The Underground Girls of Kabul Read Free Page B

treatment of women for years, consensus among foreigners now converged on the need to quickly usher Afghan women closer to a Western version of equality. A “gender workshop” seemed to be taking place at every upscale hotel in Kabul, where European and American women in ethnic jewelry and embroidered tunics held seminars and drew circles on whiteboards around words like “empowerment” and “awareness.” Throughout Afghanistan, hundreds of disparate aid projects were under way, whose euphemistically stated goals were to enlighten Afghans on topics such as “gender mainstreaming” and “gender dialogue.”
    But senior officials at the United Nations and experts from both government and independent aid organizations delivered a unanimous dismissal when I approached them: Afghans did not dress daughters as sons to counter their segregated society. Why would they ever do that? Had more girls like Mehran existed, these experts, heavily invested in the plight of Afghan women, would certainly know about it, I was told. Anthropologists, psychologists, and historians would surely also have taken note, as such a thing would seem to go against the common understanding of Afghanistan’s culture,where one dresses strictly according to gender. Books would have been written and academic studies would have been made. Ergo, such a practice—if it was really a practice and not just an oddity—
must
not exist. Gender segregation in Afghanistan is among the strictest in the world, I was repeatedly told, making such an act unthinkable. Dangerous, even.
    But persistent inquiries among Afghans offered a different, if muddled, view. My male translator casually remarked that he had heard of a distant girl cousin who dressed as a boy, but had never understood or thought much of it. Other Afghans echoed occasional rumors of such girls but uniformly advised that I better leave it alone; poking into the private affairs and traditions of families was never a good idea for a foreigner.
    An Afghan diplomat eventually offered a firsthand sighting, remembering a friend on his neighborhood football team during the Taliban era in the 1990s. One day the friend just disappeared and a number of his teammates went to his house in search of the boy. His father stepped out of the doorway and said that unfortunately their friend would not be returning. She had changed back to being a girl. The team’s twelve-year-olds on the street outside were stunned.
    This, however, was an
anomaly
, the diplomat assured me. Any such desperate and uncivilized measures could be blamed solely on the horrors of the Taliban era. A 2003 Afghan feature film,
Osama
, had actually told a story of a young girl who disguised herself as a boy under Taliban rule. But that was fiction, of course. And besides, these were new, enlightened times in Afghanistan, the diplomat said.
    But were they really?
    To a reporter, the aggressive pushback by expert foreigners and Afghans alike was intriguing. What if this pointed to something bigger than just Azita’s family—something that might raise questions about what else we were missing in our decade-long quest to understand Afghanistan and its culture?
    I was hoping Carol le Duc might have some input on the topic. With her red hair and jewel-toned silk
shalwars
, Carol never seemedto offer the same confident and often-repeated theses about Afghans or what their country needed in terms of basic understanding of Western values. “I would never call myself a feminist,” she had said, for instance, when I first met her. “No, no, I leave that to the others.”
    Instead, Carol is of a kind that eschews the expat crowd, preferring to socialize with the Afghan families she befriended many years ago, when fewer foreigners were allowed into the country under Taliban rule. She is believed by many to have the sharpest institutional memory in Kabul and is famous for having been one of few women to have negotiated with the Taliban when they were in