On the rural-urban divide for Afghan women

Anand Gopal reports for The New Yorker Magazine under the headline, "The Other Afghan Women."  The subhead is more revealing, "In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them."

A village woman named Shakira is the center of Gopal's narrative, but here's an excerpt that encapsulates the overarching point the journalist seems to be making:  

This summer, I travelled to rural Afghanistan to meet women who were already living under the Taliban, to listen to what they thought about this looming dilemma. More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities, and in the past decade the insurgent group had swallowed large swaths of the countryside. Unlike in relatively liberal Kabul, visiting women in these hinterlands is not easy: even without Taliban rule, women traditionally do not speak to unrelated men. Public and private worlds are sharply divided, and when a woman leaves her home she maintains a cocoon of seclusion through the burqa, which predates the Taliban by centuries. Girls essentially disappear into their homes at puberty, emerging only as grandmothers, if ever. It was through grandmothers—finding each by referral, and speaking to many without seeing their faces—that I was able to meet dozens of women, of all ages.

* * *

I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban.

As you can see, Gopal is focused on misbehavior by the U.S. military, and how that misbehavior --or at least the collateral damage of the military--disproportionately impacted rural Afghans these past two decades.  

Postscript:  This Twitter thread, captured on Sept. 11, 2021, provides a different perspective on Gopal's article.  Heather Barr, the author/tweeter, is Associate Director, Women's Right's Division, Human Rights Watch.  Her bio says she is a former Afghanistan researcher.  

And here's a second commentator on Gopal's piece, and Barr's commentary on it.  

Azmat Khan's bio says she is an investigative reporter and associated with the Columbia Journalism School.