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Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan
by Ann Jones
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Synopses & Reviews A sharp and arresting people’s-eye view of real life in Afghanistan after the Taliban Soon after the bombing of Kabul ceased, award-winning journalist and women’s rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city, determined to bring help where her country had brought destruction. Here is her trenchant report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Working among the multitude of impoverished war widows, retraining Kabul’s long-silenced English teachers, and investigating the city’s prison for women, Jones enters a large community of female outcasts: runaway child brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape. In the streets and markets, she hears the Afghan view of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban, and learns that regarding women as less than human is the norm, not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked—by Communists, Islamic fundamentalists, and the Western free marketeers—always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S promises and performance, between the new “democracy” and the still-entrenched warlords, between what’s boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends so much upon our own. Review: "In February 2003, Jones and her fellow NGO relief workers watched with disbelief and horror as Fox News declared the American war in Afghanistan a success — the Taliban totally defeated, all Afghan women 'liberated' and the infrastructure completely restored. The reality they knew on the ground in Kabul was starkly different. Jones ( Women Who Kill) presents her version of the events in this fascinating volume, which tours Kabul's streets, private homes, schools and women's prison. The political and military history of Afghanistan, as well as its cultural and religious traditions, inform Jones's daily interactions and observations. Describing an English class she taught, for example, Jones says, 'Once, after I explained what blind date meant, a woman said, 'Like my wedding.' ' Jones focuses particularly on Afghan women, whose lives are often permeated by violence. Her sharp eye and quick wit enable vivid writing, as when she witnesses a fistfight from her traffic-blocked car: an old man hit by a cyclist socks the cyclist, a young man punches the old man, then a traffic cop joins and socks the young man. Seconds later, all get up and continue on their way." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "The harsh beauty of Afghanistan has always lured a certain hardy breed of Westerner, and the few who linger there inevitably become both addicted and disillusioned. Despite the overthrow of the repressive Taliban and the advent of democracy in 2001, the country continues to vex as much as it inspires — and the continuing deep U.S. involvement in its rebirth compels us to examine why. In ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) her aptly titled 'Kabul in Winter,' Ann Jones, a journalist and women's rights activist, presents an especially bleak portrait of post-Taliban Afghanistan, depicting a cruel and opportunistic place where foreign aid money vanishes into a thousand tunic pockets, where women are trapped in prisons of family and cultural tradition, and where concepts such as accountability and the rule of law are often viewed as naive, foreign abstractions. Much of what Jones writes rings true, especially about the thick barriers that thwart her attempts to promote the legal rights of Afghan women. And some of her descriptions approach poetry: 'Kabul in winter is the color of the dust ... a fine particulate lifted by winds from old stone mountains and sifted over the city like flour .... Dust fills the lungs, tightens the chest, lies in the eyes like gravel, so that you look out on this obscure drab landscape always through something like tears.' Unfortunately, Jones, who writes frequently on women and violence, tends to veer into sarcastic, semi-vulgar and unsubstantiated diatribes against the Bush administration and U.S. foreign policy, thus undermining the power of her argument. She repeatedly refers to the current president as 'Bush the Lesser' and glibly tars all U.S. officials as people who 'knew nothing about Afghanistan and cared less,' except as a potential venue for an oil pipeline. Despite these lapses, Jones' book gathers power as it goes on, and her anger serves her increasingly well as she compiles a painstaking litany of frustrations and failures in her mission to help Afghan women. She skewers the hypocrisy of a culture that forces women to 'keep themselves under wraps' as a protection from the 'uncontrollable God-given sexual appetites of men.' Imposing the burden of 'honor' on women, she points out, 'frees men to live as they please' but makes them fearful and cruel. A Muslim woman, she concludes, 'wears the whole weight of the Islamic world.' Jones visits girls in hospitals who have tried to burn themselves to death rather than face the shame of not having proven their virginity by bleeding on their wedding nights. She visits a prison where young women are confined for such sexually related 'crimes' as running away from abusive husbands. Many recount tangled tales of forced marriages, family rejection and sexual enslavement. The common theme is the powerlessness of human property. 'Murder a favored wife,' Jones notes grimly, 'and you owe her family ... four new copies of the Quran, four women, and one fat sheep.' Most depressing of all are her efforts to get the local legal establishment to defend women's rights. Even female lawyers at the brand-new Ministry of Women's Affairs treat her with indifference, suspicion and bafflement. 'In my country it is against the law for a husband to hit his wife,' Jones tells them. 'In Afghanistan not,' they reply, in halting English. 'In my country it is against the law to force a young girl to marry an old man she doesn't want to marry,' Jones says. The lawyers shake their heads. 'In Afghanistan not. In my country is custom,' one says. Toward the end, the book relapses briefly into a sputtering indictment of red tape and corruption in foreign aid programs. But Jones' bitterness is eminently understandable. Afghanistan is a fledgling democracy, backed by Western money and might, but it is still often a society of survivors without pity that blames the victim and steals what it can from those who try to help. We are left with the indelible image of a winter night in Kabul as Jones listens impotently to the howls of chained dogs freezing to death in backyards, their owners too poor and beaten down to heed them. Greg Mortenson is another American drawn to the same forbidding region, determined to make a humanizing mark. After a failed attempt to climb the deadly K2 peak in 1993, Mortenson was taken in by a poor Pakistani village — and taken with the idea of building that village a school. Despite its pinky-raising title, 'Three Cups of Tea' is a swashbuckling, sprawling adventure tale in which we accompany the former 'climbing bum' across mountain passes and wobbly bridges on a mission to open schools for village children in northern Pakistan. Like Jones, he encounters obstacles at every turn — from Muslim clerics who forbid girls to attend his school, to tribal militiamen who kidnap him, to wily local leaders who attempt to divert his largess for their own ends. Mortenson is surely right that education is key to the battle with jihadists for Muslim minds. But unlike Jones' sharply observed, frequently lyrical memoir, Mortenson's book is full of self-indulgent digressions, clunky prose and odd, hagiographic references to himself. In one passage, we learn that 'thousands of people likewise sang Mortenson's praises,' while one villager thanks 'Almighty Allah and Mister Greg Mortenson' for a new school. There's even a highlighted quote from a profile in Parade magazine that describes him as 'quietly waging his own campaign against Islamic fundamentalists.' The problem stems in part from the awkward construction of the book, which is written as an admiring, extended third-person interview by its co-author, journalist David Oliver Relin. He acknowledges being in awe of Mortenson, but his efforts to build him up often fall flat. And Relin's metaphors often seem like parodies: 'Mortenson sat on a boulder and drank from his water bottle ... but he couldn't drink in enough of this setting.' We also learn far too much about Mortenson's domestic life and fundraising travails back in the States — none of which is nearly as interesting as the characters and situations he encounters in the remote tribal regions of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, Relin's prose gains both altitude and insight. When a Muslim guide kneels to pray in a parking lot, 'the belief rippling around him was ... powerful enough to convert a gas station into a holy place.' Among some tribes, patience is a way of life: Just as a hunter from Pakistan's Balti people 'would stalk a single ibex for days' to save a precious bullet that he could not afford to squander, 'a Balti groom might wait years for his marriage' until his betrothed child bride was old enough to leave home. Mortenson's mission is admirable, his conviction unassailable, his territory exotic and his timing excellent. His story would have been better served, though, by a tougher editor and a book that was shorter, leaner and freer of fawning. Pamela Constable, a deputy foreign editor at The Washington Post, was the paper's South Asia bureau chief from 1999 to 2002 and its Kabul correspondent from 2002 to 2004." Reviewed by Pamela Constable, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Book News Annotation: A journalist specializing in women and violence, Jones went to
Afghanistan after the bombing stopped from her home in downtown New
York City. She recounts her experiences and observation with war
widows in the streets, the prisons, and the schools of Kabul.
Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) About the Author Ann Jones is the author of Women Who Kill, Next Time She’ll Be Dead, and Looking for Lovedu. An authority on women and violence, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Nation.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780805078848
- Subtitle:
- Life Without Peace in Afghanistan
- Author:
- Jones, Ann
- Publisher:
- Metropolitan Books
- Subject:
- Social life and customs
- Subject:
- History
- Subject:
- Anthropology - Cultural
- Subject:
- Middle East - General
- Subject:
- Personal Memoirs
- Subject:
- Islamic Studies
- Subject:
- Asia - Central Asia
- Subject:
- SOC048000
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Publication Date:
- 20060321
- Binding:
- HC
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 336
- Dimensions:
- 8.48x6.42x1.12 in. 1.08 lbs.
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