Why America’s hasty departure kills all hope for the lives of Afghanistan’s women and girls

I vividly remember watching a Channel 4 documentary in 2001, a matter of months after 9/11, in which a reporter had travelled to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, filming covertly for the duration of the trip, the footage grainy and chilling. Through sheer coincidence it had been shot earlier that year, before the Tuesday in 2001 that changed the world, and before Afghanistan was on all our lips and television screens.

I rewatched that documentary earlier this year, but even before this, for the past two decades I had remembered the images of blue burqa-clad women begging for bread, abandoned by their husbands yet legally forbidden from working under Taliban rule; I also remembered the secret girls’ schools and, most harrowingly of all, the woman in a blue burqa executed by the Taliban for adultery in the “execution square”, which was once a football field.

As she was fatally shot, her body slumped into a heap on the ground, while hundreds looked on. I thought at the time, and still think, of the utter bravery and daring of filming undercover, to show, in brutally vivid detail to viewers in the UK, the unbearable oppression in which Afghan citizens (particularly women) were forced to exist; it was both heartbreaking and extraordinary. The programme was filmed and first broadcast in 2001, before social media, before YouTube, before I had the internet. It was profound to my 15-year-old self.

Fast forward two decades, and this week, President Biden has followed through on Donald Trump’s decree for all US troops to leave Afghanistan by 11 September 2021 – the UK’s troops are set to follow suite. In reality the exit had started sooner, and was swifter, to put it charitably. Indeed, Biden’s (and by extension, Trump’s) argument goes along the lines that America can’t be in the Afghan war forever: “It’s now in your hands, Afghanistan,” seems to be the message delivered from the US, the UK and Nato.

To quote Biden directly, he stated last week that “we did not go to Afghanistan to nation build. And it’s the right and responsibility of Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.” This was on the day the president announced that all US forces will be out of Afghanistan by 31 August. In fact, at the time of writing, US and Nato forces left Bagram base with little fanfare, with American troops leaving Bagram airbase without so much as a goodbye: with the exception of a handful of troops to guard the US embassy in Kabul, western troops in Afghanistan will be no more.

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Without American backing, there cannot be a viable foreign presence in Afghanistan. And I fear that this wholescale withdrawal is one of the biggest foreign-policy blunders of the past decade. It is more than likely that a troop surge will be required in the not-too-distant future, once the Taliban fully recapture much of Afghanistan, as they are doing with worrying rapidity: recent reports suggest that the Taliban has regained control of 85 per cent of the country.

I have no familial links to the county, and I can count on one hand the number of people I know who went there as members of our Armed Forces. But it is precisely due to the intertwined historical and military relationship between Britain and Afghanistan that this country should remain at the forefront of much public discussion and discourse. This is reflected through the many programmes and journalistic accounts delivered on the issues, such as Ross Kemp’s Back on the Frontline from over a decade ago, towards the end of which the then British ambassador takes Kemp to an abandoned swimming pool where the Taliban used to carry out ritualistic executions and throw the bodies off the diving board into the waterless pool. An epilogue to brutality.

President Biden’s reasoning is seductive and may win favour with much of his electorate. However, his reasoning would only work if America had had no prior involvement in Afghanistan pre-2001. On the contrary, through Operation Cyclone, the CIA covertly funded and armed various mujahadin factions in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s: both before and after the fall of President Najibullah.

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The role of Pakistan in what eventually became a jihadist insurgency also cannot be overstated. In fact, as former Pakistani prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, recounts in her book Reconciliation (published posthumously in 2008): “The decision to empower the extremist factions among the Afghan mujahideen caused me to say, in a meeting with President George HW Bush in the White House in June 1989, ‘Mr. President, I fear we have created a Frankenstein that will come back to haunt us’.”

That Frankenstein’s monster did come back to haunt Afghanistan in the form of the Taliban, which took control of Afghanistan in 1996. This was a time when, on the other side of the world, the Spice Girls and their message of girl power rang through the UK, empowering a generation of young girls, and a year before Tony Blair became prime minister in the summer of 1997 under the banner “things can only get better”. Those British summers seemed like a free and opportunity-filled time, just as thousands of miles away, the Afghan people were succumbing to the yoke of oppression and the terror wrought by Mullah Omar and his adherents: music was banned, beards for adult men were compulsory, floggings, amputations and executions were commonplace, and women were relegated to existing in what can best be described as chattel slavery.

A quarter of a century from the beginning of the codification of these horrors, Afghanistan now appears closer than it seemed then, thanks in no small part to the internet and satellite TV in our interconnected world. On a personal level, this has also come about due to the work I have done with Afghans in the UK, primarily through tutoring Afghan teenagers over a decade ago, who were in foster care, and who had arrived to the UK as unaccompanied minors: alongside teaching them I learnt of tales of war and human suffering, and unimaginable pain and trauma.

One young Afghan boy spoke of his relief when the police at Kent decided not to handcuff him when collecting him from the shore: this was long before Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point” poster and Priti Patel and the “hostile environment”, where so many tabloids have become obsessed by the “dinghy people”, showing a worrying problematisation of the black and brown body.

In fact, it may be hard to believe now, but the tuition I provided to these refugees was directly funded by the local borough councils. I know some of those young men are now doing well, at good universities, and in work. None of them, they told me, had wanted to flee their homelands, arriving abandoned in the UK, leaving dead fathers and missing mothers behind. And when I asked one boy why it was only boys I tutored he told me: “It is impossible for girls to leave the country.” All this told to me in the classrooms of a London comprehensive.

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And so, it again returns to the women and girls of Afghanistan. About a decade after my experiences of tutoring young Afghan refugees, I was working at a law firm, in what would be my final direct experience with the situation in Afghanistan. It was an immigration law firm, and many of those we were representing were Afghans fleeing a resurgent Taliban.

One of my first tasks was to conduct detailed background research into the situation to assist their claims before the immigration tribunal. I immediately became aware of the Taliban’s utilisation of “sticky bombs” – a new tactic that wrought terror in their campaign to destabilise the country and intimidate its people. As part of my research, I came across a short documentary by a BBC journalist from 2014, whose work I had followed before. A British Afghan, she had returned to Kabul to report on how the land lay at the time.

I end with recounting this experience because in this news documentary, amid the chaos and explosions, she spoke to two Afghan school girls: one in a white hijab, the other in a mustard-coloured hijab. I have not seen the clip in a while, but I remember it with absolute clarity, and it will be seared into my mind for many years to come. Speaking in immaculate English, the two young girls spoke bravely about how Afghanistan had to educate its young women and girls, and how despite the horrors, they must persevere in going to school. And when the reporter told one of the girls that where she is from, in the UK, girls going to school is an utterly non-remarkable aspect of life, the schoolgirl wearing the mustard-coloured hijab simply looked up in wonderment and said “wow”.

In light of the escalation of attacks on girls and women across Afghanistan, and the recent bombing of a girls’ school in Kabul, I do not wish to think what might have happened to those two young girls. I hope that they have made it, and that they live, and learn, and prosper. But the odds are not in their favour. What if they are now dead? I shudder at that thought with dread: I cannot comprehend a world in which that could be possible. And what if, as seems more than likely, when US troops fully depart – abruptly, with no compassion or strategy – the piles of bodies continue to grow?

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Will we, the west, have a clear conscience? Hardly. You may wonder why, in a country which has seen at least 10,000 civilians murdered each year (between 2013 and 2020), where 2,448 US soldiers have been killed³, and where 455 British troops have been killed, I focus on two girls I saw for a few moments on a BBC documentary several years ago. The answer is somewhat personal.

First, you will find that for those of us who have worked in the criminal justice system, among victims, offenders, the dark corners of humanity, the faces and names and misery all blur into one – until every now and then, one face or one name enters our memory forever. A child – a girl – unable to comprehend the luxury of being able to go to school without the bullets, the mortar shells, the gunfire and suicide bombs – and all in the 21st century, was one such face for me.

Second, I saw a striking physical resemblance to two of my nieces, who live just a couple of borders away from Afghanistan. Yet such is the luck of the draw – the “birth lottery” – that they do not have to dodge sniper fire and explosions just to receive an education. And now, are we saying that these girls, and millions more like them, should simply be abandoned at the mercy of forces that will inflict medieval barbarism given half the chance?

Trump was widely (and rightly) chastised for his lack of empathy and compassion, but President Biden, in this latest decision, has shown himself to be hardly better. As I have already outlined, America is inextricably linked to the region’s problems. And if we leave now, our 20-year war, and all the lives lost, would be for nothing. So long as the prospect of girls simply going to school, or women going to work, or holding public office, or being a religious minority in Afghanistan seems like a fantastical idea enough to elicit wonderment from schoolchildren, so long as that is the reality, the whole world is worse off.

And when the Taliban re-emerges to plunge the country’s people back into state-sanctioned inhumanity, then it seems less likely that within the lifetimes of those two schoolgirls stood on a street in Kabul there will be peace. So, that is why I mourn for a country to which I have never been, and which in many ways I feel I know well, but in other ways I do not know at all. And that is why, amid this hasty withdrawal, the whole world’s people should weep: for the lost promise – and the death of hope.