Veiled Courage

A timely insider's account of the bad fortunes of Afghan women under the Taliban regime—and its predecessors and likely its successors as well.
Novelist and policy analyst Benard (Turning on the Girls, 2001, etc.), who is married to an Afghan dissident and has traveled widely in southwestern Asia, documents the important work of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a grass-roots organization that commanded much attention when it released photographs of Afghan women being beaten and killed by members of the Taliban religious police. Founded in late 1979 by a moderate reformer named Meena, RAWA organized schools, job programs, and social services for Afghan women; though Meena showed admirable entrepreneurial and administrative abilities and a democratic bent, she was never able to enlist the aid of the US, which instead filled the coffers of the anti-Soviet fighters who would spawn the Taliban. "Any politically knowledgeable Afghan could foresee the tragic outcome of this very shortsighted American strategy: They were pouring money into groups that hated the West and everything it stood for." Meena was subsequently kidnapped and murdered, but RAWA went on, its members under constant threat of death. Using several case histories, Benard examines the group's ideals in the face of "gender apartheid" and presses for Western governments in post-Taliban Afghanistan to take an active role in stopping the systematic abuse of women: "Even if oppressing women were [the Afghan] tradition, it would rightly fall into the category of droughts and other problems that the progress of history and civilization provide us with the means—and thus the obligation—to alleviate."
Academic in nature but eminently accessible, this should find an interested audience among readers concerned with women's issues and civil rights. It capably "gives representation to the rural, the uneducated, and the female members of the Afghan populace—voices seldom heard in sociology, to its great detriment."