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Ask a Feminist: Jennifer Fluri Discusses the Gender Politics of the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan with Sandra McEvoy

Jennifer Fluri and Sandra McEvoy

The following conversation took place over SquadCast in November 2021. An edited transcript is below.

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[social_warfare]

Sandra McEvoy (SM): Hi, this is Sandy McEvoy. I am a clinical associate professor of political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Boston University, and I am so excited to be conducting this Ask a Feminist interview for Signs on the gender politics of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. We’re thrilled to be joined by Jennifer Fluri, who is a professor of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and who has written extensively about gender and Afghanistan for many years. Jennifer, thank you so much for taking the time to be here with us today.

Jennifer Fluri (JF): Thank you, I’m happy to be here.

SM: Jennifer, your work has been so instrumental in examining the gender and spatial dimensions of postconflict aid and development programs, particularly those in South Asia and the Middle East. Much of your work is also grounded in empirical research and Afghanistan, where you work with and learn from women as they navigate militarism and political violence. Later in our discussion, I'd like to talk more about feminist research methodology and the considerations that you make as a white feminist entering the field, but before we do that, I wonder if—for listeners who aren't as familiar with Afghanistan and the history of Western intervention there—you might offer a brief overview that will help listeners contextualize our conversation.

JF: Sure, so most of what many people are hearing about Afghanistan now is really about the last twenty years of US intervention in Afghanistan, and I would argue that we really need to go back further than that. So, for example, the US has been engaged in Afghanistan really since the 1980s, when the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 as part of assisting the existing communist country there that had initiated a coup just a few years earlier.

During the ’80s, the US began fighting a covert and then more overt war in Afghanistan through what are known as the mujahideen, who were different groups of men who were basically working together to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. And those men were working through Pakistan and getting funds from the US and Saudi Arabia to fight against Soviet occupation. So that time period, I think, is really important because the US—this was the Reagan administration and the US’s thinking, geopolitically, at the time was to create a pan-Islamic jihad to fight against godless communism. So it was a very different discourse than we saw if we fast-forward to the US interventions after 2001, after September 11th.

That time period—we can look at a lot of failures and missteps around what types of organizations were being funded, how they were being funded, and which types of, I would say, war crimes or war abuses were seen as acceptable by the US. So, this this was a really interesting time that many people want to forget, as if it never happened, right? And so when you look at the 1990s, as well, the US was involved in Afghanistan after the Soviet War ended in ’89, when the Soviets withdrew. And that negotiation was brokered between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the UN. They basically left the Afghan government out of those negotiations. So that was one issue that was a problem. And then after that, the Soviet Union falls in 1991 and that's followed by a lack of funding of the Soviet-backed government, and so the US really pulls back support also from the mujahideen. What they do, the mujahideen, is they fight a civil war for control of the capital city of Kabul and then that that runs until about 1996 when the Taliban basically takes over the capital city.

And the Taliban were also created in Pakistan by taking men and young boys from refugee camps and basically indoctrinating them into this kind of particular method of warfare and having them memorize the Qur'an through rote memorization in Arabic, a language that they didn't speak, and really coming into Afghanistan in an illegitimate way; they weren't really seen as an indigenous fighting force in in Afghanistan, and many Afghans really see them as the creation of Pakistan as well. The US wasn't really in involved that much in Afghanistan at that time; there wasn't a lot of humanitarian aid or economic development, for example, and the US was an early supporter of the Taliban because it really felt like it was the answer to the “war-weary people of Afghanistan.”

The US discourse about Afghanistan starts to change in the late-’90s, when various feminist organization start advocating for women's rights in Afghanistan, right? And they see women as a real victim of the Taliban. So that begins to change public discourse about women's rights in Afghanistan in the US and at the congressional level, to think about how more attention can be placed on Afghanistan.

However, I would say nothing really happens at that political level until the events of September 11^th, when the US is looking towards Afghanistan as the problematic country even though zero Afghans were on the planes that hit the buildings and they weren't geostrategically involved in that terrorist event. But Al-Qaeda having their training camps in Afghanistan was really why Afghanistan became this target that led to the US invasion on October 7^th, 2001.

So I guess all of that is to say is that the real take-home message here is that former allies became adversaries, right? Osama bin Laden was an ally of the US in the ’80s; many of the mujahideen were allies of the US and in the ’80’s and even into the ’90s but became adversaries and were involved in campaigns against the US, militarily or through violence.

And so you have this forty-year history that really is now truncated into this twenty-year history of the US role in Afghanistan. Getting into when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001: This was not just the US, it was a “coalition of the willing,” it was many NATO partners, and that all started what is known as the International Security Assistance force in Afghanistan. And then that was followed by lots of humanitarian aid and international-development assistance coming from various countries—the US being the largest donor, the largest military, the largest influencer, but you had over fifty countries operating in Afghanistan at any given time.

That's another reason why we really need to understand this as very much US-driven but a very international effort to basically reconstruct Afghanistan, because the country had been completely destroyed during so much war up until 2001. And the capital city had really been destroyed during the civil war, and the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 were not effective at reconstructing, or really even governing the country, let alone rebuilding the city and working with international organizations to help them do that.

So you have this situation in 2001 where there was so much destruction and so many people displaced—huge numbers of refugees in Iran and in Pakistan and other neighboring countries. People starting to slowly come back and in many ways believing in this US-led effort to reconstruct the country and create a new government.

It's a complicated overview, but I guess I just really want to make sure that we go back far enough because so much of the discourse has really just been on the last twenty years.

SM: That's great, thank you for that. It does help set the stage for the rest of our conversation, and I know that it's difficult to summarize and condense the history of the conflict, especially one that has so many important nuances and international actors in just a few minutes but you did that perfectly.

If I may, I want to start from the beginning. That is to say with your training and your research interests: You're a feminist political geographer by training. So tell me what brought you to this work and what this lens of analysis brings to a conversation about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan?

JF: That's a great question. So what brought me to the work as a feminist political geographer—I started my PhD research in August of 2001. I was very much interested in and looking at feminist organizations that were using education as a form of political resistance. Like, how did that work? As a geographer I was really interested in Afghanistan because so much of the education that was being done, particularly by feminist organizations, was done underground and in secret or done in refugee areas in Pakistan.

So that's how I found the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan or RAWA, which was a radical feminist organization that was also really effectively using the internet to gain international support for women's issues in Afghanistan at that time.

I connected to some of their supporters in the US in order to learn more about the organization and see if it would be feasible for me to study them and look at this education piece as well. As part of that, I really started to read everything I could on Afghanistan and get to understand the country's history and what the major contemporary issues were through the lens of RAWA and their support network. Then, of course, 9/11 happened, so that slowed all of that research down a bit. It also, in some ways, gave me an opportunity to spend more time reading and connecting with their networks, and going to conferences, and going to various events focused on gender-based and particularly women's issues in Afghanistan in this post-9/11 environment; and also collecting information from the media about how the kind of discourse of saving Afghan women was really starting to form in 2001 and 2002. And that really became part of that research.

Thinking about how a spatial analysis, or really a feminist political geographic analysis, connects to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan: Much of my research and analysis has been about this idea of the geographies of aid and development and where the failures and falling short are [due to not looking] at it through a geographic lens. What I mean by that is that the withdrawal, well—first of all it wasn't well planned. It was so chaotic. It didn't take into consideration people who live in rural areas, the people who have difficulty getting to Kabul airport, not just from rural areas but also in the city, and how that played out through a gendered lens.

For example, if you look at a lot of the images of people at the airport in Kabul as it became more chaotic and more violent, most of the people in those images are men; some are women but many of the people that were able to get onto the planes during the evacuation were men because they were able to push their way through. A lot of families—many families that I know and were talking with—were really reluctant to send young children or women or vulnerable men to the airport because they were afraid that they would be injured or killed or crushed in this kind of mad rush to get out of the country. Then there were a number of people who also worked with Americans, who are known to have worked with Americans or other internationals, who lived in villages well outside of the capital city or other major cities that have airports, and just the logistics of getting to certain areas was really difficult. So those kinds of geographic differences I think were not really incorporated in any media representation because they are more complicated.

[click_to_tweet tweet="Jennifer Fluri: 'We flatten everything out and don't ... realize that {Afghanistan} is an incredibly diverse country where you have multiple ethnicities, multiple languages, different education levels, and different belief systems....' " quote="We flatten everything out and don't ... realize that {Afghanistan} is an incredibly diverse country where you have multiple ethnicities, multiple languages, different education levels, and different belief systems...." theme="style2"]

From a basic level, people think of Afghanistan as this one country, and we flatten everything out and don't remember or realize that this is an incredibly diverse country where you have multiple ethnicities, multiple languages, different education levels, and different belief systems. And even though everyone's mostly Muslim, that doesn't mean they all believe the same, right? That kind of flattening and narrowing of space is something that I've really been working against through my research.

SM: It’s so helpful to really be able to get a kind of more macro assessment of those days that probably so many of us around the world watched on television during the evacuation. I want to turn now to a topic I know that you've written about and certainly have a long history of discussing and addressing in your own work.

Many feminists around the world have been critical of the US-led War on Terror. As someone who is so deeply familiar with the politics of Afghanistan and how Afghans themselves, particularly women, have understood the war, what are your thoughts? What comes to mind when you think about the US War on Terror in Afghanistan?

JF: Thank you for that question. In many ways, the War on Terror—I think one of the biggest problems is it sort of put all Muslims into one group, or maybe sometimes you got the Sunni/Shia division, but didn't really think of them—like what I was just saying about Afghanistan was just being flattening out the country as if it was one country, one voice, one belief system. Not all Muslims think alike. They don't all pray the same way or have the same belief systems. Yes, there're these two large groups—Sunni and Shia—but they're not the only division, they're not the only differences.

There's a lot of debate among Muslim scholars. Even at the academic level, there's debates and discussions and really lively ways of thinking about the religion and meaning and interpretation. Then when you get to everyday belief structures, it's even more diverse. That those kinds of prevailing discourses still exist to this day, and I think it's super unfortunate.

The other thing is the way in which women were really weaponized by the Bush administration during the War on Terror—"we're going to go in there, we're going save Afghan women." And the way in which women in the US were really used strategically to sell that message. Like Feminist Majority Foundation, and Laura Bush herself, giving the first First Lady's radio address talking about Afghanistan and how we have to go and protect the women and children of Afghanistan. Then also, famous feminists were engaged in that work in the US and other places.

[click_to_tweet tweet="Women were really weaponized by the Bush administration during the War on Terror—'we're going to go in there, we're going save Afghan women.'" quote="Women were really weaponized by the Bush administration during the War on Terror—'we're going to go in there, we're going save Afghan women.'" theme="style2"]

The more I conducted research on this, [the more I saw] the real weaponization of women, to the point where the US military actually a initiated a program called the FET program, meaning “Female Engagement Teams,” where they would send all female Marines and then later Army personnel into villages with this idea that it would draw out men because they would be curious to see this group of women from the West in their community. And then the idea would be that those women would be able to enter into homes and speak with women in Afghanistan without disrupting the gender expectations. Because if a man crossed into the threshold into a home in Afghanistan, particularly without permission or by banging down the door and just coming in, that's really seen as a violation of the whole household and the violation of the women in the house, whether or not there is an actual violation. [The FET was seen as] the way to offset those gender norms, and I thought it was really clunky and not well thought out and didn't work exactly as planned or intended. That was really an interesting thing, just to see that women and gender really became very dichotomized—as if women in Afghanistan don't live with men and aren’t part of families that include men. So that was one problem.

Then, there's the way in which men were represented either as Talibs and insurgents or as potential collaborators and assistance to the US effort. But they weren't necessarily seen as feminists, which I thought was really surprising because my research [has shown] and, as many other people who have researched Afghanistan have shown, that men are incredibly involved in feminist movements. Now, there are plenty of men that are misogynists and patriarchal and not really involved at all, but many women's organizations really rely on men and really engage men in that work in a way that I thought was much more active and engaged than I've seen in women's organizations I’ve been involved with in the US, for example.

Just one other quick thing: the War on Terror was also used to create a discourse to marginalize Muslims in other countries, too, so you see that happening in Europe and it being used in South Asia.

SM: This is all so interesting and really helpful. There's so much nuance here, there are so many different ways we need to really be looking at this idea of gender in Afghanistan and the US occupation. You've answered this a little bit already or touched upon it, but I want to go a little bit further: You and other scholars of Afghanistan have been quite critical of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as being at least partly motivated by the US interest in developing women's human rights. I’ve seen elsewhere that you've described this strange or false preoccupation with women's rights as a sort of “frenzy.” I wonder, what do we miss by not being more intersectionally curious about gender and women's lives in Afghanistan both pre- and post-war?

JF: I think by not taking an intersectional approach and [instead] looking at women as, like Chandra Mohanty would say, a single category of analysis (which is really a way of narrowing and not taking in all the diversity and complexity that I was just talking about) really doesn't leave room for women to have different ideas, to disagree, to have debate, to engage in lively conversation and discussion about what works and what doesn't work based on everyone's diverse experiences. It also doesn't take into consideration that women have multiple identities; women aren’t just women, they may be part of a particular ethnic group, they may be a devout Muslim, they might identify as an academic, they may identify as an embroiderer. There are so many ways in which their identity is complicated. Everyone has complicated identities and Afghanistan is no different.

This kind of flattening out of nuance and not seeing women with all these other complications and contradictions and connections and disconnections…. Some women don't get along, and that’s okay, and that should be in some ways celebrated. I think that diversity should be celebrated, not something to be seen as a negative. Men are never asked these questions. I had so many women's rights activists in Afghanistan say “They always say we don't get along but do the men get along? Do they all agree?” No, they don't, and no one questions that, but somehow women are held to a higher standard but with such low expectations.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Men are never asked these questions. I had so many women's rights activists in Afghanistan say 'They always say we don't get along, but do the men get along? Do they all agree?' No, they don't, ...but somehow women are held to a higher standard.'" quote="Men are never asked these questions. I had so many women's rights activists in Afghanistan say 'They always say we don't get along, but do the men get along? Do they all agree?' No, they don't, ...but somehow women are held to a higher standard." theme="style2"]

They're held to a much, much higher standard, but they are not given the tools or the time or the space they need to actually get anywhere close to those expectations that men aren’t even held to. Those are some of the other issues I think that were totally not considered in part of this frenzy. I use the term “frenzy” too because I felt like people were just getting connected to this Afghan moment, if you will. Like, “I want to be part of this saving mantra! I want to connect to what everyone’s caring about!”

What we're hearing in the media [is that it’s] something we should all care about and has become almost trendy, and so in some of my work I talked about women almost becoming this currency. They became a value or unit of exchange—that's what I mean by “currency.” Women were exchanged between organizations, so international nongovernmental organizations (or NGOs) could say, “We have a woman on staff” or, “We have women on staff, so we're super progressive and we're part of the saving-women trope that is supposedly occurring in Afghanistan.”  Then, other organizations would say, “We're training women to do this work,” or, “We're saving women in this way and that way,” and in many cases, if you look closer at those programs, they weren't necessarily doing that.

Dr. Daulatzai has written on this extensively. She was looking at bakeries for widows. Widows in Afghanistan were working in these bakeries, even during the Taliban time, and then afterward. And they were hailed by many different groups that would come through to tour these bakeries as these heroes and feminists of Afghanistan and defying the Taliban by working. And because she [Daulatzai] is Afghan and has amazing language skills, she was basically interpreting for the women in these bakeries what these internationals were saying. The women's response, and I'm paraphrasing here of course, but they were like “If we're so wonderful, why don't they pay a living wage? Why don't we make more money? Why don't we get better hours? Why don't they provide child care?” They were actually women in incredibly low-wage labor. They didn't have childcare, they didn’t have attention to all of their needs, but they were then being hailed as these amazing heroes when women who are widows in Afghanistan really do struggle. It is a difficult position to be in because it is a very patriarchal society and so not having a husband or a male partner in some way to protect and work with you, it puts you in a very difficult and marginalized position.

So you have that mismatch between the rhetoric of saving women and the reality of their lives. That mismatch, I would say, has continued for all of this time. There haven’t been programs that were really trying to connect the rhetoric of the “saving women” mantra and the reality of women's lives and how diverse they are. What a woman who's educated and speaks English in urban Afghanistan needs is very different from a woman who only speaks one minority language that may even be an unwritten language and lives in a village and has basically engaged in farming all her life. Their needs are really, really different, and that was very rarely taken up as part of the “saving women” trope.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'You have a mismatch between the rhetoric of saving women and the reality of their lives.... There haven’t been programs that were really trying to connect the rhetoric of the 'saving women' mantra and the reality of women's lives and how diverse they are.'" quote="You have a mismatch between the rhetoric of saving women and the reality of their lives.... There haven’t been programs that were really trying to connect the rhetoric of the 'saving women' mantra and the reality of women's lives and how diverse they are." theme="style2"]

SM: It's so interesting and so smart. I want to keep this portion of our interview or discussion together at the micro level and I want to continue to think about women's lives on the ground, as we say. I was wondering, can you tell us some of the lesser-known women's rights organizations that are working in Afghanistan? What kind of work have they done historically and what are they doing now, postwithdrawal?

JF: Sure. So there are a number of both women's rights organizations and women's civil society and nongovernmental organizations. There are more well-known ones like RAWA, because they have this huge international support network, so they really have gotten a lot of press over the years. But there are smaller organizations, some that partnered with RAWA and some that haven't. Some were started in the late-’70s, similar to RAWA, but many were really founded in the ’80s and ’90s in refugee areas in Pakistan and some in Iran, too—the Afghan Women's Network being one of them. And several other organizations that basically were founded to improve women's lives in various ways that would not always be recognizable to Westerners. And some of it was certainly around education, and I always found it interesting when we talk about education many from the Western perspective, it was around education so women could get jobs-skills training and get jobs. It was this very liberal feminist, “add women and stir” approach: “if women have income, then they will be treated better and that will make everything better,” and you tie a nice bow on it.

Many women have worked in Afghanistan for centuries as carpet weavers and embroiderers and various different types of employment that didn't necessarily lead to them being respected more in their households or having more of a say on how funds were spent and that sort of thing. It didn't necessarily disrupt the patriarchal structure of the family or the community in the ways that Westerners assumed it would. So there's that one piece. Then other women's rights organizations were really focused on education, but a lot of this was on educating women about their rights in Islam.

So you had Islamic feminist organizations as part of this. You also had organizations that were really focused on doing midwifery trainings and helping women to improve their health in various ways. Everything from basic hygiene to helping women improve prenatal care because you had such high maternal and infant mortality rates in Afghanistan. So that was another area where some women's rights groups were looking. And then others were just basically consciousness raising, similar to some consciousness-raising groups in the US in the 1970s, which were helping women gain access to understanding what their rights are in Afghanistan, in Islam, and then how to access those rights.

And then other organizations—this is one that's actually in the US and also in Afghanistan: Women for Afghan Women. They help to run shelters for women, so women that left home because of abuse or ill treatment, they ran shelters to help women to basically build back their lives and be safe from harm, from their families, or other people that were trying to harm them.

[As for] the work that's been done historically: These women's organizations have been working for some time on very low budgets. So even though you had all this money coming into Afghanistan, so much of the problem with that funding coming in is that it was subcontracted out. You would have, for example, a US aid program that would hire an implementing partner, which is often a for-profit company from the US. Then that company would then hire a local NGO or civil-society organization to implement the project. By the time it got to that third partner, there was a lot less money because most of the money went into big salaries and logistics and security for the international organizations. So those women's organizations have always struggled with having enough funding, and that is even more acute now with the withdrawal because there's really no international funding coming into Afghanistan to speak of.

I mean, there're some World Food Programmes and world health programs, but it's very minimal as far as the type of funding that was coming in for these particular organizations. What we're starting to hear about is women from various organized groups in Afghanistan who were evacuated in that unfinished wave of evacuations in August are starting to run councils or Shuras or jirgas in the camps to basically come up with the next plan. Like, how are they going to support women's rights among Afghans in the diaspora? And what is going to happen to, quite frankly, the women left behind that worked for these organizations in Afghanistan? Because that's what you have to realize, is that a lot of the high-profile women that were leaders of these organizations may have gotten out, or women who were in leadership positions as governors or mayors or in parliament may have been able to get out because of their connections; the women under them that were their support network in the country, for example, were mostly not evacuated.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Women {who} were evacuated in that unfinished wave of evacuations in August are starting to run councils ... in the camps to ... come up with the next plan. Like, how are they going to support women's rights among Afghans in the diaspora?'" quote="Women {who} were evacuated in that unfinished wave of evacuations in August are starting to run councils ... in the camps to ... come up with the next plan. Like, how are they going to support women's rights among Afghans in the diaspora?" theme="style2"]

So you definitely have women activists who are in hiding but also trying to figure out, “What can we do next? How will the future be for women and girls in Afghanistan?” Because the Taliban has already banned women and girls from high school and colleges, and while some schools are fighting back, their ability to do so is really quite limited.

SM: You touched on this just a little bit during your discussion related to women's rights organizations. Sometimes from a Western perspective, it's difficult, even for people who are very interested in women's rights or very interested in understanding these more nuanced components of conflict, to find instances where women are being agentive, to find places where women have been successful as women pushing back against any number of difficult structural oppressions. Can you fill in the blanks a little bit about ways in which you've observed or understand women to really embody this idea of agency, despite there being so much conflict around them?

JF: Women have expressed their agency in various ways; I'll just touch on a few. For example, going back to education, if you look at the Islamic law faculty or department at Kabul University, it's filled with women. So women were very clever, realizing, “If I gain more knowledge about Islam, I’ll be able to advocate for my rights in that way.” I would say that's one way that women have really—I’ve been very fascinated with the Islamic feminist approach in Afghanistan because they've had some really important strides in advocating and articulating women's rights and pushing back against some customary practices that significantly disadvantage women. Or pushing for women to be able to inherit property, because they can in the Qur’an, but it's not a common practice in Afghanistan. Even though it's not illegal, it's not a common practice so it often doesn't happen.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'I’ve been very fascinated with the Islamic feminist approach in Afghanistan.... They've had some really important strides in advocating & articulating women's rights & pushing back against some customary practices that significantly disadvantage women.'" quote="I’ve been very fascinated with the Islamic feminist approach in Afghanistan.... They've had some really important strides in advocating and articulating women's rights and pushing back against some customary practices that significantly disadvantage women." theme="style2"]

But, just to remind everyone, they also have done this by partnering with men, with progressive mullahs and imams, because sadly women still aren't able to speak with authority on Islam the same way a male voice can in Afghanistan. So a lot of it is through partnerships, trust building, and connections with men who are also reading the Qur’an and the hadith and the religious books and saying, “Wait a second, it says men and women are equal before the eyes of God; we really need to stop some of these practices,” or, “It clearly says that women should be educated,” that sort of thing.

That was one way.  Other ways, which was really interesting—which would just really get missed and sometimes even missed by myself compared to an Afghan that really knows the culture in that kind of visceral way versus someone who studies it from an outside position—is working within their culture in very careful and strategic ways. And you see this more because it being a patriarchal society, there's a lot of respect for elders and people who are identified as honorable as I mentioned before. So you have older women who would figure out ways to influence, sometimes through marriage practices.

For example, I was talking to this woman about how she was able to influence certain marriage practices. In Afghanistan, if two children are nursed by the same woman, they're considered siblings, even if they're not even related at all. So women have used that to stop an arranged marriage that they didn't agree with or that their daughter didn't want to happen by saying, “Oh no, I nursed both young adults when they were children, this marriage can’t happen.” No man is going to question that. I just thought that was always a really interesting and cool example of using cultural taboos to their advantage, to actually have influence.

Women also often have a tremendous amount of other influence around marriages—around brokering them, because most of the marriages in Afghanistan are arranged. Mothers and sisters and aunties are very concerned about making sure that those marriage arrangements will protect their daughter or niece or granddaughter in some cases. Really making sure that they're very actively involved in those kinds of marriage arrangements. Also if there is conflict in the marriage afterward, being involved in more customary conflict-mediation types of situations.

These very careful, delicate, nuanced ways of working within their own culture which of course from an outsider's perspective, it could be like, “How is that agency?” But it's so clearly agency when you see how women are able to enact change or make an immediate situation better for fellow women or sometimes even a man in their family.

Those have been some of the really interesting ways. I mean, there are many other examples but those are just some of the ones that I found really interesting, where women were able to use their position as a woman and within their culture to create change.

SM: I’m particularly interested in your ability to take the temperature of what's happening on the ground, and I think what good feminist analysis helps us do is to take local femininities and local masculinities seriously. So I wonder from your perspective, how have masculinities and femininities been solidified during the US war in Afghanistan? And then how have you seen them either stay the same or change following the withdrawal?

JF: One of the interesting things that just drove me crazy, actually, during the early intervention periods there was this attempt to have a beauty school for women. It became this really popular book called [Kabul Beauty School], and trying to understand Afghan women’s femininities from a Western perspective. You know, makeup, hair, as if that didn't already exist, which it did of course. But this way of making Afghan women's femininity recognizable to people in the West. That was one of the bad ideas.

Then on the changing gender structure of women's lives: Like I said, women live with men as husbands, brothers, fathers, cousins, whatever. So this idea that women were not a single category of analysis but also seen as somehow separate from men, and separate from the gender structure that exists in Afghanistan, was really problematic and didn't go well in many of the types of programs that were focused on that. It did open up some space for women in Afghanistan to explore activities that were really forbidden during the time of the Taliban and even during the civil war.

I would say that their entree into formal leadership positions through quota systems that the US and other internationals pushed in parliament made it very difficult in some ways for women to identify their leadership and their influence at that more formal scale. Some of the women that did it effectively, when we interviewed them, they really complained about men actually saying “Well, I can work with you because you're like a man,” or,  “You're basically a man.” They would say, “Why can't I be this competent and still be seen as a woman?” So Afghan men were really trying to also figure out women who are competent in ways that they were conditioned to believe was impossible by saying, “Oh well you're like a man, so I can work with you.”

Then, I would say that a backlash from more conservative groups also happened in Afghanistan. In some ways, it was because women didn't have the skills and were pushed into positions just because they were women, because that frenzy I mentioned before, that was also happening in Afghanistan. So they were like, “Oh there’s these quotas, we can put this woman up and then she'll do whatever we tell her to do.” So, putting a woman up who wasn't terribly competent or having women speak on television that weren't well versed in Qur’anic or Islamic education, and then they weren't able to properly answer questions.

Those kinds of things were done, and I would argue somewhat purposefully, to illustrate women's inabilities, rather than their abilities within the culture. A fair amount of women who worked either as women's ministers or in the Women's Ministry also said that they felt like having a Women's Ministry was almost like a loss leader; where it was like, “Oh, well you have a Women's Ministry for that question”—but then the ministry wouldn't be given any power or funds or ability to actually attend to the things that people needed.

So some women were saying, “Why isn’t there are a women's ministry in every division and in every office in the government? Every ministry should have a women's division.” Then a number of male feminist activists I interviewed were like, “We don't need a Women’s Ministry; we need a Men's Ministry because we need to educate men about women's rights in Islam.” Because if a woman comes home and says, “I have all of these rights,” it may lead to conflict in the household; whereas if a man is educated about what their rights are, he's more willing to engage in that conversation.

[click_to_tweet tweet="Jennifer Fluri: 'A number of male feminist activists I interviewed were like, 'We don't need a Women’s Ministry; we need a Men's Ministry because we need to educate *men* about women's rights in Islam.''" quote="A number of male feminist activists I interviewed were like, 'We don't need a Women’s Ministry; we need a Men's Ministry because we need to educate *men* about women's rights in Islam.'" theme="style2"]

A number of female judges I interviewed early on, and this is probably in the mid-2000s, they also took that approach in training programs. They would have training programs for women's rights and a number of women would come and they would spend the first few days of the program talking about men's rights in the Constitution, in the country, and in Islam. So women would go home and tell their husbands everything they learned about their [men’s] rights, and they [men] would say, “This is a great program, keep going!” Then, they could slowly introduce women's rights in relationship to men's rights—again, in the Qur’an, and Islam, and in the Constitution, and in society.

Those kinds of approaches really helped to offset some of the more conservative backlash against women's rights in Afghanistan. I would say the other issue was this problem of all these international workers in Afghanistan really modeling, in many ways, “bad” behavior, or what is perceived as immoral behavior: promiscuity or drinking or drug use. Those kind of things really got misinterpreted by Afghan men [as meaning that] offices are unsafe places for women. They were like, “They're doing these things that are against our culture and I’m worried that it'll ruin my daughter's reputation or my wife's reputation if she goes and works in this office where everyone is known to go out and party at night and sleep with each other.”

I think those kinds of behaviors made it difficult for women to access certain spaces because some of the behaviors of the internationals were seen as negative. Also, when we interviewed international female aid workers from various countries—mostly from the US but from other countries, too—all but one of them (and we interviewed over a hundred) had been sexually harassed or assaulted by international men, not by Afghan men. And that knowledge and that information was not lost on Afghans. So, particularly in the early intervention period in the 2000s, there was a lot of fear about women working in offices or engaging with the international community.

SM: Thank you for that. I want to shift now to the politics of producing knowledge and its relationship to your empirical work, which we talked a little bit about. As a scholar who is sensitive to and guided by a feminist research ethos, I wonder if you can tell me about a time when you were on the ground and you encountered something that was really difficult to work through. Or perhaps a situation or a decision that felt especially hard given your feminist training.

JF: Sure, sure. Well, I mean first just going to Afghanistan, being a citizen of a country that had invaded them, was really hard. Trying to explain my position to people as an educator as someone who wanted to learn about Afghanistan, because I often got misunderstood as an aid worker or an international development worker, to the point where so many people that I was working with, or interviewing would be like, “Why do you want to understand…?” They realized a few questions in that this wasn't the typical humanitarian aid survey. So they were like, “Wow you really want to know about our culture!” There was a lot of shock around that, and they were just not sure what to do with me. I'm coming from the West—I mean, I'm a white Western feminist female person; I think that an initial barrier.

I would say the other issue was that many people, when I give talks—I try to give talks in both academic [settings] and in public libraries or schools and to really challenge the prevailing narratives about Afghanistan and Afghan women in particular. People really want to buy in to the narrative of oppressed women. I’m not saying that women in Afghanistan aren't oppressed, but they want to buy into a narrative that’s so narrow and really focuses on physical abuse and some of the really horrible stories (that are true) that have come out of Afghanistan. But that's not every woman's story. Telling a story of a woman who's done well and done well in a way that wasn't dependent on international funding is really not a narrative many Americans want to hear. And that's the complication of it—that women were able to thrive without the Taliban but not always as a direct result of US-funded programs.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'People really want to buy in to the narrative of 'oppressed women.' ... Telling a story of a woman who's done well and done well in a way that wasn't dependent on international funding is really not a narrative many Americans want to hear.'" quote="People really want to buy in to the narrative of 'oppressed women.' ... Telling a story of a woman who's done well and done well in a way that wasn't dependent on international funding is really not a narrative many Americans want to hear." theme="style2"]

In many ways the US, by keeping the Taliban at bay, or the Afghan government doing that, in some ways did give women space to advocate for their own rights. But I would say the ways that they would go about it isn't always reflective of the way that the US or other international donor organizations would like them to do it, or would expect them to do it.  I really felt much more comfortable critiquing international aid and development than I did criticizing Afghan women. Of course you know they're human beings, they make mistakes, they don't do everything perfectly. But again, as a white Western woman from the US, the occupier of their country, I didn't really feel comfortable making those critiques and criticisms.

SM: Okay, our last question here together: You spoke a little earlier about women’s human rights defenders, about the ways we need to think through women's rights in context in Afghanistan. For those women that were not able to evacuate as a result of their connection to high profile politicians or agencies, what can we do to support those women? And what can we do to better understand those women that were left behind?

JF: I think in many ways—and this is a difficult situation because the Taliban is interested in having international aid and development organizations come back to Afghanistan, but they want that to happen in conjunction with being recognized as a legitimate power. It’s this really difficult catch-22: should international countries recognize the Taliban in order to provide funding to help people make it through the winter, or just basic attending to the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding in Afghanistan? So that's one issue that's really difficult.

For the women that have been left behind, this is a really difficult case. Like I mentioned, women are being banned from high schools and colleges, women aren’t able to really work like they were before, and most of the people who worked with Americans and other internationals have all lost their jobs. Hundreds and thousands of people, many of them women, have lost their source of income. There're these really acute humanitarian issues, and one way, at least in the US—what they can do right now and over this next year is advocate for the passage of what is called the Afghanistan Adjustment Act. [Amy] Klobachar and [Chris] Coons are the two Senators that have started this act, and are looking for cosigners and will present it before the Senate. That act sadly doesn't provide for any more evacuations, so that's a separate issue, but it does provide more funding to help Afghans in the diaspora.

Why I think that's important for women left behind in Afghanistan is that if we can give more attention and help to Afghan women in the diaspora, who are newly in the diaspora, who were women's rights activists, they can use some of their influence that they have here to help women in Afghanistan. So that's one way.

[click_to_tweet tweet="Jennifer Fluri: 'If we can give more attention and help to Afghan women in the diaspora, who are newly in the diaspora, who were women's rights activists, they can use some of their influence that they have here to help women in Afghanistan.'" quote="If we can give more attention and help to Afghan women in the diaspora, who are newly in the diaspora, who were women's rights activists, they can use some of their influence that they have here to help women in Afghanistan." theme="style2"]

The other way: I would also agitate politically and with organizations that are trying to work with Afghan women on the ground, to be able to advocate for rights within the Taliban regime, which is no easy task. The Taliban, they’re just a draconian regime. They were horrible to women in the past; there's no indication that they're not going to be in this current iteration. And part of what we're doing is being very attentive to my colleagues that I work with who are still stuck in Afghanistan and their family members to help them get out. I would also push for more evacuations because for many of these women that were left behind, some of them want to stay and want to figure out how to navigate the Taliban regime. Some of them want and really need to get out because they're such targets of Taliban violence. I would like to see more agitation towards the US government to provide more funding for evacuations. I sadly doubt that that will happen, but I do think that is something that could potentially lead to helping more women get out of the country or at least having their paperwork processed so that they can evacuate through other means, like through private travel and that sort of thing.

Then, for women that want to stay and are doing that really difficult and important work, advocating for rights, I would say stay in touch with people like myself and others who are working on this. Because that's part of what we're doing now. I mean, my research has totally changed and is focusing on: What is happening with women on the ground? What are their needs? How can we support them? What can we do to help them advocate for their own rights? That's how it should be. We need to listen to the Afghan women that are left behind on what they need. We need to understand that we may not be able to fix everything and [that the solution] may not always be throwing money at the problem. That's another thing that I think the US just does sometimes: “Let's just pour a bunch of money at the problem and it'll all get sorted out.” I mean, yes, funding is necessary in some ways, but there are other ways to advocate for women in Afghanistan.

Putting pressure on other countries like Russia and China, that are really interested in the mineral wealth in Afghanistan. Supporting women through feminist Islamic networks that are doing some amazing work around the world and definitely for women in Afghanistan. I would say, that’s a much more difficult and harder thing. But I think in some ways, it's [important to pay] attention and listen because many of these organizations are very savvy. They have an internet presence, they have connections to people who have influence in other countries, and they'll start using those networks to gain influence and the things that they need to be successful and to advocate for their rights and their futures in this absolutely difficult environment.

SM: Well, thank you for letting us do this. It was really nice.

JF: Thanks, it was so nice to chat with you. 

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