost. He told me, \u201cI asked the crew why they did this, and they said, \u2018We knew they were civilians, but Camp Bastion\u2019 \u201d\u2014a former British base that had been handed over to the Afghans\u2014\u201c \u2018gave orders to kill them all.\u2019 \u201d As we spoke, Afghan Army helicopters were firing upon the crowded central market in Gereshk, killing scores of civilians. An official with an international organization based in Helmand said, \u201cWhen the government forces lose an area, they are taking revenge on the civilians.\u201d The helicopter pilot acknowledged this, adding, \u201cWe are doing it on the order of Sami Sadat.\u201d
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\nGeneral Sami Sadat headed one of the seven corps of the Afghan Army. Unlike the Amir Dado generation of strongmen, who were provincial and illiterate, Sadat obtained a master\u2019s degree in strategic management and leadership from a school in the U.K. and studied at the nato Military Academy, in Munich. He held his military position while also being the C.E.O. of Blue Sea Logistics, a Kabul-based corporation that supplied anti-Taliban forces with everything from helicopter parts to armored tactical vehicles. During my visit to Helmand, Blackhawks under his command were committing massacres almost daily: twelve Afghans were killed while scavenging scrap metal at a former base outside Sangin; forty were killed in an almost identical incident at the Army\u2019s abandoned Camp Walid; twenty people, most of them women and children, were killed by air strikes on the Gereshk bazaar; Afghan soldiers who were being held prisoner by the Taliban at a power station were targeted and killed by their own comrades in an air strike. (Sadat declined repeated requests for comment.)
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\nThe day before the massacre at the Yakh Chal outpost, CNN aired an interview with General Sadat. \u201cHelmand is beautiful\u2014if it\u2019s peaceful, tourism can come,\u201d he said. His soldiers had high morale, he explained, and were confident of defeating the Taliban. The anchor appeared relieved. \u201cYou seem very optimistic,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s reassuring to hear.\u201d
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\nI showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadat\u2019s Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Wali\u2019s house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girl\u2019s limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, \u201cWe\u2019re civilians!\u201d The choppers killed him and Wali\u2019s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. \u201cWhy are they doing this?\u201d he asked. \u201cAre they mocking us?\u201d


\nIn the course of a few hours in 2006, the Taliban killed thirty-two friends and relatives of Amir Dado, including his son. Three years later, they killed the warlord himself\u2014who by then had joined parliament\u2014in a roadside blast. The orchestrator of the assassination hailed from Pan Killay. In one light, the attack is the mark of a fundamentalist insurgency battling an internationally recognized government; in another, a campaign of revenge by impoverished villagers against their former tormentor; or a salvo in a long-simmering tribal war; or a hit by a drug cartel against a rival enterprise. All these readings are probably true, simultaneously. What\u2019s clear is that the U.S. did not attempt to settle such divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other. As a result, like the Soviets, the Americans effectively created two Afghanistans: one mired in endless conflict, the other prosperous and hopeful.
\n
\nIt is the hopeful Afghanistan that\u2019s now under threat, after Taliban fighters marched into Kabul in mid-August\u2014just as Hamdullah predicted. Thousands of Afghans have spent the past few weeks desperately trying to reach the Kabul airport, sensing that the Americans\u2019 frenzied evacuation may be their last chance at a better life. \u201cBro, you\u2019ve got to help me,\u201d the helicopter pilot I\u2019d spoken with earlier pleaded over the phone. At the time, he was fighting crowds to get within sight of the airport gate; when the wheels of the last U.S. aircraft pulled off the runway, he was left behind. His boss, Sami Sadat, reportedly escaped to the U.K.
\n
\nUntil recently, the Kabul that Sadat fled often felt like a different country, even a different century, from Sangin. The capital had become a city of hillside lights, shimmering wedding halls, and neon billboards that was joyously crowded with women: mothers browsed markets, girls walked in pairs from school, police officers patrolled in hijabs, office workers carried designer handbags. The gains these women experienced during the American War\u2014and have now lost\u2014are staggering, and hard to fathom when considered against the austere hamlets of Helmand: the Afghan parliament had a proportion of women similar to that of the U.S. Congress, and about a quarter of university students were female. Thousands of women in Kabul are understandably terrified that the Taliban have not evolved. In late August, I spoke by phone to a dermatologist who was bunkered in her home. She has studied in multiple countries, and runs a large clinic employing a dozen women. \u201cI\u2019ve worked too hard to get here,\u201d she told me. \u201cI studied too long, I made my own business, I created my own clinic. This was my life\u2019s dream.\u201d She had not stepped outdoors in two weeks.
\n
\nThe Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project\u2014the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. \u201cThey are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,\u201d Pazaro said. \u201cIs this justice?\u201d Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, \u201cThis is not \u2018women\u2019s rights\u2019 when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.\u201d Khalida, from a nearby village, said, \u201cThe Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.\u201d
\n
\nThe women in Helmand disagree among themselves about what rights they should<\/em> have. Some yearn for the old village rules to crumble\u2014they wish to visit the market or to picnic by the canal without sparking innuendo or worse. Others cling to more traditional interpretations. \u201cWomen and men aren\u2019t equal,\u201d Shakira told me. \u201cThey are each made by God, and they each have their own role, their own strengths that the other doesn\u2019t have.\u201d More than once, as her husband lay in an opium stupor, she fantasized about leaving him. Yet Nilofar is coming of age, and a divorce could cast shame on the family, harming her prospects. Through friends, Shakira hears stories of dissolute cities filled with broken marriages and prostitution. \u201cToo much freedom is dangerous, because people won\u2019t know the limits,\u201d she said. <\/a>Why did Shakira agree to cooperate with you, divulging her life history in such intimate detail?<\/span>I believe she, as with the other women I interviewed, was eager to share their stories. She viewed the act as cathartic. She and the others expressed pride, wonder and even delight at our conversations. Compared to other conflict zones I have reported from, I’ve found that Afghans are much easier to approach, perhaps because they have never carried the the type of all-consuming fear that comes from having lived under a dictatorship, like those who grew up in Saddam’s Iraq and Assad’s Syria. With that being said, the key to getting subjects to cooperate is, at least in the foreign context, cultural sensitivity. You’ll need to have an understanding of the culture and its myriad norms. For example, when sitting on the floor with a rural Afghan, especially an elder, you never show the soles of your feet. If you are a man, you avoid asking after his wife or daughter. Speaking the language helps a lot, as does a deep familiarity with the people and places of a subject’s life.<\/span><\/span> <\/a>Could you describe your interviewing style?<\/span>The most important work occurs before an interview. I will seek to familiarize myself with the context and learn the details of an area or an interview subject’s background to the fullest extent possible. This includes studying the scholarship and local language press, if available. For example, in my interview with Shakira, it was I who first brought up Amir Dado. I asked her if she remembered him. Until then she’d not mentioned him, but after I broached the topic, the recollections poured out of her and some ended up in the piece. If I had not known who he was or lacked familiarity with the tribal dynamics of Sangin, I would have missed a large part of the story. In the interview itself I always like to start with biography. I’m very interested in a subject’s life story, even if I have no intention of portraying it in a piece. I’ve found that this is usually an effective way of getting people to open up.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAll the women I met in Sangin, though, seemed to agree that their rights, whatever they might entail, cannot flow from the barrel of a gun\u2014and that Afghan communities themselves must improve the conditions of women. Some villagers believe that they possess a powerful cultural resource to wage that struggle: Islam itself. \u201cThe Taliban are saying women cannot go outside, but there is actually no Islamic rule like this,\u201d Pazaro told me. \u201cAs long as we are covered, we should be allowed.\u201d I asked a leading Helmandi Taliban scholar where in Islam was it stipulated that women cannot go to the market or attend school. He admitted, somewhat chagrined, that this was not an actual Islamic injunction. \u201cIt\u2019s the culture in the village, not Islam,\u201d he said. \u201cThe people there have these beliefs about women, and we follow them.\u201d Just as Islam offers fairer templates for marriage, divorce, and inheritance than many tribal and village norms, these women hope to marshal their faith\u2014the shared language across their country\u2019s many divides\u2014to carve out greater freedoms.
\n
\nThough Shakira hardly talks about it, she harbors such dreams herself. Through the decades of war, she continued to teach herself to read, and she is now working her way through a Pashto translation of the Quran, one sura at a time. \u201cIt gives me great comfort,\u201d she said. She is teaching her youngest daughter the alphabet, and has a bold ambition: to gather her friends and demand that the men erect a girls\u2019 school.
\n
\nEven as Shakira contemplates moving Pan Killay forward, she is determined to remember its past. The village, she told me, has a cemetery that spreads across a few hilltops. There are no plaques, no flags, just piles of stones that glow red and pink in the evening sun. A pair of blank flagstones project from each grave, one marking the head, one the feet.
\n
\nShakira\u2019s family visits every week, and she points to the mounds where her grandfather lies, where her cousins lie, because she doesn\u2019t want her children to forget. They tie scarves on tree branches to attract blessings, and pray to those departed. They spend hours amid a sacred geography of stones, shrubs, and streams, and Shakira feels renewed. <\/a>The New Yorker is known for its rigorous fact-checking system. How did the fact-checker go about confirming all the facts in your story, given the challenge of distance and the location of your sources in rural Afghanistan?<\/span>The biggest challenge was that the phone network went down during the final weeks of the Taliban’s takeover. But fortunately the fact checkers were eventually able to contact locals who confirmed key points of the story. In addition, they spent considerable time poring over the documents I’d obtained, both classified and open-source, to verify not only the factual content but my interpretation of that content.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nShortly before the Americans left, they dynamited her house, apparently in response to the Taliban\u2019s firing a grenade nearby. With two rooms still standing, the house is half inhabitable, half destroyed, much like Afghanistan itself. She told me that she won\u2019t mind the missing kitchen, or the gaping hole where the pantry once stood. Instead, she chooses to see a village in rebirth. Shakira is sure that a freshly paved road will soon run past the house, the macadam sizzling hot on summer days. The only birds in the sky will be the kind with feathers. Nilofar will be married, and her children will walk along the canal to school. The girls will have plastic dolls, with hair that they can brush. Shakira will own a machine that can wash clothes. Her husband will get clean, he will acknowledge his failings, he will tell his family that he loves them more than anything. They will visit Kabul, and stand in the shadow of giant glass buildings. \u201cI have to believe,\u201d she said. \u201cOtherwise, what was it all for?\u201d <\/a>How did you settle on this ending? When did the conversation come during your reporting trip?<\/span>This conversation took place early on, when I asked Shakira about her hopes for a post-America Afghanistan. It stuck with me because I felt it captured the bittersweet nature of the events of last year: the war and the bloodshed were finally coming to an end, but the future looked bleak. Shakira’s optimism \u2014 which she knows, deep down, is unwarranted \u2014seemed to encapsulate a bitter but undeniable truth of the American war.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n***
\n
\nChip Scanlan<\/strong> is an award-winning newspaper reporter who taught writing at The Poynter Institute for several years. He lives and writes in St. Petersburg, Florida, publishes\u00a0 Chip’s Writing Lessons<\/a> and two new books,”Writers on Writing” and “Thirty-three Ways Not to Screw Up Your Writing.”<\/em>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Yorker writer Anand Gopal worked through layers of sources to enter the veiled world of Afghan women under Taliban rule<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[13],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-2333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-chip-scanlan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHearing stories from behind the burqa - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2022\/09\/30\/afghanistan-taliban-womens-rights-burqa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hearing stories from behind the burqa - 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