Unabashed and Unbroken

Afghan-American Women Reclaim Their Stories
Interviews: Zainab Mohsini | Artwork: Zainab Ahmadi

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban during the chaotic U.S. troop withdrawal, the memory of the War in Afghanistan is starting to fade from public discourse. Despite headline coverage of the tumultuous evacuation effort during the last two weeks of August 2021, the U.S. media industry has reared its head to Ukraine. The endless coverage of white Ukrainian refugees has exposed the racist bias of journalists who have claimed that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan [...] This is a relatively civilized [place]”.¹ Despite the lack of mainstream media or political discourse about Afghanistan, the legacy of decades of U.S.-endorsed geopolitical conflict is still negatively impacting Afghans, and particularly Afghan women, all across the globe. Listening to Afghan women, now more than ever, is essential.

Afghan women have been a central justification for the development of the expansive U.S. military-industrial complex during the era of the War on Terror. Very explicitly, Laura Bush, during the first presidential radio address presented entirely by a First Lady², stated, in reference to the War in Afghanistan, that, “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”³ At the very beginning of the Bush presidency, the U.S. government was planting the seeds of a cynical political and social discourse that placed Afghan women at the very center of a racist and paternalist reasoning for the “War on Terror”. The use of Afghan women as a rhetorical tool to justify very uncivilized U.S. wars and imperial expansion was an act of intentional historical amnesia.

Contrary to popular belief and knowledge, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan predates 2001 by over 20 years. In the late 1970s, the CIA began providing support to anti-Soviet mujahideen forces with the intention to “goad the Red Army into invading” Afghanistan so that the U.S. could pull the Soviet Union into a drawn out, bloody conflict similar to the U.S. war in Vietnam.⁴ Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. government regularly provided hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military support to the mujahideen every year.⁵ Branches of the mujahideen would use the training and weapons from the U.S. and its allies to form the Taliban, which brutally took over Afghanistan in the 1990s.⁶ The entire U.S. policy towards Afghanistan in the late twentieth century was to actively support a prolonged, brutal conflict to tear apart Afghan society as a part of the proxy war in the greater geopolitical struggle with the Soviet Union. Throughout these years of extensive, if covert, involvement, the U.S. contributed to a cycle of violence that displaced millions of Afghan women.

The women who I interviewed for this project have been caught up in these conflicts that have extended over the past 40 years. From those whose families were forced to flee in the late 1970s to those who escaped last year, there are eerie echoes of pain and struggle that carry through each successive generation of women refugees. Despite President Biden’s promise to, “speak out for basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls,” the concerns facing Afghan women in the U.S. and across the globe are continuing to escalate. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are successively placing more restricting on women’s rights while about half the population in general is at risk of starvation. Meanwhile, efforts to provide permanent status to Afghan parolees in the U.S. have stalled.

Though the U.S. government and the media have spilled much ink on the importance of supporting Afghan women, political and journalistic actors rarely center the voices of those women. My SAADA project fights to break this cycle of repeated violence, disenfranchisement, and paternalism by asking Afghan and Afgan-American women to speak candidly about their own experiences. Unfortunately, the limited scope of my project inhibited me from focusing on the voices of all marginalized groups within communities of Afghan women. However, my hope is that my project builds a space for future research into other aspects of Afghan womanhood. Unsurprisingly, the interviews yielded a diverse array of perspectives, with women discussing gender, ethnicity, immigration, class, discrimination, resistance, and a range of other topics. Not all of the women agree on the attitudes towards U.S. intervention or on their specific role within the South Asian American community. However, all of the women agree that Afghan women are the ones who should have the leading role in deciding their own futures.














1. “They are ‘civilised’ and ‘look like us’: the racist coverage of Ukraine,” Moustafa Bayoumi, The Guardian
2. “Laura Bush Addresses State of Afghan Women,” James Gerstenzang and Lisa Getter, Los Angeles Times
3. “Radio Address by Mrs. Bush,” The White House
4. “Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Vietnam,” Al-Jazeera
5. “History to Trump: CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded in ’79,” Tim Weiner, The Washington Post
6. “A Look At Afghanistan's 40 Years Of Crisis — From The Soviet War To Taliban Recapture,” Hannah Bloch, NPR

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