I come from a land of tragedy called Afghanistan. —Malalai Joya

The truth is like the sun: when it comes up nobody can block it out or hide it.

—Afghan proverb

Imagine yourself twenty-five, female, the youngest member of Afghanistan’s new parliament.

Born three days before the Soviet-backed coup, your earliest memories are of a police force beating down your door and ransacking the house to arrest your father. Like many other children from your country, your family flees and you grow up in refugee camps along the borders of Iran and Pakistan. You’re lucky enough to enroll in a school sponsored by an underground Afghan Women’s “freedom-loving anti-fundamentalist” organization known as RAWA where you not only learn to read and write, but you become a teacher, helping others including your own mother to become literate. When your family returns to Afghanistan, under the Taliban, you help to create an underground school for girls in direct defiance of Taliban law.  You smuggle schoolbooks under your burqua and endanger your own life for the sake of educating others. You later become the director of a medical clinic and an orphanage, spending time with families that torn apart by decades of war, poverty and high unemployment.

When, at twenty-five, you are elected to represent the people of your province in Afghanistan’s new parliament, you take your job very seriously. And when you arrive at the Loya Jirga, which literally means a meeting of elders, to help shape your country’s new constitution, you look around only to notice that many of your fellow representatives are well known to you. They are, in fact, your country’s equivalent of Ted Bundy, Anthony Sowell, John Wayne Gacy and Robert Pickton, but more anti-social. People whose crimes against humanity are so large and well documented that their very participation in a fledgling democracy make the proceeding look like a cruel hoax.

What do you do next?

If your name is Malalai Joya, you struggle your way to the microphone at the first opportunity, and convince a colleague to let you cut in front of him in line. When given your three minutes to speak, you begin,

My name is Malalai Joya from Farah Province. By the permission of the esteemed attendees, and by the name of God and the martyrs of the path of freedom, I would like to speak for a few minutes.

My criticism of all my compatriots is why you are allowing the legitimacy and legality of this Loya Jirga to come into question due to the presence of those criminals who have brought our country to this state. Why would you allow criminals to be present here?

They are responsible for our situation now! The chairman of every committee is already selected. Why do you not take these criminals to one committee so that we see what they want for this nation! It is they who turned our country into the center of national and international wars! They are the most antiwomen elements in our society who have brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again. I believe that it is a mistake to test those who have already been tested.

They should be prosecuted in the national and international courts! Even if these criminals were to be somehow forgiven by our people—the barefoot Afghan people—our history will never forgive them. Their names are recorded in the history of our country...

So begins your surreal new life as a fugitive and a legend.

*   *   *

I am an Afghan. Tijik, Pathtun, Hazara, Uzbek, Nooristani, Baluch, Pashaee, are all the same to me. —Malalai Joya

Joya’s memoir is titled A Woman among Warlords, although I prefer the Australian title, Raising my Voice.

It’s difficult not to like a person who describes the trials of eating ice cream under a burqa.  It’s also impossible not to get a very different picture of life in Afghanistan than one we have in the mainstream media. For example, she describes how popular bootlegged copies of the Titanic were, even under the Taliban. Suddenly soaps and deodorants were all named “Titanic Soap,” and “Titanic deodorant,” there was a newly titled, “Titanic Market.” Even one of the Taliban mullahs giving a sermon said that if people didn’t follow the teachings of Allah they would all end up like the people on the Titanic, implying he too had seen it.

Of course, her story is also one of constant struggle during the ongoing disruptions of war. Joya’s father lost his leg when a landmine exploded, and because of his political involvement, fighting the soviets, he was also unable to complete his medical degree. Meena, a childhood hero of Joya’s and the founder of the underground women’s organization RAWA was murdered by fundamentalist warlords at age thirty. (RAWA is also the organization that released the famous footage showing the soccer stadium execution that highlighted to the west the realities of life under the Taliban. Salon called them the Taliban’s bravest opponents).

But Joya also paints a complex picture of men in Afghanistan. The young man who let her take his turn at the microphone at the Loya Jirga tells her that it was the most intrepid thing he’d ever done. “I did not have the courage to speak the way you did.” Taxi drivers risk their lives for her. Under the Taliban women could not walk unaccompanied, but sometimes when she had to come home late and a truck of Taliban fighters drove up, a stranger would step forward and claim to be her brother so she would not be arrested.

Joya writes, “many Afghan men are willing to accept the leadership of a woman, if you speak from the heart about the core issues and the miseries that afflict them. Scores of men visited me to tell me they were ready to work for my cause. They wanted to take direction from me, regardless of my age and gender. This gives me confidence that if more women in Afghanistan take up the struggle for our rights and for justice, we will have the majority of poor Afghan men as our comrades-in-arms.”

After she spoke at the Loya Jirga, one male supporter told her, “I want to put my hat on your head, and your scarf on mine.”

However, this is not to imply that she doesn’t experience almost cartoonish amounts of hatred from many men and women just for being a woman. The word misogyny takes on new meaning in Afghanistan where even after eight years of war and democracy construction in the post-Taliban era, it says a lot about the failures of the United States to improve the lives of women that RAWA, the women’s organization that educated Joya is still a more or less underground operation, and women can be detained and tortured indefinitely just for being associated with it.

While she was running for office, Joya’s political opponents found a photo of her without a headscarf, and put a caption underneath, “she took off her scarf at the Loya Jirga, she’ll take off her pants in Parliament.”

And in a controversial ruling that is being appealed, Joya has been banned from serving her full elected term in parliament for insulting the other MP’s by comparing the proceedings to a zoo. Not one of the MP’s who called for her to be killed or raped (captured on you-tube) have been likewise suspended for disrespect. North Americans such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, have circulated a petition for Joya to be reinstated. In her description, Afghanistan’s parliament is a zoo. At least four times, journalists have been beaten up inside the parliament by MP’s, and in 2007 a Tolo tv crew was attacked by members of Parliament after the station broadcast some MP’s literally sleeping on the job. She points out, many journalists have to turn to self-censorship to survive since even mentioning the names of any warlords, let alone their crimes, means, at the least, arrest and imprisonment.

*   *   *

Terrorism isn’t a person or a country, either. It’s a tactic. How can you wage war on a tactic? —Malalai Joya

Political forgetting, perhaps like personal forgetting, nearly always has some degree of self-interest and intention.  Reading Joya’s book made me wonder if the biggest obstacle to the United States’ efforts toward nation-building in Afghanistan has been our collective lack of a long-term memory.

Of course, it takes effort to redact history in the age of information. Anyone with a dial-up modem in the United States, Pakistan, or Afghanistan can learn that the United States invested between 36 and 48 billion tax payer dollars in the muhadeens or warriors including Bin Laden during the 1980’s. But our investment in jihad goes deeper than that. As a Washington Post article points out, as a product of the Cold War, the United States sent millions of textbooks to Afghanistan featuring violent images for school children. Instead of counting oranges or pomegranates, kids could learn math by counting of landmines or grenades. Books showed pictures of soldiers with missing heads and verses from the Koran praising their sacrifice. As a Canadian aid worker reading through them pointed out to the Washington Post, “The constant image of Afghans being natural warriors is wrong. Warriors are created. If you want a different kind of society, you have to create it.”

It took until 2002 for these U.S. written and produced textbooks to be “fixed” or the violent images to be replaced with milder ones. Or tellingly, after violence from Afghanistan spilled out into the United States, we suddenly became aware that teaching a generation of middle eastern school children how to be violent, death-seeking warriors might be a problem. But this points to the problem of circularity in the United States’ entire program in Afghanistan.  If Islamic fundamentalism is the number one threat to America’s security in the world today, why do we continue to fund and militarily abet Islamic fundamentalism in the form of the government of Hamid Karzai?

After Malalai Joya spoke out at the Loya Jirga the New York Times wrote an article about it called “A Young Afghan Dares to Mention the Unmentionable,” but the article fails to answer the question, what makes it unmentionable? Why should the United States lend our support to a parliament that not only has accused criminals in it, but criminals whose alleged criminality can’t be mentioned?  What kind of democracy are we spending so much of our precious blood and treasure to build?

*  *  *

Afgans are more than just a handful of warlords, Taliban, drug lords, and lackeys. I have a country full of people who know what I know and believe what I believe: That we Afghans can govern ourselves without foreign interference. That democracy is possible but can never be imposed at gunpoint. —Malalai Joya

If you want to see in miniature the disconnect between an American understanding of Afghanistan and Afghanistan’s understanding of itself, you can look at the reviews of Joya’s book on Amazon.com.  One reviewer writes, “she never appeared to look at herself to ask…What can I do differently?…How can I work WITH members of the Parliament to change views?”

Few Americans realize that the average lifespan in Afghanistan is 44 years. Most Afghans live on less than $2 per day. Eighty percent of women are illiterate, fifty percent of men are illiterate, unemployment hovers at around 40%, and these numbers have not improved over the past nine years the U.S. has intertwined its fate with that of the warlords, the so-called northern alliance of Afghanistan.

Yet, the period in the recent history of Afghanistan that’s mostly blacked out in our media takes place between 1992 and 1996, after the Soviets pulled out, and when our current allies, the Northern Alliance ruled the country. And to really understand where Joya is coming from, and why she enjoys so much widespread popularity among the people of Afghanistan, I waded through Human Rights Watch’s Report, Blood Stained Hands that put many things into perspective.

For one thing, the alleged crimes of the warlords include mass kidnappings, torture, including putting nails into human skulls, loading shipping containers full of people and setting them on fire, mass genocidal rapes of ethnic minorities, looting, and intentional mortar fire on civilians and civilian areas including hospitals. Conservative estimates say 25-30,000 people were murdered in Kabul alone during that period, but other estimates put the number closer to 65,000 or higher. 

And disturbingly, the warlords named in the Human Rights Watch Report report read like a who’s who list of Karzai’s government. The so-called warlord strategy. To try to understand, it would be as if a foreign country entered the United States to set up a democratic government and allowed Charles Manson to be appointed the head of our Ministry of Defense. Or John Wayne Gacy were to head our Department of Homeland Security. No wonder Karzai is eager to welcome the Taliban into his government. As Joya points out, Karzai’s warlords and the Taliban aren’t temperamentally different, since both are at root Islamic fundamentalist extremist groups with little regard for human rights, particularly if those humans are women. The primary difference is that one group is funded by the CIA and US taxpayers (the warlords) while the other has been and is currently funded by Pakistan.

Grotesque only begins to describe it.

Joya and many others in Afghanistan opt for a secular form of democratic government.

*   *   *

I know this is already long, but I wanted to end with this link to footage by an Australian filmmaker named Carmela Baranowska. She won her country’s equivalent to a Pulitzer prize for being one of the few filmmakers to penetrate deep into what the marines call ‘Taliban Country’ in the heart of Afghanistan. She embedded with a marine unit, but then went back with a translator on her own to try to ask villagers what had happened.

It’s a free download, but the story is incredibly sad. Thirty-five people are arrested in a village, and the marines claim it’s for harboring Taliban soldiers, but the villagers assert that the warlords traveling with the marines are using them purely to carry out tribal grievances. The men and women interviewed say that they were stripped naked, fingered in their anuses, not properly fed for three days and they had water thrown in their eyes and pushed up their noses. For being members of the wrong tribe. “Don’t humiliate us,” an older man says.

“The skies have fallen on us over and over.”