{"id":26254,"date":"2021-09-06T17:24:11","date_gmt":"2021-09-07T00:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=26254"},"modified":"2021-09-06T17:24:11","modified_gmt":"2021-09-07T00:24:11","slug":"article-the-other-afghan-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=26254","title":{"rendered":"Article: The Other Afghan Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Other Afghan Women | The New Yorker<\/a><\/p>\n

Just read a long-form article in the New Yorker, about the war in Afghanistan – what locals call “the American war” – from the perspective of a rural woman. The article is excellent – probably the best I’ll read this year – but absolutely devastating. Content warning for everything you’d expect, including many deaths, including of children.<\/p>\n

Dado 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, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. 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<\/p>\n

The incident didn\u2019t affect Dado\u2019s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable in serving up \u201cterrorists.\u201d […]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The “terrorists” were essentially any men – completely innocent men included – our allies could grab and turn over to the US in exchange for a bounty. <\/p>\n

In 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. […]<\/p>\n

It 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.<\/p>\n

So 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Other Afghan Women | The New Yorker Just read a long-form article in the New Yorker, about the war in Afghanistan – what locals call “the American war” – from the perspective of a rural woman. The article is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26255,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26254\/revisions\/26255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}