Most ambitious journalistic efforts begin with one, telling moment.
The road that led to the Behind the Veil project began one morning in late March, when word leaked out of a international conference in the Hague that Afghan President Hamid Karzai – our ally in the bloody and costly effort to bring peace to that war-savaged land – had endorsed a law that, among other things, allowed some men to demand sex from their wives.
We were skeptical at the initial reports. Could this really be true?
The answer turned out to be yes, and the response – a mix of anger and disappointment around the world – spoke volumes about the powerful and often conflicting emotions many of us have about the nation-building exercise in Afghanistan. Should we have been shocked that such a law could have emerged from an ancient, paternalistic culture that neither embraced nor endorsed Western notions of gender equality?
Probably not. But, realistic or not, we hoped for better.
During the next few weeks, as the rape-law controversy dominated the headlines, we started to ask ourselves some basic questions: What do Afghan women think about this law? Moreover, what do Afghan women think about anything: the war; the presence of foreign troops; their place in the world; their hopes and fears about the future?
Half the population of this country to which we have devoted so much attention was an enigma to us; a silent, shadowy presence, hidden behind veils and mud walls, almost absent from the narrative of the conflict.
Behind the Veil is our effort to give voice to the largely silent half of Afghanistan. The women live lives that on one hand seem mystifying and terrifying – the unrelenting violence, the smothering social codes, the buying and selling of women like cattle – but also touchingly familiar in the places where our lives intersect around family and work, around their hopes for the future that aren’t much different than ours.
Like us, these women hoped the intervention of the outside world would improve their lives; like us, they have been largely disappointed. In fact, for many of the women of Kandahar, what was to have been a march toward a brighter future has turned into a retreat back to the past and in some cases, back to the burka.
