Rahmat Gul/AP Photo
Women wait inside the passport office in Kabul, Afghanistan, June 30, 2021.
In the spring of 2018, while giving a talk at a community college in Maryland, I asked the audience for a show of hands.
“How many of you can tell me the longest war in U.S. history?” One hand, belonging to a recent veteran, went up.
“How many of you know the capital of Afghanistan?” A few more.
“What about its official languages? Religions?” A bit less than half.
“OK, how many of you know something, anything, about Afghan women?”
Every single hand in the auditorium went up.
For some in the room, it was the now-iconic “Afghan girl” National Geographic cover; for others, it was a woman in blue burqa, face obscured. But each person had an image of an Afghan woman readily at hand—a testament to how central these images were to Americans’ conception of a war that, as of this weekend’s 48-hour Taliban onslaught, has come to an ignominious end.
In her 2013 book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Lila Abu-Lughod describes the reductive imagery around Afghan women—silent, shrouded, unable to leave their homes without male accompaniment—that pervaded U.S. airwaves in the early days of the 2001 invasion.
The way Afghan women were depicted in Western media was removed from the complex realities on the ground.
Abu-Lughod didn’t deny the oppression faced by women at the hands of the Taliban. But, she argued, the way Afghan women were depicted in Western media was removed from the complex realities on the ground. Such representations reduced these women to a series of contextless images. They sought to blame culture or Islam, while ignoring the long history of foreign involvement in Afghanistan that contributes to the current situation—from the social disintegration during the Soviet occupation to the sexual violence during the subsequent civil war and mujahideen rule. They collapsed Afghan women—who encompass a complex mosaic of identities, ages, ethnicities, classes, and religious backgrounds—into a single voiceless image with a single set of desires, which in turn made it seem like the only solution for them was to be saved from their own society by Western forces.
Twenty years later, as the precipitous U.S. withdrawal unfolds and the Taliban seize power, women are again at the center of the story. We are hearing fear that the gains in women’s rights of the last two decades will be lost under a new Taliban rule, hope that they will not, and a great deal of cynicism about saving women as a pretext for war to begin with.
As we struggle to make sense of current events and what they mean for women, it is helpful to revisit the critique of “saving women,” which offered a way to think critically about how women’s rights have been deployed in justifying intervention for two decades. What does it have to teach us now? I think it can offer three correctives that are relevant to this moment.
First, Afghan women never needed “saving.”
The scores of articles published in recent weeks acclaiming the “gains” women have made since the invasion make it seem as though, before Western forces arrived, women had no rights or voice. This ignores both the decades before the 1990s, during which women went to school and worked, and the underground education and organizing that women engaged in during the Taliban years. As one Kabul-based Afghan activist told me, “The Taliban regime didn’t last long enough for those underground schools to revolt.” While it is impossible to know what might have happened, her larger point is that it is Afghan women, not the United States, who are responsible for the gains they made as a result of—often in spite of—changing political circumstances.
Second, the invasion did not save Afghan women.
The United States and its NATO allies funneled billions of dollars of aid into Afghanistan, some of which was used to construct schools and hospitals. In those same years, they also perpetuated a reality of violence across the country, particularly in contested provinces or Taliban strongholds. A recent report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network, based on extensive interviews with 23 women in rural Afghanistan, reminds us of the disparate kinds of violence and obstacles women face as a result of war—from night raids and drone attacks, to domestic violence made worse by economic and political instability, to loss of the everyday ability to move freely from one town to another. We erase that violence when we talk about Afghan women as a single group who have gained as a result of intervention or assume to know what all Afghan women want for themselves and their families.
Third, the U.S. will not save Afghan women. But this does not mean the U.S. government and its allies have no responsibility toward them. In President Joe Biden’s July remarks on the drawdown in Afghanistan, one exchange between the president and an Afghan female journalist stuck with me, and with so many others who are thinking about the status of Afghan women now. The journalist asked Biden if he had a message for women concerned for their futures. The president responded with an anecdote about a conversation he had with a nameless young woman while visiting the country:
“It was heartbreaking. ‘You can’t leave,’ she said. ‘I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. If you leave, I’ll never be able to be a doctor.’”
The U.S. will not save Afghan women. But this does not mean the U.S. government and its allies have no responsibility toward them.
President Biden shared this during a briefing in which he explained why the United States spent so much time and resources in Afghanistan, but also why he couldn’t carry on. For his critics, the encounter was held up to show America’s moral obligation to stay.
For me, though, this exchange captures the fundamental problem at the heart of the “saving women” narrative. Beyond collapsing the differences among Afghan women, and whitewashing military intervention, it has an even more basic flaw: It presented a false choice. The United States could either rescue women with military might or abandon them.
This false choice yokes an abstract definition of women’s rights to military intervention, while ignoring the demands of women themselves. Indeed, when America engaged in talks with the Taliban, women were largely excluded. The dichotomy leaves no possibility to imagine an alternative reality, where women could be stakeholders in Afghanistan’s future, rather than props or moral pawns. It’s worth noting that as late as last week, with the national government on the brink of collapse and so many fearing for their futures, this is what I heard over and over from Afghan women: They were not angry about the withdrawal itself, but rather, about the failure to be included, meaningfully, in that process.
“They didn’t include us on anything,” the activist told me by phone a few weeks ago. She was sitting at a café in Kabul; it was a Friday night, and I could hear a guitarist strumming in the background in what felt, even at the time, like a fleeting moment. “We deserved a responsible withdrawal. We needed a responsible withdrawal.”
