The Punishment of Virtue

"This is by a former National Public Radio reporter who moved to Afghanistan after 9/11 and stayed. She is completely immersed in the community and is unflinching in her account of what has gone wrong here, especially as regards political corruption. She very accurately captures the simple nobility of the Afghan people and gives a brilliant portrayal of living in these communities. People are amazed that I, as a six-foot blond woman, was allowed to move around so freely in the border areas but I was always, well, not always but almost always, well-treated. The friendliness is tremendous and I rarely had problems. In fact I was lucky because I had access to women – that 50 per cent of the population that my male colleagues did not have access to. Of course, that’s true, but there are a lot of misconceptions about that too. I’ve had meetings with male Taliban officials, Pashtun leaders about women wearing burkhas and not being allowed out. I’m not saying I support their view but they really believe that they are protecting the women. The horrible brutality that has taken place there makes them think that covering up their women and having them protected by men when they go out in public is vital to keeping them safe. A lot of the rigid laws that exist are little bit more understandable once you live there. I’m not saying I support them, but to me the greatest urgency is to expand educational opportunities for girls so that they can become part of the workforce. The offence to humankind is not the veil but the fact that women don’t get access to education. The burkha or veil, I believe, should be a matter of personal choice. It’s not one I understand or a choice I would make, but it is an issue that is overblown. In the West, we see the veil as a sign of a woman’s persecution or submission, but many Muslims see as a sign of Western women’s degradation that they are draped half-naked over a car in advertisements. Probably. I have friends who go out in tube tops and short shorts and I think they look ridiculous, but it’s up to them. I have friends who choose to wear the veil too, and I take the same attitude. For me, the key issue is access to education and freedom to work. Again, if you speak to the male community leaders – and I’m not letting them off the hook – they say it’s not safe to let the women out to work and this is to some extent understandable in the really insecure areas. We must help change that by extending rule of law. Yes, they are certainly working. But in some ways it might be easier for them to go out and work in the community, in schools and health centres, than it is for Western women, because in South Asia families tend to live with their large extended families. Again in the Sachs book he talks about the sweatshops of Bangladesh and women who walk two hours to work and are paid paltry wages and then walk two hours home. Outsiders tend to think of this as terrible but, in fact, when he interviewed the women they were delighted to earn a salary that they control. In Afghanistan and Pakistan my experience is that women want these opportunities for their daughters and we would do ourselves a favour to listen to them."