"Imagine a huge dark piece of cloth hung over your entire body like
you were a shameful statue."
That is an excerpt from the poem
"Under the Burqa" by the playwright
formerly known as Eve Ensler.
It was recited by Oprah Winfrey
on February 10, 2001, in front of 18,000 people who had paid $1,000 per ticket to attend a
"Vagina Monologues" gala event.
They then witnessed Winfrey remove a
blue shuttlecock burqa from an Afghan activist.
That was eight months before the invasion of Afghanistan.
There isn't a better summary of over 20 years of
U.S. involvement in Afghanistan than that:
an exorbitantly expensive spectacle of salvation
and dehumanization using the body of the
Afghan woman as a front.
It also sums up what U.S. coverage of Afghanistan has looked like for over two decades.
For the women of Afghanistan, the veil, the burqa, has become the symbol
of the Taliban's power.
- How long does the military think it will take them to finish the job that they came
there to do in terms of Afghanistan and Al Qaeda and the Taliban?
- Hundreds of women, many in burqas, gathered at a wedding hall
to implore officials to find a kidnapped American aid worker.
- For the first time, hitting the Taliban where it
hurts. Targeting the drug labs that double as
money machines for the insurgency.
- With the Taliban seizing power, the fate of
Afghan women and girls hangs in the balance,
as do hard-fought freedoms and rights.
In its coverage of Afghanistan, the U.S. media
has tightly held hands with U.S. foreign policy,
helping justify an invasion born in large part
out of the fog of vengeance
following the 9/11 attacks.
And so when we closely examine American media coverage of Afghanistan from the
invasion to the occupation, and even the withdrawal in late 2021,
we see how U.S. militarism and, in many cases, U.S.
journalists themselves are presented as a source of salvation.
Afghanistan deserves a better story.
And for us here to tell that story from the vantage point of the American empire,
we need to be able to reexamine how we've built the narratives around American militarism,
its victims and the so-called war on terror.
We need to define the real legacy the United States leaves in Afghanistan,
one which is about the horrors of violence and not one about a reluctant savior,
a bumbling empire.
Welcome to "Backspace," where we tell you how the story is told
in our headlines, and then we think about how we can tell it differently.
The narrative U.S. coverage of Afghanistan loves to repeat, as it often does in coverage
of Muslim societies, is about the physical bodies of the women and the violence
done against them by their own men, while actively ignoring the role
American militarism plays.
- The Taliban, of course, is responding in the way
that it always has, that
Osama bin Laden and his associates are
guests in their country.
Well, it's time for the guests to leave.
- It is obviously late in the evening in Kabul,
and once again they are finding
nighttime very unpleasant.
- As we drive out the Taliban and the terrorists,
we're determined to
lift up the people of Afghanistan.
The women and children of Afghanistan
have suffered enough.
Afghan women were and still are depicted
as simply victims of their men's savagery.
They only exist in our headlines when they're being
beaten by their own men, denied
education by their own men or when they are killed
by their own men.
And journalists, of course, have made themselves the voice of Afghan women
against their own men.
- The hidden victims of war and a brutal,
male-dominated society.
A rare look inside the lives of Afghan women
and their struggle to survive.
- The need for female officers is definitely there.
But you can imagine the incredible obstacles and
taboos that Afghan women have to get
through in order to do this kind of work.
- Violence towards women is
not just committed by the Taliban,
and it's quite frequent. And in a report
released just this year by Human Rights Watch,
it stated that nearly nine out of 10 Afghan women
suffer physical, sexual or psychological violence
or forced marriage at least once in their lifetimes.
Rarely, if ever, do we hear about how the women of Afghanistan have been impacted by over
20 years of American militarism and occupation.
Instead, we see blame placed primarily on culture, on tribes, implying
that this violence and hatred of women is simply a part of
a rough terrain where men rule and women serve.
But how did severe U.S. economic sanctions, which have been used against Afghanistan since 1999,
impact women, the health care system, maternal health care?
How did over 20 years of American military
occupation, drones, war crimes, misuse of funds
and failed institutional building impact the
economic, political and physical
well-being of women?
U.S. coverage shows us that violence against Afghan women only exists
at the hands of their own men and never ours.
Ours are there to help.
But shouldn't U.S. coverage hold the actions of its government accountable?
Shouldn't U.S. coverage look at its government's complicity in worsening
conditions for Afghan women?
Journalists seemed pretty excited to start the war to save them,
but not as much when the time came to hold their own governments accountable.
This was nowhere more apparent than in the coverage
of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan in August 2021.
A long-planned but haphazard, violent withdrawal led to a sudden increase in concern
and horror amongst American news punditry and reporters about the well-being
of Afghan women.
- With the Taliban in control, Afghanistan's women
and girls now find themselves fearing
that 20 years of progress will vanish.
- Afghan women, do you worry that they were
abandoned by the United States, essentially?
- The most vulnerable are little Afghan girls.
What are you hearing?
Are Afghan girls able to get out?
Many American journalists seemed shocked that 20 years of well-documented corruption
and destabilization didn't result in Afghanistan turning into a liberal Western
democracy, that it fell apart so quickly.
We saw blame put on President Joe Biden for
failing the people, and specifically
the women, of Afghanistan by leaving them at
the mercy of the Taliban.
- Did you get the sense that President Biden
cared about the fate of Afghan women?
- I don't think so.
He said the U.S. could not be the police of the
world to protect women in any other country.
- If there was a frustration by President Biden that
staying wasn't going to help things,
we've now seen that leaving
can make things worse.
Many journalists began to see themselves as saviors, imperfect, but saviors
nevertheless, taking up the responsibility of demanding that something be done
to protect Afghan women. And then there was the glorification
of American militarism.
We were inundated with feel-good stories, tweets
and photos about U.S. soldiers and Afghan
children, where the occupier was again portrayed
as a savior and ultimately,
a good-hearted person because they were on
our side. They represent us.
- This is what American troops were doing
before terrorists struck today:
feeding children, playing with kids,
lending an arm to the elderly.
The American military is the greatest in the world,
not only because of its superior force,
but because of its humanity.
Now compare that to what felt like silence from the same American
newsrooms, once it began to be reported
that over 23 million Afghans were facing mass starvation,
with only two percent of the population
having the means to feed themselves sufficiently.
That the winter was about to claim countless lives.
But that level of devastation wasn't from a natural disaster.
We knew a famine was approaching in Afghanistan as early as March 2021.
The famine has been made a lot worse by Joe Biden's decision to freeze $7 billion
in assets from Afghanistan's central bank.
That was justified as a way to coerce the Taliban, which retook the country as
the U.S. withdrew, into meeting U.S. and European demands.
In one of the few instances where the connection
was made between the frozen money and the
devastation it caused, The Intercept's
Austin Ahlman detailed what the U.S. move has
actually meant: that it's kept Afghans from
withdrawing their own money, that teachers
and government workers are unable to receive
their salaries, that the impact the freeze has had
on the import-export trade is
devastating the economy.
Most coverage doesn't actually connect the dots between the U.S. decision to freeze
funds and the humanitarian crisis.
If it did, the picture would show a starvation campaign waged by the
United States on the country it supposedly went to war to save.
Usually, the frozen funds are buried deep into
articles that offer little context beyond
painting the Taliban as primarily
to blame for the hunger.
The framing makes it seem like freezing the money was the logical thing to do to stop
the money from getting into the hands of the Taliban.
- The United States continues to face difficult
fundamental questions about how it might be
able to make reserve funds available to directly
benefit the people of Afghanistan, while
ensuring that the funds do not benefit the Taliban.
It can be spun any way, but that won't change the fact that by freezing
those assets, the United States enacted a policy of mass starvation.
And yet there seems to be less media concern about Afghan women and girls having
enough food to eat, than there is about what clothes they have to wear.
Take the Wall Street Journal, for example.
Between August 1, 2021, and February 16
of this year, the Journal posted over a dozen
articles, podcasts and videos
about the dangers facing Afghan women from
Afghan men and from the Taliban.
And articles and podcasts on the famine and the
starvation facing millions of Afghans?
A handful. Even then, reports weren't framed
around the direct impact of the U.S. freeze.
Coverage in The New York Times follows a similar
suit, where stories about Afghan women
outnumber those specifically about the
deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and
the U.S. role in exacerbating it.
Now, on February 11, President Joe Biden made
the announcement that the $7 billion would
finally be unfrozen.
But it wouldn't be given back to Afghans.
Instead, half of it would be given in aid, meaning distributed
by U.S.-approved organizations.
The other half, the Biden administration has decided that it will keep the money
for itself, putting it in a compensation fund for victims of 9/11,
meaning further punishment for a crime that Afghanistan never committed
but has paid for for two decades.
Meaning Afghans are paying reparations to citizens
of the richest country in the world while they are being starved.
"But Sana! Can we really talk about Afghanistan differently?"
"Are you saying we can't talk about Afghan women?"
"This is sounding like whataboutism and Taliban apologia to me."
We absolutely can - should - be talking about Afghanistan completely differently.
Demands for more humane and honest reporting that holds American war crimes
and occupation accountable can be uncomfortable for many.
It is, after all, easier to frame the United States ultimately as
good, but bumbling, and just blame the scary, brown, bearded Muslim men
for everything that's gone wrong.
So where do we start? How can we, as journalists, talk about Afghanistan,
especially in its current situation, in a way that is humane and honest?
We start with defining the actual legacy of the U.S.
war in Afghanistan, and we begin that with the violence that is at its heart.
Instead of using this moment following the U.S.
exit to earnestly self-reflect on the criminal
excesses of the war, on the toll it took on the
people of Afghanistan, the American media
collectively erased 20 years of history
and rewrote the narrative to make the U.S.
into a restrained savior.
The U.S. presence in Afghanistan didn't begin
in 2001, but that's a good date to start.
The single greatest source of violence
in Afghanistan over the last 20 years
comes from the presence of U.S.
war and occupation.
Rural Afghanistan, which is where the majority of
Afghans lived, has been devastated by the
occupation, which has seen drone air wars claim
many lives, including of men and boys who have
been indiscriminately and without contention
or evidence labeled enemy combatants.
Then there is the question of violence against women in Afghanistan.
There are cruel realities for Afghan women.
Our job isn't to deny that.
Our coverage, however, needs to take into account how 40 years of war
and 20 years of military occupation creates a culture of violence,
what it does to a society.
When violence is normalized at every
major level, then it is normalized in the most private of spaces as well.
Generations of Afghans - boys and girls, men and women -
have gone through four decades of horrific violence,
often related to foreign invasions,
which disrupts not only institutions but also a country's cultural fabric
and its interpersonal relationships.
When we chalk everything up to, "that's their culture,"
we have removed any and all responsibility of our government and
20 years of context we, as the media, are also responsible for
because of the dehumanizing coverage of the people of Afghanistan.
Another way of reckoning with the U.S. legacy in Afghanistan is to be clear
that there was no nation building, just like there was no saving of women or
building of democracy.
What we continue to refer to as a nation-building
project creating institutions to better the
day-to-day lives of Afghans was actually
billions of dollars pumped unchecked into the
hands of corrupt Afghan government officials,
Northern Virginia defense contractors, warlords or
it just disappeared.
Then there is talking to Afghans, not just those
with families who worked with past governments or those who have worked with the U.S.
military as contractors or those who live in Kabul.
Afghanistan is home to over 38 million people, 74 percent of whom live in rural areas.
Yet interviews with Afghans focus on major city centers or the diaspora.
And when the U.S. war in particular has disproportionately impacted Afghans in rural
areas, shouldn't they be at the center of the stories?
I have to say that there is good reporting from
many U.S. journalists. Their work, while functioning
as the exception to how mainstream U.S.
media has covered Afghanistan, offers that better
and honest coverage that reckons with
this country's legacy of violence is possible.
Now, there's a lot more we can put in here, and we will.
One of our upcoming episodes will be about how the U.S.
media covers so-called terrorism.
The envisioning of the U.S. legacy in Afghanistan as a bumbling savior
is rooted in a bigger story of how the U.S. media
covers and engages with the myths
propelled by the "war on terror."
Because that's the other thing about covering the war in Afghanistan.
It doesn't exist in just the context of 20 years of military occupation.
Coverage of all wars, special ops or whatever we want to call U.S.
militarism abroad over the last two decades, has been built on
deeply rooted assumptions and imaginings of Muslims, Muslim societies
and about how American violence, while it makes mistakes, is ultimately
good violence.
Like so many other societies in this world,
Afghanistan doesn't have a single story to tell.
But we, as journalists living in the United States,
can hold this country accountable
for the many stories it has
denied the Afghan people.
The many stories it's cut short.
Hey, everyone, thanks for watching. This was a
quicker turnaround for us because we
wanted to make sure that we're able to provide you
with some tools for understanding what
the coverage of Afghanistan is looking like
right now. There's a lot we didn't even scratch
the surface of, but we will be exploring a lot of it
in a deeper dive on the coverage of so-called
terrorism and the "war on terror"
in one of our upcoming episodes.
Also, do you want us to do quicker, shorter pieces reacting to what's going on?
Let me know because I do, in fact, read the comments.
I see exactly what you're saying.