Casualties of Care: A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan

Casualties of Care: A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Julie Billaud (*) (*) orcid.org/0000-0002-3205-7111. Geneva Graduate Institute. [email protected] Dynamis Fecha de recepción: 6 de noviembre de 2023 [0211-9536] 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 Fecha de aceptación: 21 de marzo de 2024 http://dx.doi.org/10.30827/dynamis.v44i1.30728 SUMMARY: 1.—Introduction 2.—A note on methodology. 3.—The humanitarian imaginary. 4.—Governing through self-empowerment. 5.—The Tyranny of Freedom. 6.—Conclusion. ABSTRACT: This article is concerned with the ways in which humanitarian imaginaries in post-9/11 Afghanistan have shaped representations of women’s needs as well as programs designed to answer them. Its aim is to examine the ‘dark side’ of care and the politics of worthiness on which humanitarianism relies. In conversation with scholars who have highlighted the disciplinary aspects of care, I show how apparently well-intentioned humanitarian discourses and practices have drawn boundaries within the Afghan population and reinforced nationalist sentiments. I argue that Orientalist imaginaries of Muslim women in need of rescue did not only serve to justify the military intervention but also the presence of international humanitarian organizations. Furthermore, such colonial fantasies have actualized specific regimes of care based on liberal notions of self-empowerment. The technologies of the ‘self’ on which these programs have relied have overlooked the various forms of structural inequalities responsible for triggering crises in the first place and the broader dynamics of violence and abandonment that have marked the history of the West’s engagement with Afghanistan since the 1990s. The return of the Taliban in 2021 should therefore not solely be understood as the mere result of military strategies and political negotiations but also as the outcome of a broader movement of resistance against this humanitarian ideology, locally perceived as a form of cultural imperialism. KEYWORDS: Gender, Humanitarian imaginaries, Care, Imperialism, Afghanistan. Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 128 1. Introduction On 8 March 2007, a ceremony was organized by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs on the occasion of International Women’s Day. The event took place in a conference room of the luxurious Safi Landmark Hotel in Shar-e-Now, one of the few modern glass buildings that had erupted in Kabul’s city center in the years that had followed the establishment of the Karzai government. The high ceiling room with extravagant golden chandeliers and thick carpets was filled with prominent Afghan women dressed in flamboyant clothes, members of women’s organizations, civil servants and politicians, who had been invited to deliver speeches and to celebrate the progresses achieved by women since the fall of the Taliban regime. The room was decorated with banners on which popular Afghan proverbs were displayed, as is customary in Afghan political meetings. One in particular attracted my amused attention: “Never beat a woman, even with a bouquet of flowers!” A group of girl scouts in khaki uniforms with transparent white scarves under their berets opened the event by singing patriotic songs. As they exited the stage, General Khotul Mohamadzai, the first woman to have acceded to a high military rank during the Russian-backed communist government, appeared in full military gear behind the lectern and delivered a speech in which she celebrated the motherland and praised women for their primary role as mothers. “Women suffered during the war because they lost their husbands and sons! Women hate wars because their children are everything to them!” she exclaimed in a sobbing voice as a storm of applauses erupted from the audience. The ceremony concluded with a gift distributed to all female attendees as they left the room: a Koran and a white chador. This unexpected manifestation of nationalism and overt celebration of traditional gender roles —at least in the speeches delivered, since the costumes women wore were contradicting such stereotypes— in an event sponsored by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs was in sharp contrast with discourses of women’s empowerment promoted by international aid agencies. I left disoriented, struggling to reconcile the ostentatious affluence of the venue with the material poverty in which the majority of Afghan women continued to live, in spite of the financial windfall promised by the reconstruction process. Was the gendered language of nationalism necessary for women to become credible and legitimate actors in the political life of the new Islamic Republic? Was there any room for alternative conceptions of femininity in a A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 129 country where nationalist sentiments were revived as a result of the presence of foreign military troops and international organisations? To a great extent, nationalist conceptions of womanhood promoted by the recently established Ministry of Women’s Affairs represented the reverse image of the ‘liberated Afghan woman’ that had been mobilized by the US and their allies to justify a military intervention in Afghanistan. Indeed, in November 2001, a few weeks after the US started bombing the country, the American first lady Laura Bush, in search of moral justifications for the war, triumphantly announced: “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” 1. She was soon echoed by Cherie Blair, the British first lady, who called for moves to “give back a voice” to Afghan women 2 . This level of attention to the plight of Afghan women marked a radical rupture with Western governments’ silence during the years of civil war that followed the withdrawal of the Red Army in 1989, revealing imperial powers’ capacity to coopt women’s cause so as to gather public support for military interventions abroad 3 . While first ladies gave public speeches, Western media flooded TV channels and magazines’ front pages with images of Afghan women covered from head to toe under blue burqas, a garment that had become the ultimate symbol of their oppression. The moral imperative to rescue Afghan women and relieve their suffering was presented as a means to restore justice after years of oppression under the Taliban, an oppression primarily explained in essentializing religious and cultural terms. Cultural explanations replaced historical ones, leaving the role of the US in the development of oppressive regimes in the region largely unexamined 4. Mobilising a classic trope of ‘colonial feminism’ in which “white men save brown women from brown men”, the figure of the Afghan woman that emerged out of these discourses 1. Laura Bush. “Laura Bush delivers Radio Address”. CNN/Transcripts, November 17, 2001, accessed April 15, 2024, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0111/17/smn.23.html 2. Lucy Ward. “Cherie Blair Pleads for Afghan Women,” The Guardian, November 20, 2001, sec. Politics. 3. See Leila Ahmed. “Feminism and Feminist Movements in the Middle East, a Preliminary Exploration: Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Special Issue Women and Islam, 5 (2): 153-68; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 4. Lila Abu-Lughod. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist 104 no. 3 (2002): 783-90. Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 130 was one of a model subject of humanitarian aid: a victim in need of rescue, innocent, silent, powerless 5. Instead of locating the root causes of women’s suffering within a situation of structural violence derived from the destruction of infrastructures and political turmoil resulting from Cold-War and postCold-War geopolitical dynamics, their plight remained over-determined by assumptions about cultural gender norms. But portrayals of a-historical victimized Afghan women in need of rescue and care did not only serve to attract popular support for the intervention. The spectacle of women’s distant suffering activated moral sentiments grounded in what Luc Boltanski identifies as the “politics of pity” 6: validating women’s deservingness and the need to take swift military action on their behalf. Through the narrative aesthetics of news reports Western spectators were constituted as publics with a will to act 7. This article is concerned with the ways in which humanitarian imaginaries in post-9/11 Afghanistan have shaped representations of women’s needs as well as programs designed to answer them. Its aim is to examine the ‘dark side’ of care and the politics of worthiness on which aid practices are grounded. In conversation with scholars who have highlighted the disciplinary aspects of care 8, I show how apparently well-intentioned discourses and practices of care have drawn boundaries within the Afghan population and reinforced nationalist sentiments. I argue that Orientalist imaginaries of Muslim women in need of rescue 9 did not only serve to justify the military intervention but also the presence of international humanitarian organizations. Such colonial fantasies have actualized specific regimes of care based on liberal 5. Lila Abu-Lughod. Women and Gender in Islam (Newhaven, London: Yale University Press, 1992); Gayatri Spivack. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313; Miriam Ticktin. “Where Ethics and Politics Meet.” American Ethnologist 33 no. 1 (2006): 33-49. 6. Luc Boltanski Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 7. Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2010. “Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication beyond a Politics of Pity.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2020): 107-126. 8. Heike Drotbohm. “Care Beyond Repair.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). https://oxfordre.com/anthropology/display/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190854584.001.0001/acrefore-9780190854584-e-411; Miriam Ticktin. “Where Ethics and Politics Meet.” American Ethnologist 33, no. 1 (2006): 33-49. Miriam Ticktin. Casualties of care: Immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in France. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 9. Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving”, 783-790; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, Third World Women. A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 131 notions of self-empowerment 10. The technologies of the ‘self’ on which these humanitarian programs have relied have overlooked the various forms of structural inequalities responsible for triggering crises in the first place and the broader dynamics of violence and abandonment that have marked the history of the West’s engagement with Afghanistan since the 1990s 11. Far from being neutral, technical and pragmatic answers to identified ‘needs’, ‘selfempowerment’ programs represent a distinct mode of governing, harnessed to an advanced liberal political project emphasizing the need for certain groups to improve themselves through individualistic self-management 12. The return of the Taliban in 2021 should therefore not solely be understood as the mere result of military strategies and international political negotiations but also as the outcome of a broader movement of resistance against this humanitarian ideology, locally perceived as a form of cultural imperialism. 2. A note on methodology My reflections on gender, imperialism and humanitarian aid are primarily informed by a twelve-month fieldwork carried out in Afghanistan in 2007 in the context of my doctoral researches as well as observations conducted over a year in 2004 as a humanitarian practitioner employed by a French medical NGO. My long-term involvement with the country enabled me to develop linguistic skills and to embed myself among various groups of women targeted by humanitarian programs: women Members of Parliament, women’s rights activists, students boarding at the Women’s National Dormitory as well as women civil servants. Through volunteering at the Afghan Women’s Network, sharing a room with women studying at the University of Kabul, shadowing the work of women’s rights activists, interviewing women MPs, and observing meetings at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, I gained insights into these women’s everyday struggles and their complex engagement with the ‘reconstruction’ enterprise. Even though I never returned to Afghanistan 10. Barbara Cruikshank. “The Will to Empower: Technologies of Citizenship and the War on Poverty.” Socialist Review 23, no. 4 (1999): 29-55. 11. João Biehl. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 2014; Omar Dewachi Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2017). 12. Suzan Ilcan and Anita Lacey. “Governing through Empowerment: Oxfam’s Global Reform and Trade Campaigns.” Globalizations 3, no. 2 (2006): 207-25. Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 132 since then, I continued following political developments, notably through contacts I maintained with the women I met during my fieldwork (some of whom have been able to leave Afghanistan and find asylum in Europe) and through Afghan friends and relatives based in Europe who run educational programs in Kabul. It is through these interactions and my own interest in critical humanitarian studies —a field I have taught and written about for the past fifteen years— that I have started to think about the intersection between humanitarian imaginaries, imperialism and gender. In the present article, I pay close attention to discourses and representations conveyed through the press and the mediums of humanitarian communication during the twentyyear presence of the humanitarian-military apparatus in Afghanistan as well as aid practices observed during my fieldwork. The cultural dimension of the occupation of Afghanistan has been largely overlooked in scholarly analyses when it played a crucial role in the re-emergence of the Taliban only a few years after their eviction from power in 2001. It is my contention that humanitarianism, as an ideology and a cultural project, has been instrumental in feeding nationalist feelings and therefore, the Taliban-led insurgency. 3. The humanitarian imaginary Historians define humanitarian reason as a revolution in moral sentiments that occurred in Western Europe, England and Northern America in the hundred years following 1750 and as the result of the rise of modern industry, the development of states, the early achievements of sciences and technology and the rise of capitalism 13. Humanitarianism as a moral tradition therefore takes its roots in the Enlightenment and its consecration of secular reason. As such, it is generally conceived as a form of rationality that radically rejects the imaginary. Humanitarianism is supposed to derive its legitimacy and impulse from measurable needs, not from imaginary representations 14. However, Liisa Maalki in her book The Need to Help, takes the example of the “aid bunnies” knitted by Finnish Red Cross volunteers for Middle 13. Thomas L. Haskell “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” Part 1. American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (1985): 339-361. Part 2. American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985): 547-566. Michael Barnett. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 14. Joël Glasman. Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs: Minimal Humanity (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 133 Eastern refugee children to illustrate the imaginative practices that underlie humanitarian projects. The way needs are imagined has a significant impact on how humanitarianism, as a global endeavor, plans its course of action. The imaginary, Malkki argues, “is not false nor illusory. The imaginary is not a mode of unreality but indeed a mode of actuality” 15 . Rather than being seen as incompatible with humanitarian reason, the imagination should be seen as a generative process with practical applications. I use the term ‘humanitarian imaginary’ here in reference to critical scholars who have reflected on the role of humanitarian communication in the formation of modern social imaginaries; i.e the socialization of spectators into ways of feeling and acting that are perceived as moral, desirable and legitimate in a specific culture and at a particular historical moment 16 . Chouliaraki defines the humanitarian imaginary as “that configuration of practices which use the communicative structure of the theater in order to perform collective imaginations of vulnerable others in the West, with a view to cultivating a longer-term disposition of thinking, feeling and acting toward these others” 17. The humanitarian imaginary can be understood as a structure of the imagination forged through moral education and regular exposure to standardized representations of ‘vulnerable others’ calling an ethics of solidarity and care into existence. In the case of post-9/11 Afghanistan, humanitarian communication produced representations of afghan women as pure and deserving and prompted the establishment of a heavy military-humanitarian apparatus legitimized by the promise to bring freedom to them. On December 3, 2001 the front cover of Time featured the face of a blue-eyed Afghan woman lit up from below by a warm ray of light —as a symbol of her newly acquired freedom and release from darkness— and entitled “Lifting the Veil: the shocking story of how the Taliban brutalized the women of Afghanistan” (see figure 1). In this cover story like many others published at the time, the singling-out of women derived from analyses that conceptualized women as 15. Liisa H Malkki. The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 18. 16. Charles Taylor. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 91-124; Craig Calhoun. “A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Order*.” Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue Canadienne de Sociologie 41, no. 4 (2004): 373-95; Boltanski, Distant Suffering. 17. Lilie Chouliarak i. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Books, 2012), 45. Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 134 victims and implicitly men and ‘culture’ as perpetrators 18. The juxtaposition of images of suffering women and Taliban extremists created a gendered distinction between worthy and unworthy subjects of humanitarian aid. While representations of misogynistic and anachronistic Taliban men dominated Western conceptions of Afghan masculinity, Afghan ‘culture’ and ‘traditions’ were identified as catch-all explanations for women’s oppression. Such stereotypical depictions of “Third World Women” as suffering victims of oppressive patriarchal cultures were shaped by Orientalist representations equating the Global South with passivity and “apolitical corporeal existence” and the Global North with freedom and civilization. The racial and gendered 18. Anila Daulatzai. “Acknowledging Afghanistan: Notes and Queries on an Occupation.” Cultural Dynamics 18, no. 3 (2006): 293-311. Figure 1. Time’s front cover, 3 December 2001. A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 135 hierarchies that such discourses sustained positioned women within the moral realm of innocence and excluded men from such a possibility 19. Sketched against the backdrop of images of burka-clad women that invaded Western media reports on Afghanistan short after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, images of the new Afghan woman promoted by international humanitarian organizations and the press were informed by liberal conceptions of femininity: visible, autonomous, self-driven, emancipated from religion and tradition. Such heroic feminine figures regularly appeared in Western news, with media outlets eager to feature stories that would resonate with the imagination of their readers. Like Soviet heroine tractor-drivers or factory workers used as symbols of modernization during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, reports were published on the first female Olympic boxing team 20, the first female mountaineer 21, the first female orchestra conductor 22, the first female air force pilot 23, the first female judge nominated to the Supreme court 24 and even the first woman to win the Afghan version of “American Pop Idol” 25. Such life stories, wheeled out to an audience who expected every single woman from that part of the world to have been threatened, raped or tortured, simultaneously obliterated the possibility of loving husbands, fathers 19. Miriam Ticktin. “A World without Innocence.” American Ethnologist 44, no. 4 (2017): 582. 20. Huffington Post. 2012. “Afghanistan’s First Female Boxing Team,” January 3, 2012, accessed, April 15, 2024. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/afghanistan-female-boxing_n_118 2123?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_ sig=AQAAAE05FBAVKbJu0OwaQGc-grC62995PWyondCarF3O2N5eHyC5on6Pw7b02pZ8Qvy WUWkq9WtZsvCRHisZ0_I2KGsXU1urhSyqnjsGtWcw1s7RVz-_S43_-uODknGkfymU7Uk8wBiQj uYMjAZFX5ImXrZukbi9O5e8Hz7lM0tfn7O9. 21. The Guardian. “ ‘I Did It for Every Single Girl’: The First Afghan Woman to Scale Mount Noshaq| Global Development,” September 11, 2018. Accessed, April, 15, 2024. https://www. theguardian.com/global-development/2018/nov/09/for-every-single-girl-first-afghan-womanto-scale-mount-noshaq-hanifa-yousoufi 22. Vincent Dowd. “Meet Afghanistan’s First All-Female Orchestra.” BBC News, March 15, 2019, sec. Entertainment & Arts. Accessed, April, 15, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainmentarts-47571463 23. The New York Times. “A Female Afghan Pilot Soars and Gives Up,” December 23, 2016. Accessed, April, 15, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/opinion/a-female-afghanpilot-soars-and-gives-up.html 24. Radio Free Europe. 2015. “Afghanistan Nominates First Female Judge To Supreme Court,” June 30, 2015. Accessed, April, 17, 2024. https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-female-judgesupreme-court/27102086.html 25. Washington Post. 2019. “For First Time, a Woman Won Afghanistan’s Version of ‘American Idol’,” March 23, 2019. Accessed, April, 17, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/03/23/ first-time-woman-won-afghanistans-version-american-idol/. Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 142 maintained “whiteness and the West as symbols of authority, expertise and knowledge” while relegating the “rest” to its inherent lack 40. Inspired by corporate management culture and influenced by neoliberal thought, their message was based on the view that the main actor of social change is the individual, an individual detached from external constraints and whose will is essential to bring about progress. Workshops and trainings were therefore colonial technologies of power mobilised to diffuse narratives of progress, rationality and freedom in society. The forms of expertise on which they relied involved specific assumptions about Afghan women’s needs, and the means through which to achieve the objective of ‘emancipation’. Relations of empowerment involved what Cruikshank calls a “voluntary and coercive exercise of power upon the subjectivity of those to be empowered” 41. It was not rare to see participants drop-out in the middle of such programs, unable to confront the skepticism of their relatives and a general climate of suspicion toward activities targeting women exclusively. The international experts rationalized drop-outs through formulaic cultural explanations: “Afghanistan is a very traditional and conservative society that considers women as primarily belonging to the family”, international aid professionals constantly told me in interviews. Hassina Sherjan, an Afghan woman who had returned to Kabul in 2001 after twenty years of exile in the US to open a manufacture of home accessories alongside an NGO running schools for girls, was equally skeptical about the language of ‘empowerment’. In 2007, her factory employed fifty workers, with men and women on an equal number. “Afghans have been merchants and traders for as long as this country has existed. Women have worked alongside men, running family businesses since time immemorial. We do not need trainings to do business! The income people make is for the entire family. Of course, I want women to be equal to men, but to achieve this, we should not set women apart and employ and educate men too”, she insisted while giving me a tour of her factory located in Bagrami Industrial Park. Disconnected from the social reality and material needs of ordinary people, it is not surprising that the liberal conceptions of freedom and progress such workshops sought to transmit quickly became sources of intense anxieties 40. Jemima Pierre. “The Racial Vernaculars of Development: A View from West Africa.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (2020): 88. 41. Barbara Cruikshank. “The Will to Empower: Technologies of Citizenship and the War on Poverty.” Socialist Review 23, no. 4 (1993): 35. A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 143 within Afghan society. Because of its abstract “gender mainstreaming” mandate, workshops were pervasive professional activities within the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. In a context marked by widespread poverty and heavy militarization, the ubiquitous visibility of these governance rituals contributed to feed critiques against this already fragile institution. In an article published in the magazine Irtiqa (“development”) in February 2007, a political analyst commented on the MOWA in the following terms: Expensive seminars organized by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in luxurious hotels during which empty speeches are delivered are deceitful events. Women’s future is not determined in such spaces. It belongs to them to take their destiny into their own hands 42. The director of the Department of Provincial Relations at the time of my research herself admitted that priorities should be placed elsewhere and exclaimed in an outburst of anger: “We don’t want pens! We don’t want workshops! We want money to run real projects!”. While the workshops promoted notions of ‘self-care’ and ‘empowerment’, their outcome was rather harmful for women whose cultural legitimacy was guaranteed through their explicit adhesion to more collective values. As Heike Drotbohm argues, care should not solely be conceived as repair work. Care can also involve disciplinary dimensions and function “as a classificatory boundary-drawing practice that both includes and excludes” 43. In the case at hand, the prioritization of women and the promotion of individualistic conceptions of self-care and autonomy were locally perceived as a form of acculturation, a threat to patriarchal authority and to national sovereignty more broadly. Regular debates in the Afghan national press and the parliament questioning the relevance of the MOWA and the eventual closure of this Ministry once the Taliban returned to power should not be exclusively understood as the outcome of reactionary politics. The Taliban’s replacement in 2021 of the MOWA by the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was a symbolically powerful means to express political independence and resistance against “foreign ideology”. In May 2022, the Ministry published a decree requiring all women in Afghanistan to 42. Qassim Akhgar. “Society’s Development Depends on Women”. Irtiqa. Issue 7 (2007) : 6-7. Translated from the Dari by the author. 43. Drotbohm, “Care”, 2. Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 144 wear full-body coverings when in public 44. In the same year, women’s access to employment and education was severely curtailed by additional decrees. These political moves demonstrate the symbolic significance of women’s bodies in the definition of Afghanistan’s national boundaries. This scenario, already observed during the first Taliban government (1994-2001), highlights how foreign interference in the form of military-humanitarian interventions, instead of creating the conditions of possibility for women’s autonomy, contributed to the tightening of conservative gender norms. These dynamics are perhaps best captured in the poetry produced by the Taliban during the twenty-year long NATO/US occupation and collected by Alex Strick Van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn, Rahmany Mirwais, and Hamid Stanikzai 45. As a popular and well-respected means of political expression, Afghan poetry is an aesthetic form characterized by patriotism and a remarkable historical consciousness. Taliban’s ghazal celebrate the simple humanity of rural Afghans, their love for the mountains, the streams, pastoral life and the brutality and corrupting power of the foreign occupation. In this poem by Matiullah Sarachwal entitled “How many are the NGOs” for example Western norms such as letters of recommendation and women’s empowerment are sketched against a backdrop of generalized poverty and disempowerment: Wasting time, they merely sit in their offices, How many are the NGOs! Their salaries, more than ministers’, How many are the NGOs! […] When you are interviewed, they ask for recommendations, Those who have no recommendations are forgotten. How many are the NGOs! […] If the applicants are girls, they will be admitted without interview; Women in large numbers but men are few. How many are the NGOs! […] People come from here and there taking salaries in dollars; They don’t work in the government because they have their hearts broken […] 46 44. According to information I gathered from personal contacts based in Afghanistan, this law is not being enforced. 45. Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn, Rahmany Mirwais, and Hamid Stanikzai. Poetry of the Taliban. (London: Hurst, 2012). 46. Matiullah Sarachwal. “How Many Are the NGOs!” in Strick van Linschoten et al. (2012): 129. A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 145 5. The Tyranny of Freedom Because of the deep symbolic and political implications of humanitarian programs, the ‘gift’ of empowerment was poisonous for the women who were supposed to benefit from it. Caught in a bind between humanitarian organizations’ requests to take part in public life and become visible and populist pressures asking them to respect Afghan culture and Islam, women targeted by aid agencies had to redouble efforts to be seen as culturally legitimate subjects. While the reconstruction failed to improve the material conditions of life for the majority of the population, narratives of freedom reiterated by international organizations awakened social apprehensions around culture, identity and national sovereignty. As Harry Englund highlights in the case of democratic reforms undertaken after the fall of the dictatorship in Malawi, translations of human rights as ‘freedom’ is congenial to neoliberal reforms in the economy 47. The emphasis on freedom does not only confine the scope of what can be publicly discussed —by pushing aside issues such as poverty, public health or labor conditions— but also contributes to the disempowerment of the majority whose only means of resistance is to reassert ‘culture’, often along conservative gender lines. Some articles published in the press during the time of my fieldwork illustrate these tensions particularly well. For example, in March 2007, an article entitled ‘women misuse democracy’ was published in Arman e Mili 48, a national weekly newspaper. The article reported that the Director of the Department of Women’s Affairs (DOWA) of Balkh province complained about “the semi-naked (sic) and skimpy clothes worn by women at wedding parties and other ceremonies in the province”. In the interview she gave to the newspaper, Feriba Majid expressed her concern towards what she thought was a misunderstanding of women’s rights and democracy. She added that, “we know that everyone interprets democracy in his own way, but some women are shaming other women by showing up half naked (sic) at parties. This is quite wrong and Islam condemns it”. She finally announced that female 47. Harr y Englund. Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 48. “Women Misuse Democracy.” Arman-e Milli, May 3, 2007. Among private publications in Afghanistan, Arman-e-Milli is one of the most popular. Launched just after the fall of the Taliban, Arman-e Milli is widely seen as the mouthpiece of Jamiat-e Islami, the political party associated with the Northern Alliance (Commandant Massoud’s party). Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 146 security officials would be hired to check women’s appearance on specific occasions like weddings and other ceremonies. The publication of an article like this was not an isolated occurrence in public debates. During the same year (2007), a number of similar articles were published in national newspapers, weaving together the threat of cultural dilution and loss of Islamic values. In July 2007, for example, the following article was published in Cheragh 49, under the title ‘Strange cultural invasion with officials as watchers’: A number of countries use propaganda to try and impose their culture in Afghanistan. By doing this, they seek to lead our young generations — the backbone of our society - towards ethical corruption and to destroy our society. We should warn them that we are an Islamic country and that most of our people are faithful to Islamic principles. They will therefore oppose those who have been sold to foreign culture. There is no compatibility between our two cultures, and conflicts will automatically erupt between these two ways of thought. The intensification of the foreign invasion will revive the opposition against the government of Afghanistan. In such a situation, our government officials should advise foreigners who come to Afghanistan to strictly observe Islamic customs, because foreigners walking in the city and bazaars wearing semi-naked clothes (sic) will provoke people’s hatred. We recommend that officials of the ministries of Hajj and Religious Affairs and Information and Culture conduct research on the exact nature of the foreign invaders’ plot and that they search for ways to prevent it. One solution to this problem could be the re-establishment of the police (for the prevention of) Vice and (the promotion of) Virtue. If we remain observers, the crisis will intensify, and carelessness will harm society as a whole 50. Because of their recurrence, the sensationalized tone used by journalists, and the political reactions that ensued, this phenomenon can be described as a moral panic: a threat created through the collusion of the media and conservative political leaders in order to stir up popular fears and fuel nationalist sentiments. But the panic also revealed deeper concerns for national autonomy and longings for a strong and independent state. With a myriad of actors (such as NGOs, UN agencies, the World Bank, private companies, 49. Independent daily newspaper; generally critical of the government. Cheragh is financed by Burhanuddin Rabbani, the recognized president of Afghanistan before Karzai and who also heads the Tajik political party Jamiat-i Islami-ye Afghanistan. 50. “Strange Cultural Invasion with Officials as Watchers.” Cheragh, July 30, 2007. A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 147 militias and narco-traffickers) assuming some of the traditional Weberian functions of the state, State sovereignty in Afghanistan had remained, like in many other postcolonial contexts, largely “fuzzy” 51. Dispossessed of its sovereign functions, the State could only maintain a semblance of authority through the control of the moral order. As scholars of gender and nationalism have well demonstrated, women occupy a central symbolic function in the reproduction of this moral economy 52. In a society torn apart by violence and war, women’s bodies represent the symbolic terrain through which statehood enacts its sovereign power. Discourses of “women’s liberation”, locally interpreted as a form of “cultural invasion” and a disrespect for Islamic values, had therefore reinforced a sense of urgency among the political elite in maintaining communal boundaries along stereotypical gender lines with the nation imagined as an idealized desexualized maternal figure in need of “protection.” In the process of rendering the state legible and as a result of the deep entanglement of women’s rights with nationalist discourses, the political elite tended to support patriarchal versions of culture in an effort to thwart its local critiques and assert its independence. Calls to re-establish the moral police should therefore not be interpreted as mere signs of a “patriarchal conservative culture” but rather be placed in the context of an occupation where external injunctions of “women’s empowerment” bear significant colonial traces. Indeed, as observed in other colonial encounters 53, the control and disciplining of women is a symbolic means of asserting domination. Caught between abstract humanitarian discourses of self-care and empowerment on the one hand, and nationalist ones defending orthodox versions of “culture” and “religion” on the other hand, Afghan women’s capacity to remain in control of their own lives remained extremely constrained and limited. Such tensions created existential doubts among them about the kind of performance the most apt to express their continued allegiance to their communities, culture and religion. Because women feared the social sanction reserved for those who are considered traitors, they could not make 51. Alessandro Monsutti. “Fuzzy Sovereignty: Rural Reconstruction in Afghanistan, between Democracy Promotion and Power Games.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 03 (2012): 563-91. 52. Anne McClintock. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 53. Fanon, Frantz. “Algeria unveiled.” Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then. Prasenjit Duara Ed. (Routledge, 2004) : 60-73. Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 148 choices that did not show some level of adherence to the patriarchal norms promoted by nationalism. This did not mean, however, that women were bound to passivity. Rather, their agency had to be placed in the polarized socio-political environment created by the occupation. In other words, caught in the dynamics of identity politics, women’s public presence needed to have local cultural resonances in order to be perceived as legitimate. 6. Conclusion Women’s empowerment programs are promoting a vision of the individual that is functional to the corporate market economy. The woman who is meant to emerge out of them is a woman who is free to choose, resilient, in control of her life and detached from communitarian and family responsibilities. The characteristics of this ideal woman, imagined outside of the specific social, material and political reality that shapes ordinary Afghan women’s lives, reflects the turning of the humanitarian gaze away from those in need and the reframing of “helping others” in terms of narcissistic self-work: a dynamic that Ofra Koffman, Shani Orgad & Rosalind Gill have coined “selfie humanitarianism” 54. In post 9/11 Afghanistan, the political category “woman” has been a creation of exogenous forces, a product of the humanitarian imaginary that bore little resemblance with “real” Afghan women. The ideal woman targeted by humanitarianism was at once a victim of oppressive patriarchal culture and a heroic, courageous, resilient agent refusing to be silent. “Selfempowerment” was intended to unleash her inner potential: the neoliberal logic that guided this discourse was grounded in the view that it was internal processes rather than external objective conditions which were to blame for her predicament. By obscuring global inequalities, imperial logics and reinforcing neoliberal psychological imperatives to work on the self, empowerment programs imposed on its subject what Nikolas Rose has succinctly called in the title of his book, the “powers of freedom” 55. The objective of this form 54. Ofra Koffman, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill. “Girl Power and ‘Selfie Humanitarianism’ ,” Continuum 29, no. 2 (2015): 157-68. 55. N ikolas Rose. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 149 of governmentality was to trigger “revolutions within the self” 56 so as to normalize the same postsocial forms of citizenship already at play in advanced liberal democracies 57. By promoting forms of moral discipline devised to activate the capacities of citizens in a cost-effective way, the individual was molded to assume responsibility for the many disorders and dysfunctions that continue to prevail in the country. As empowerment schemes delegated sovereignty onto individual women, they simultaneously promoted a model of “economic citizenship” which justified the violent exclusion of those who could not comply with the liberal and paternalistic obligation of autonomy. It is under this regime of powers that ‘freedom’ has been radicalized and that Afghanistan has been maintained in a permanent “state of exception” marked by military occupation and neoliberal reform 58. Most importantly, such dynamics have to be placed within a longer history of imperial engagement with Afghanistan from the 1920s onward, during which the country has been conceived as “ungovernable”. Successively labelled as “the kingdom of insolence” 59, “the graveyard of empires” 60 and “the land of the unconquerable” 61, journalists and political pundits have regularly alluded to Afghanistan as ungovernable, using an increasingly familiar litany of tropes: authoritarianism, sectarianism, tribalism, terrorism, etc. The ungovernability that is assumed to characterize Afghanistan is used to explain the condition of spiraling violence and failures to establish order in the country. In my opinion, the ‘ungovernability’ cliché is not merely a representational device designed to create an inherently wild and primitive other whose requirement for redemption is civilizational self-help. Rather, I posit “self-empowerment” and other “self-care” programs as instruments geared toward the continuation of a form of government predicated on continuous chaos. As Omar Dewashi argues for the case of Iraq, “ungovernability” is to be conceptualized as “a feature of the internal dynamics of power enmeshed in 56. Cruikshank, “The Will to Empower”, p. 87. 57. Dean “Powers of Life”, 131. 58. Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 59. Michael Barry. Le Royaume de l’Insolence: L’Afghanistan 1504-2001. (Paris: Flammarion, 2002). 60. David Isby. Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires. (New York: Pegasus Book, 2011). 61. Jennifer Heath and Ashraf Zahedi. Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Julie Billaud Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 150 its disordered operations”, a framing particularly apt at capturing conditions of governance within zones of exception and abandonment 62. This last point is particularly well illustrated by the fact that twenty years after the intervention of the coalition forces, the Taliban are back in power and women’s situation continues to be presented in the press and NGOs’ reports as a reflection of Afghanistan’s inherent disarray and conservative culture. Omitting to consider the long-term global dynamics that have contributed to shape Afghan women’s position in society, Human Rights organizations keep on locating the cause of their oppression solely with the gender policies enforced by the Taliban not with the imperial wars that have left the country poverty stricken, aid dependent and deeply traumatized 63. In this article, I have argued that in the context of the Global War on Terror, the systematic association of Afghan women’s suffering with Islamic fundamentalism and humanitarian responses to such suffering have produced specific forms of care which have had harmful consequences. I have revealed how discrimination against women, a political issue of the highest order, has come to be managed in significant ways by sentiments and practices of care that have been locally perceived as a form of cultural domination. International agencies’ attention to women, while creating a distinction between deserving and underserving Afghans, has been accompanied by acts of violence such as villages bombed by NATO troops, houses raided by US special forces and CIA-funded militia groups, pushed through under humanitarian pretexts. This form of ‘armed love’, to use Miriam Ticktin’s expression 64, which enabled to combine narratives of rescue and violent repression and which allowed foreign troops to kill without committing homicide 65, have reinforced an oppressive order and curtailed the possibility for genuine transnational forms of solidarity to develop between the global feminist movement and Afghan women. This limited version of ‘humanity’ implemented through such an exclusionary regime of care is once again powerfully captured in the poetry of the Taliban 66. A manifestation of the deep historical consciousness that 62. Omar D ewachi. Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq. (Standford, California: Stanford University Press, 2017); Fouad Gehad Marei, Mona Atia, Lisa Bhungalia, and Omar Dewachi. “Interventions on the Politics of Governing the ‘Ungovernable,” Political Geography 67, November (2018): 176-86. 63. Human Rights Watch 2022; UN News 2023. 64. (2006; 2011). 65. (Asad 2015). 66. (Linschoten et al., 2012). A Reflection on Gender, Imperialism and Humanitarian Imaginaries in (Post-) Taliban Afghanistan Dynamis 2024; 44 (1): 127-155 151 shaped Taliban’s understanding of contemporary geopolitics, the following ghazal written by Samiullah Khalid Sahak and entitled ‘Humanity” is an expression of moral outrage against the unequal international world order. By using the most traditional and powerful aesthetic medium of Afghan mode of expression and the ambiguous meanings that classic poetry cultivates, the insurgents sorrowfully acknowledged that their refusal to endure the tyranny of liberal freedom threatened both their lifeworld and their humanity. Everything has gone from the world The world has become empty again. Human animal Humanity animality. Everything has gone from the world, I don’t see anything now. All that I see Is my imagination. They don’t accept us as humans, They don’t accept us as animals either. And, as they would say, Humans have two dimensions. Humanity and animality, We are out of both of them today. We are not animals, I say with this certainty. But, Humanity has been forgotten by us, And I don’t know when it will come back. May Allah give it to us, And decorate us with this jewelry. The jewelry of humanity, For now it’s only in our imagination 67. œ 67. Samiullah Khalid Sahak. “Humanity” In Alex Strick van Linschoten et al. (2012): 210-211.