Do you recall this photo, a young refugee whose pierc­ing gaze con­fronted read­ers of National Geo­graphic dur­ing the Soviet Union’s inva­sion of Afghanistan? Her image became an endur­ing icon of that war’s hor­rific impact on Afghan fam­i­lies and orphans.

© 1984 National Geo­graphic

For many peo­ple this photo sym­bol­izes the suf­fer­ing of peo­ple pow­er­less to pro­tect them­selves or loved ones from the hor­rors of war­fare, cor­rupt gov­ern­ments or greedy war­lords.

Afghan Women

Then as now few peo­ple are as pow­er­less as Afghan women and girls. For cen­turies their tra­di­tional cul­ture has oppressed women. All aspects of their lives are utterly con­trolled by the men in their fam­ily, bound by the con­straints of a cru­elly nar­row-minded honor code.

Girls and women live in fear of say­ing or doing any­thing, even unwit­tingly, that might bring dis­honor to the fam­ily or tribe. The small­est infrac­tion could trig­ger an honor killing if the fam­ily or tribe decides it’s war­ranted. Hus­bands, fathers, broth­ers, uncles — all have the power to kill an Afghan woman whose behav­ior is seen as dis­hon­or­ing the fam­ily.

The offenses that might merit ston­ing are unimag­in­able to some­one who has grown up in a per­mis­sive West­ern cul­ture. Dis­play­ing one’s face, arms or ankles to a stranger; mak­ing eye con­tact, talk­ing while unsu­per­vised to a male who is not a fam­ily mem­ber — the list goes on and on.

Women in burqa

For most Afghan tribes the best way to avoid the risk of dis­honor is to pre­vent women and girls above a cer­tain age from being seen by any man out­side their fam­ily. Hence the burqa, a shroud-like gar­ment which cov­ers the form from head to toe, con­sid­ered manda­tory for hon­or­able women when doing errands away from home.

Most Afghan women are trapped inside the home, chained to the kitchen and an unend­ing cycle of chores. Once a girl is deemed old enough to marry (as young as 9 in some fam­i­lies), she can no longer leave her home unless escorted by a male fam­ily mem­ber. If need be, sons escort their moth­ers to the bazaar for shop­ping.

Is Education the Solution?

This seques­tra­tion of women makes it very dif­fi­cult to intro­duce West­ern-style reforms such as edu­ca­tion, let alone the right to vote or hold office. West­ern­ers have tended to believe the solu­tion lies in build­ing schools and libraries, fund­ing teach­ers, and cre­at­ing edu­ca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties for girls.

The say­ing among phil­an­thropists goes, “Edu­cate the girls and the whole fam­ily ben­e­fits. Edu­cate the boys, and they’ll leave home to emi­grate to places with bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ties.” This is cer­tainly what my friends and I have believed. We were enthralled with the hope­ful pos­si­bil­i­ties raised by books like Three Cups of Tea, the mis­sion to edu­cate girls in order to improve the soci­ety in which they live.

Just build­ing schools and libraries — “build it and they will come” — may be doomed to fail­ure, because it ignores the cul­tural real­i­ties that keep Afghan women trapped in poverty and illit­er­acy. In My Father’s Coun­try, a thought-pro­vok­ing book by an Afghan woman who moved to the US at age 15, raises chal­leng­ing ques­tions:

So much atten­tion is paid to build­ing schools for girls, but their men refuse to allow them to go. In a cul­ture where women are so depen­dent on the good­will of men, how can we expect to move wom­en’s rights for­ward with­out get­ting the men to bring them to the new age of lib­erty and democ­racy?

— Saima Wahab, In My Father’s Coun­try, © 2012

Saima’s book tells her jour­ney from Kabul to Port­land (and back to Afghanistan), with an empha­sis on the impact of Pash­tun cul­ture on every­day fam­ily life.

One Woman’s Perspective

Like Shar­bat Gula, the young Afghan girl in the iconic photo, Saima Wahab lost her father to the Sovi­ets. Like her she was forced to flee with her fam­ily to Pak­istan when their vil­lage came under con­stant attack from Russ­ian bomb­ing.

Unlike the orphaned Shar­bat Gula, Saima was lucky enough to have rel­a­tives who could spon­sor her emi­gra­tion to Amer­ica, along with two sib­lings, in the late 1980s. Join­ing her uncles’ house­hold in Port­land, Saima learned Eng­lish, attended school and landed a full-time job.

Despite liv­ing in Amer­ica, her uncles con­tin­ued to enforce the Pash­tun way of life and its restric­tions on women. Their rules were so con­fin­ing that Saima even­tu­ally rebelled and moved out of their house, once she earned enough money to pay rent.

As one exam­ple, phone calls from male class­mates could send Saima’s uncles into a frenzy, falsely accus­ing her of provoca­tive or licen­tious behav­ior despite her efforts to avoid any­one’s notice. The fact that these male callers were gen­er­ally seek­ing home­work help did not excuse her behav­ior in her uncles’ eyes, one of whom was a col­lege pro­fes­sor.

In 2004 Saima was recruited as a trans­la­tor by a mil­i­tary con­trac­tor (there were very few flu­ent Pashtu-Eng­lish speak­ers at that time). This enabled her to return to Afghanistan, where Saima served as an inter­preter for US mil­i­tary com­man­ders in charge of recon­struc­tion mis­sions and liai­son to gov­ern­ment offi­cials. While work­ing in Afghanistan, Saima took advan­tage of every pos­si­ble oppor­tu­nity to meet and talk with Afghan women in their homes and vil­lages.

Saima’s life story and her inti­mate con­ver­sa­tions with Afghan men and women make her book, In My Father’s Coun­try, a com­pelling insid­er’s look at the cul­tural real­i­ties and con­flicts of con­tem­po­rary Afghanistan. It’s well worth read­ing by any­one who wants to under­stand what life is like in today’s Afghanistan.

Sadly, the book does not offer any pat answers to the ques­tion of how best to help Afghan women. It raises trou­bling ques­tions about the effi­cacy of today’s well-inten­tioned NGO and phil­an­thropic approaches. (It also reveals the per­va­sive cor­rup­tion within the Afghan gov­ern­ing struc­ture.)

What it does make clear, how­ever, is that any last­ing solu­tion must be forged by peo­ple who truly under­stand the cul­ture and its mores, who oper­ate from within the sys­tem to pro­mote changes through solu­tions that will pro­voke less resis­tance from the peo­ple with power over wom­en’s lives.

If only all we had to do was build libraries and schools to make a dif­fer­ence to these pow­er­less women…