The reading circuit for 2012 has concluded, and in my case, it’s back to Afghanistan where it started with the story of Enaiatollah Akbari, taken by his mother to Pakistan to escape the persecution of the Taliban.

I have been reading ‘Letters to my Daughters’, written by Fawzia Koofi in collaboration with Nadene Ghouri. It is subtitled ‘between terror and hope, the struggles of the first Afghan women in politics’. Fawzia Koofi was elected to be the vice-president of the lower chamber of the Afghan parliament when it was reformed in 2005 and intends to be a candidate in the 2014 presidential elections.

The book tells the story of her life, with letters to her two daughters and also to her dead mother and father seeded between the chapters. She was born in 1975 in Koofi in Badakhstan, the most northerly and impoverished region of Afghanistan. Her family was important in local politics and her father was a deputy to the first Afghan parliament which was called under the monarchy of Zaher Shah in 1965. Her grandfather had been an important local leader.

In 1973 the king was deposed in a non-violent coup led by Mohammed Daoud Khan. Daoud was himself ousted and killed in a violent coup in 1978, which led to a period of instability as the new regime implemented a secular and communist programme, leading in 1979 to the invasion by the USSR. During the following decade the Soviet invasion was resisted by the mujahedeen, supported by finance and munitions from the US, China, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Fawzia Koofi’s father was killed by the mujahedeen as a representative of the government, and her family had to flee their home.

A peace treaty between the USSR and the US and Pakistan was signed in 1988 and the USSR withdrew its troops. The mujahedeen continued their struggle against the government, however, in 1992, having overthrown the government, the factions within the mujahedeen fought amongst themselves for control. In 1993, negotiations led to a new government with Burhanuddin Rabbani as president.

The in-fighting between the mujahedeen factions created an opening for the radical Taliban groups. In 1996, the Taliban, originally based in Kandahar, took control of Kabul. Rabbani fled to the north, which was controlled by the forces of the Northern Alliance, while the Taliban had control over the remaining 2/3rds of the country.

On September 9th 2001 the most popular leader of the Northern Alliance Ahmed Shah Massoud, who had been warning of imminent terrorist attacks against the west, was assassinated and two days later the World Trade Centre was attacked. The Taliban refused to give up Osama Bin Laden and in October the US launched airstrikes. By the end of December the Taliban had abandoned Kandahar and Hamid Karzai became leader of an interim government.  At the end of 2004 Karzai was elected president under the newly approved constitution. In September 2005 elections were held for the new parliament.

Fawzia Koofi’s story is intertwined with these events. Her father Wakil Abdul Rahman was a deputy for the region of Darwaz in the first Parliament established in 1965. Her mother Bibi Jan was the 2nd of his seven wives and Fawzia was the 8th of her children and her father’s 19th child. This is a story of very extended families where each wife is a political alliance. In Afghan culture, girls are less valued than boys are and are not educated as this is considered a wasted investment in a girl who will leave to join someone else’s family. Marriages can be organised for girls as young as twelve. Culturally it was acceptable for a man to beat his wives if he was disappointed in them and she accepted the blows as proof of his care.

She is 3 years old in 1978 when her father is killed by the mujahedeen while trying to negotiate on behalf of the government and the family has to flee, first to Faizabad and then to Kabul, where she is able to go to school and acquire an education. By 1990 the cold war is over and the USSR has withdrawn. However, because of instability in Kabul as the factions competed for power, Fawzia and her family left to return to Faizabad and then back to Koofi. In 1993 her mother, who she was very close to and who inspired her in her career died, and she first met her future husband Hamid.

In 1995 the Taliban enter Kabul. The arrival of the Taliban is a disaster for woman, particularly educated women. She is forced back into the burqa and forbidden education. The Taliban forbid women to become doctors and then forbid male doctors to care for women, with the consequence that there is no-one trained to care for women, particularly in childbirth.   In 1996 she marries Hamid, but their married life is short-lived as he is arrested by the Taliban and imprisoned several times. In prison he contracts the tuberculosis which will kill him 6 years later. Her daughters are born. There is a flight to Lahore in Pakistan with her brother then an ill-starred return to Kabul where Hamid is again arrested.

In 1998, they return in Faizabad.

Reluctant to continue on horseback, I hastened, after what we had just seen, to distance myself from those dreadful people without humanity and gain the relative security of the hills. In the seventh month of pregnancy I was struggling to remain in the saddle on the horse Hamid had succeeded in hiring. But with his help and my desire to flee, I managed to hold on. Hamid walked at my side and I felt a strange feeling leaving the Taliban behind us. It was as if my life had branched into a strange parallel universe or my country had regressed five centuries. The couple that we formed were the image of what the future Afghanistan should be for me, an educated and ambitious young woman with a husband equally informed, educated and loving. Yet, here I was, enveloped in my burqa and perched on a horse while my husband, long-haired and bearded, walked at my side through the mountain. The ideology of the Taliban was threatening to imprison my country in the darkness of the Middle Ages.

The birth of a second daughter is a disappointment for Hamid and the couple’s marriage is broken. Fawzia becomes involved in teaching English and then working at an orphanage. This leads to engagement with the UN who are active in the territories controlled by the Northern Alliance. She is now embarked on a political career. She comes from a well-connected and relatively wealth background and her political career is supported by her extended family, the memory of her father, as well as her own contacts and career. She is elected to the lower chamber of Parliament in 2005 and becomes its vice-president.

Just occasionally the voice becomes the voice of the educated and well-connected being judged by uneducated and illiterate mullahs. This is also the memoir of a potential presidential candidate and I guess one needs to be aware of this when reading. She fears the return of the Taliban when NATO withdraws in 2014. She regards the Taliban as a perversion of Islam and of traditional Afghan culture, and clearly has to tread carefully to blend advocacy of modernisation, particularly in the treatment of women, and respect for traditional culture. She is the target of a number of assassination attempts.

I suppose one difference is that traditional cultures are by their nature adaptable whereas the defensive ideologies that underpin fundamentalism in all its forms are inherently rigid. Fundamentalism looks like a defensive buttress against the world and knowledge, adaption and accommodation are taken to be corruptions which will weaken the defences.

One part of modernisation is information and education. Fawzia cites the issue of breast-feeding immediately after birth. Traditionally this is considered harmful, and therefore denies infants the support for the immune system that their mother’s milk provides. It can also be harmful to the mother. Afghanistan has very high infant mortality. A second part of modernisation lies in the image of masculinity. In impoverished districts in the north she observes that the houses have no latrines leading to indignity for the women and the spread of diseases. Part of the problem here is that digging latrines would be considered an undignified task for a man. In tribal cultures men are warriors, not builders and engineers.