Chapter Nine

SOUL SICK

Afghanistan

Lisa clutched her nine-millimeter weapon as insurgents fired into the house of men, women, and children. A team of US soldiers and Special Forces operators engaged in one of the worst firefights that had taken place in Wardak province; this central east region of Afghanistan was the scene of some of the most violent battles launched by violent extremists. Trapped by intense hostile fire, US forces battled a local Afghan insurgent group named Hezb-eIslami (HIG), or Party of Islam.

“There were fourteen people in the house, including four children. The women were in the back of the room,” Lisa told me in an interview.

The event took place in a small village. On the right side of the room in the back of the house, a local woman concealed by her clothing stood near a large propane tank. As insurgents continued to fire at American soldiers, an explosion hit the house. Lisa was blown out the front door. The suicide bomber killed four children and two American servicemen.

Lisa tried to stay calm as she shared her story. The memory of the female suicide bomber made her voice crack. Her eyes welled with tears. Her simple declarative sentences were like individual frames in a film.

“She was a nobody [to the men], a nomad from Pakistan who was moving weapons for the Taliban and the HIG. She was pushed outside of her tribe when her [Afghan] husband was killed.”

Before 2010, local insurgents didn’t include or invite women into their groups. Committing acts of violence was reserved for men. But that began to change when men became desperate and decided to recruit women to attack Americans. Insurgents operate from bone-white mountains in a parched, defeated land. Along the switchback mountain roads, the Kuchi, the Dari word for “nomad”—are always moving, with their camels, goats, sheep, and children. The women wear dazzling plum, yellow, and red dresses speckled with sequins and mirrors. To the outsider, the Kuchi are a people without borders or boundaries. Their life romanticized by Western historians, Kuchis are Pashtuns, the dominant tribe in Afghanistan, some now settled in cities and villages.

Nomads are convenient pawns for insurgents. They depend on them to move their weapons. Because the Kuchis are always moving, they are unsuspected collaborators. Sometimes, women act as facilitators and messengers. Few are killers. I knew from studying women in war that they are not involved in fighting. Female bombers are uncommon.

As a woman, Lisa was able to speak to the Kuchi women to glean information on the insurgents’ communications. She suspected that the nomads had knowledge of insurgent activity; they could be wives of the insurgents.

“I couldn’t get to the bomber quick enough,” she said.

For years, I had listened to stories like this: survivors of tragedy, grateful to be alive, never forget that frightening, dark moment. American novelist William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”¹ Lisa had a collection of memories from her deployments to Afghanistan, but that one harrowing event seemed to be life-changing for her. Because she survived.

“These women do what they are told. What they know is to hate us because they don’t know us,” Lisa said.

There can be few places as hostile as Afghanistan, between the scorching sun of summer and the piercing subzero winds of winter. In some parts of the country, the landscape is drained of all color except white and patches of beige. Other provinces reveal shades of lime green and placid water. To the outsider, the daily carnage is so singularly unspectacular, so primitive. As if conflict were familiar to the country and the people were accustomed to certain expectations—violent displacements, unfit rulers, and the silence of grief.

In a country defined by stereotypes, eye-catching pictures of Afghan girls and stories of women tormented by conflict have captured our imagination. Consider Steve McCurry’s iconic photograph of the girl with green eyes, her unruly brown hair half-covered in a crimson shawl—this single image of an Afghan girl in tattered clothing from the cover of the June 1985 National Geographic revealed a nation haunted by war. Or the stories told by American-Afghan physician-turned-novelist Khaled Hosseini, widely known for his huge best seller The Kite Runner, who explores the lives of mothers and daughters in A Thousand Splendid Suns, a heartbreaking saga of women afflicted by Afghanistan’s violent history.

Lisa continued, “I tried to understand why this woman did what she did. We found out that when her husband was killed, she was pushed outside of her tribe. She had two male children. She looked old and harsh. I guessed she was over forty. She had years on her face. In that culture, when a woman loses her husband, she loses everything. Men take advantage of a woman’s loss in order to further the insurgency. They use her vulnerability, and it increases her anger and hatred for us.

“This is a scary trend. Men are learning how to use women in a country where it’s against the cultural norm for women to step outside the home. I believe the woman was desperate. She had no home. She had no tribe. So, she chose revenge.”

Anger is an intense emotion. And because it’s a powerful emotion, it demands an equally powerful response. Psychologists describe anger as an attack against someone or something. I have seen anger on the faces of women in conflict, whose inevitable, necessary madness leads them to an unbound darkness. The result is an unhealthy response to overcome the pain of loss.

The complete identity of the female bomber is sometimes unknown. Even when female operatives are named, they are slippery characters. Their lives are fragmented and distorted by half-truths reported in the media or by their families. For the weak, wearing death as a dress is a desirable personal choice. Lisa believed that the woman who nearly killed her was emotionally bruised.

“I couldn’t save her.”

“It’s not easy to save every woman,” I said. “You must trust that God is watching over them.”

For a moment, she had an expression of rage, a searing emotion: the feeling of helplessness, of being abandoned and not knowing how to rescue the desperate Afghan woman. Perhaps Lisa thought she could do something, just something, rather than betray her conscience with the illusion of helping a people she barely knew. Here there were no abstractions; here was flesh and blood, the unmistakable truth of vulnerability that ended the lives of one woman and the soldiers Lisa had known, lives lost to senseless violence in a place where the sky can be pink with purple clouds at sunset, and the water can go from emerald to deep indigo under the light of a half-moon. Afghanistan is still wild and beautiful. I wondered how women coped with the spell of conflict in a place thickened with silence, the memories of war confined to the slow-moving front of time.

Lisa refuted the stereotypes of women seduced by the severity and savagery of decades-long fighting. On the other side of war, she discovered women with emotional power: an affection and attachment to one another, their grace and goodness reflected in small acts of charity. The more I listened to Lisa, the more I understood that Afghan women were diverse, different, and determined to survive, despite the odds against them. In her own personal journey through Afghanistan, author Christina Lamb discovered the brave writers of the province of Herat, who risked their lives to carry on a literary tradition under the guise of sewing circles.²

During one of my talks on Islam, I met Lisa at Fort Hood, Texas. Outside the auditorium, Lisa introduced herself to me as a senior officer in the US Army leading missions in Afghanistan. I remember her trusting eyes, pained with a brutal truth: she could not save the fallen victims of Afghanistan. In that single moment, I learned enough about the personal tragedies in her life. She later told me that she grew up in the South, raised by her mother, who was widowed and poor. A man she loved ran away or died. She raised three boys with the help of her mother. Two sons went to war and died in battle.

“When my boys were killed, life got simple,” she said.

Her youngest son lives with his grandmother. Her second love, a man from Afghanistan, betrayed her, and the short-lived marriage ended badly. She was now on her own.

When I returned to Virginia, Lisa and I met a few times a year, sharing food and chai in each other’s homes. Her photographs of Afghanistan portrayed a country of ravaged magnificence: alluvial plains funneled upward to the dove-white mountain peaks; leafless trees bathed in a mango sun; wisps of snow buried the living green under a silver-black night sky; and women with brilliant blue eyes large as leaves were revealed when the all-covering veil was removed. Lisa also told me what I suspected to be true: the continuity of blasts and gunfire created an irrational, possessing anxiety for American soldiers returning home.

So long as the war continued, the exchange of manic, almost uncontrollable fire would invite more extremism, the terrorist attacks, the crisis of leadership, and the conflict with the Taliban. This is how the world knows Afghanistan. In few places is death as widespread. Children born there have the bleakest futures. According to one report, Afghanistan is the fourth most dangerous country in the world.³ Other surveys list the country as the worst place for women, who are at high risk for health threats, sexual violence, oppression from cultural and religious traditions, lack of access to legal recourse, human trafficking, and systematic rape.

Perhaps the greatest threat of all to Afghan women is their family. Women experience forced marriage and physical, sexual, and psychological abuse at the hands of men. “It’s a question of control and power. You use religion, you use culture, you use tradition, you use gender to keep the power, to keep control,” said Sima Samar, women’s rights activist and chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, in an interview with Al Jazeera.

The female bomber’s death was not the end of the story. There would be more women to follow. These stories were painful to hear, but they had become imaginable. My former students who had been deployed once or twice to Afghanistan shared their own experiences with female bombers. The women, hidden behind thick clothing, pretending to be innocent victims of war, target Americans and Afghan nationals in acts of vengeance. These women rarely make television news headlines. Their identities are enshrouded in secrecy, their lives largely unknown to local authorities.

At times, it was difficult to listen to the stories of these women who are burdened by a place that is corrupt, unsettling, a cobweb of crises and self-contained chaos. One afternoon as I listened to Lisa, I had a mental image of a woman in a burqa, her eyes emptied of kindness as she released the deadly weapon.

If we cannot identify the bomber, whom can we blame? Society needs to have someone to blame for the carnage and crimes committed against humanity. In cases where the female bomber was known, who were the most blameworthy of all? Culture? The men? The conflict? The state? Other countries?

Lisa continued, “We did a lot of things wrong in Afghanistan. We mistreated their homes and their property. Land and water are two important things for the people there, and we abused them.”

Lisa experienced Afghanistan with unceasing love for its people. She sat with tribal men, one of whom had an emotional breakdown in front of her. She was given permission to meet the women behind the curtain, the wives of elders who had seldom “felt compassion from their husbands or children,” she told me. Lisa gained the trust of a shaikh, who invited her into his home to meet his three wives and twenty-one children. Her memories of Afghanistan went beyond a mosaic of colors spiraling across a cobalt sky.

From the beginning, the most immediate question for me was how Afghan women can attain the most basic human rights when traditions argue against it. It surprised me that women were denied gender equality promised to them under Islamic law. For decades, patriarchs and powerful Islamists have defined women’s roles in society, denying them the opportunity to contribute to their country’s growth as well as their own individual success. Confined to puritanical Islam, women are at risk from violent extremist groups.

“Many women are enslaved by men,” Lisa said. “Some turn violent. They are soul sick.”

I stared at her. She had tried for years to unravel the hidden complexity of violence committed by Muslim women in a country governed feverishly by men. The bizarre unpredictability of women’s lives ordered by religious and traditional rituals had always frustrated me. Despite its complicated history, Afghanistan had its heroines—police officers, journalists, film directors, underground teachers, doctors, actresses, pilots, and paratroopers, to name a few, who were redefining their country’s political and social landscape.

The more time I spent with Lisa, the more details of her career she confided in me. She told me that she had interrogated hundreds of terrorist suspects, sympathizers, and seasoned professionals. In 2009, in a northern Iraqi city, Lisa questioned the wife of a terrorist leader. She described her to me as a local woman with a baby. For twenty-one days, every day, Lisa tried to talk to the woman, who was angry and desperate to escape prison. She cried for hours; she paced her cell; she recited scripture. “Are you going to talk to me?” Lisa asked every day; on the fifth day, she brought the prisoner a cup of tea. “I want to understand. Is this jihad?” The woman replied, “You killed my husband.” Lisa made it clear that she wasn’t going to hurt her.

“Some days, we said nothing,” Lisa recalled. “Other days, she would talk to me, or I would hold her hand. The simple act of holding her hand let her know that she could trust me. I would keep my word. In exchange for valuable information, I would let her go, even though it was risky for her. If men knew she had been imprisoned and told us about them and their activities, they would likely kill her.”

When the prisoner told Lisa everything she knew about the men, she was released. “We gave her $100 and sent her off in a taxi. We detained her longer than we should have. I remember the last conversation: she said al-Qaeda in Iraq was coming for her. I told her to escape, but ten miles down the road, extremist men stopped her and killed her. I regret her death, although she did the right thing by talking to us.”

The conversations Lisa had with female extremists in Iraq would have been difficult in Afghanistan, where many women were unseen, unknown, and unheard of. Lisa wished she could have learned more about the bomber in Afghanistan who nearly killed her. To not know who they were made her feel anonymous and invisible. The survivors of suicide attacks might be, as writer Christopher Hitchens calls it in Mortality, “living dyingly,” waiting for their own expiration date as night lacerates with bands of day.

Lisa found solace in the women of Afghanistan. She said, “What I know is that women have an amazing capability to secure each other. It’s an emotional bond. We trust each other. I was supposed to hate these women because they are the enemy, but I know that’s not always true. When you talk to women, you have a cultural exchange.”

“Most women don’t have decision-making power,” I said.

“Men make false promises,” Lisa added. “Their leaders tell them it’s their duty to act; their children will be martyrs; they will go to Heaven. But we both know that not all women choose violence.”

She continued, “We need to change the choices. Women have limited options in Afghanistan. I’ve seen women broken. They are caged. They are not nurtured by men. So, it’s easy for men to psychically and psychologically abuse them; it’s easy for men to control them. . . . The bond between men and women doesn’t exist, as it does here [in the West]. . . . The loss of a woman means nothing.”

When women are manipulated, managed, and maintained by men, they are expendable. I thought. How does it end? Is it possible to break through the cycle of violence?

“When does the violence end?” I asked.

“You start by listening,” Lisa said. “I bring me to the job. I am a soldier first. I begin by asking Afghans, ‘How can I help you?’ We have to understand their side, and that’s when listening helps. I lost two sons. I tell the tribes about my boys. It’s genuine and honest.”

Lisa understood that empathy demands authenticity, an acceptance of heart-numbing sadness expressed by a stranger. It is the desire for human contact, the ability to shift the perspective to the inside—empathy is the emotional consequence of sharing one’s life story. For as long as I have known Lisa, she has given me the truest part of herself. She has made me proud to know her and helped me accept the banal truth that you can’t have everything at the same time.

“I tell the men there is no life without women. Afghanistan needs men and women for progress,” she said. The overstated truth of both genders working together for a common purpose—a strong, stable Afghanistan—should be the blueprint for American foreign policy. Without its women, Afghanistan will have no lasting peace.

“Ultimately, girls need an education,” Lisa said.

The natural solution has always been education for girls. When they become wives and mothers, they pass on their schooling to the next generation. More important, the fundamental right to learning is a religious obligation. Islam grants girls the right to an education. In the time of the Prophet, women were granted access to him. He made special arrangements for the education and training of women, and some women in his family were the most knowledgeable on matters of faith. Ayesha was revered for her intelligence and scholarship of Islamic doctrine. She is believed to have reported more than two thousand traditions and set an example of women teaching women and men.

The importance of learning is highlighted in more than five hundred places in the Quran, beginning with the first commandment revealed to the Prophet through Archangel Gabriel: “Read in the name of your Lord, who created man from a clot. Read! And your Lord is the most generous. Who taught by the pen. Taught man which he knew not” (Quran 96:1–5). Scholars agree that this verse emphasizes the need for Muslims to learn and preserve knowledge with the help of a pen as well as the importance of record keeping for future generations. Like the Quran, oral traditions attest to knowledge as one of the greatest pillars of faith. The Prophet said, “Seek knowledge even if you have to go to China” and “God makes the path to Paradise easy for one who walks on it for gaining knowledge.” Therefore, education is obligatory for women in the same way it is required for men. The fact that some Muslim countries refuse to honor the right to female education explains why women are underrepresented in politics, many fail to achieve economic independence, and most continue to live subordinated lives.

An Afghan-American scholar and activist, who wished to be unnamed, told me that progress for women is slow. In her briefings to the United States Congress, she focuses on improving the lives of women across Afghanistan. In one conversation, she confided, “It’s getting worse for women. Whenever I go to Afghanistan, I see women suffering from violence, trauma, and abuse from their families. Even NGOs are taking advantage of these women by not providing adequate resources and support.”

Afghanistan is slowly changing. In an interview, Herat’s director of education, Ghulam Hazrat Tanha, once said, “If women are educated . . . their children will be too.” According to a local religious leader, “Education is like sun and water. Without it, you can’t grow anything. But if girls are educated, they can change our whole society.”⁴

Lisa told me, “Today, some women in Afghanistan are educated and working. They are fighting for everything, but still submissive to the country’s customs.”

Outside, the sky had turned a faint rose color, the sun sinking, as I listened to Lisa’s words, dark like the sea. I thought of all my Afghan friends, in and outside the city of Kabul, working toward a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan. They know that terrorism is not over—that Afghanistan is open like a wound. A succession of leaders have tried, and failed, to secure the country. Over the past decade, the conflict brought out the worst in people: greed, corruption, great violence.

Nightfall set in. I wondered when Lisa might return to Afghanistan. If it was possible to find a civilized calm in a place haunted by unmarked graves. If, after retirement from the army, she would return to Afghanistan to find the women she once met when she was in uniform. If she might hear the collective fury of women expressed in poetry—the landays, or verses, of longing for love or a home and the truth about war—a secret form of rebellion that Afghan women used to share their heartbreak, shame men, and protest oppression committed against them. My pains grow as my life dwindles; I will die with a heart full of hope.

In Lisa’s story, details of the female bomber were incomplete. I wanted to know more. But I knew that there is still much we do not know about the women in today’s violent groups. To what degree do women participate in the various activities of the movements, such as recruiting new members, raising funds, or socializing the youth? The most important sequencing issue is when females join violent extremism: we barely have a glimpse into their lives, before and after they disappear into the fold of violent extremism. Some experts are still trying to understand the link between religion and extremism, a complex hybrid. While the role of women in violent extremism is no longer new, I continue to argue for further research to add depth to the analysis and undoubtedly uncover new questions.

In my living room, moonlight streamed in through passing clouds. It was getting late for Lisa, who had a long drive home. I wished we lived closer, to appreciate the intimate details of a person’s life, the mercurial moods of a woman serving in the Muslim world, and the ghostly presence of lives swallowed by the earth.

“Every time I leave Afghanistan, I leave behind women who are not yet healed,” Lisa said.

I knew the pain of having built another relationship with a woman in a faraway place, only to let it go, though her words and face would feel vivid for years to come.

“I come back home in tears,” she said. “Every time. There’s a closeness I feel to the place and the people. It’s like a family bond that stays with me.”

War makes death inevitable. As a researcher-storyteller, I cannot share Lisa’s pain or know the signals of hurt that leave behind scars, the stories of suffering that pass like a slow-motion movie. Though I did understand the need to recognize that chronic social suffering is a fact of life. My mind will be forever stuck on the restlessness of not knowing if women will be free enough, and the need to answer this one urgent question: Will Afghanistan honor women’s rights? No doubt this debate will rage, or splutter, for years to come: the never-ending cultural chasm between conservatives and liberals battling for a country to be kind to its women.