ZABUL PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN, JUNE 2013—In that chasm between progress and destruction is where Johanna Smoke met Jamila Abbas for the first time.
A dilapidated white van sitting behind the guard station, to the left of everything else on the women’s center compound, was the first thing that caught Smoke’s eye as she walked onto the property. The missing front tire caused the vehicle to tilt slightly to one side. The outside of the van hadn’t been washed since it was given to Jamila by a previous FET leader who had left long before Smoke had arrived. The van was one of the proudest gifts the woman had acquired for Jamila. It was meant to provide the feminist—whose male assistant was able to drive—with a way to visit women in the more remote areas of the province. It had also, temporarily, given Jamila the power to pull abused wives and young girls being forced into marriages with older men out of their homes during late-night escapes. Now the van sat, its smooth white paint interrupted with dull gray splotches where storms had repeatedly whipped sand against its sides.
Jamila waited by the women’s center front entrance. Smoke followed the pathway, rutted and uneven, to the building’s door. To Smoke’s left, in the distance, she could see a greenhouse. Its sides were blown out. Dry tomato vines stretched across the ground. Cracks wove their way through the plaster façade of the women’s center.
Smoke smiled politely at Jamila and introduced herself. Jamila looked at Edna Sahdo, Smoke’s interpreter, and nodded, not really taking the time to meet Smoke’s warmth with meaningful eye contact. She led the women to the back of the center, the part most damaged by a recent bombing. None of the women who used the center were there when the bomb went off. And none had been able to use the center since.
Smoke walked up to what had been a glass wall that made up the rear entrance. The clear wall once covered the entire back side of the center, allowing light to flow through to a large sunroom. Thin shards of glass hanging from the roof line were all that remained. Glass crunched underneath Smoke’s boots as she walked into the center’s destroyed back room.
Smoke turned to Jamila. “What happened?”
The woman looked at Edna and explained, “The insurgents. They bombed the government center a few months ago. Nothing has been rebuilt since.”
“And the van?” Smoke again attempted to make eye contact with Jamila.
The center’s director looked again at Edna, the translator, as she explained, “A former military woman gave the center that van. It worked for a while, but we have no money to keep up with the maintenance. It will not run. We can’t repair it. We don’t even really have money for gas.”
Jamila took Smoke on a tour of the center. They walked an outer hallway that took the women along the perimeter of the entire one-story building. The hall was dotted with offices, one belonging to Jamila, another to her assistant. In the center of the building was a large conference room with a long wooden table in the middle and a couple of small sofas along the wall. Another room at the center of the building was used for classes. Sewing machines were lined up on small tables in the back section of that room—an area used for making crafts and designing clothing, which many of the women sold to make a living.
They ended the tour in the conference room, where Smoke spoke to Jamila and her assistant. In matter-of-fact tones the two explained the center’s problems with funding and with reaching the women most in need. Smoke could tell that they had explained it all before: the lack of transportation, the immense poverty and dire needs of women in the poorest villages of the province’s far north and deep south, places so far away that even the military was forced to use helicopters to reach them.
And like most of the FET women who had come before her, Smoke wondered how she would even begin to tackle the problems plaguing women in the province. Rebuilding the women’s center, Jamila emphasized, would only be the beginning.
Smoke decided to be candid. She had no idea where to begin, and as she looked directly at Jamila, she made it clear that she was there to serve Jamila, to do the center’s bidding—whatever that took. Jamila finally made eye contact with the soldier and smiled. It was the first time she’d felt that level of support from a FET member. As Smoke walked off the property she looked back at Jamila, who was standing at the front door. She smiled again, this time with worry. She wanted to make sure that everything she did fit into Jamila’s goals for the women of Afghanistan. She still felt like the task was daunting.
Soon after their first meeting Jamila walked with Smoke and Edna into a back room of one of the main offices at FOB Apache, one that allowed for more private, intimate conversations. The Afghan woman pulled a small package wrapped in brown paper from her purse. She handed the gift to Smoke, who looked up, surprised, and thanked Jamila. The custom was a traditional one—Afghans often brought gifts to new friends and colleagues, people in their lives whom they respected. As Smoke peeled back the wrapper, Jamila began to thank the captain, who she called “Colonel Smoke,” for her work. Over the past few days Smoke hadn’t done much, but the small renovations she had started on the women’s center meant a great deal. The captain had found a local contractor they could trust to get needed supplies and materials. Smoke had also created a mission for the engineering unit stationed at Apache to visit the center and assess the damage and how much time it would take to do a renovation. They were slated to begin reconstruction on the center and its greenhouse and irrigation system soon. Smoke had done more in a few weeks than Jamila and her assistant had done in months. It was a good sign that the two women would be able to work well together.
Smoke thanked Jamila again for the gift—an orange silk scarf.
The three women sat around a small table to plan the next week’s mission. In the course of talking about women in the local villages, Smoke casually mentioned marriage. She brought up her own engagement in passing and joked, as she had a few times before, that there were plenty of eligible men for Jamila, who she knew was single after having been married when she was younger. She had no idea why the woman was no longer married. Jamila usually giggled. The thought of marrying again wasn’t something that occupied her time. The occasional jokes from Smoke made her, momentarily, feel good, as if she were much younger.
But Smoke noticed that Jamila’s usual giggle hadn’t accompanied the joke this time. Instead, the Afghan woman looked up at Edna. There was no smile on her face. She nodded as she began talking to the translator and telling her story.
A man wearing black showed up one day and asked for her husband. Jamila remembered following Amir. She recalled that it had been a slightly cold day and that the crisp air, as she walked back to her home behind her husband and the man wearing black, had invigorated her.
The insurgents in the far-off distance forced her husband to his knees and beheaded him. All four of her children were under the age of eleven, and they had each seen everything. Jamila knew, all those years ago, that she should have moved. She should have gotten her children inside. For some reason she couldn’t.
The three women sat for several minutes in silence. The small meeting room gradually filled with the sound of their sobs.
Smoke slowly reached for a Kleenex and handed it to Jamila. She used the next one to catch her own tears—strangers united to defeat a problem that went well beyond the fields of war.
BY 2013 JAMILA was waging her own feminist battle against Zabul’s insurgents and had become a leader that the province’s women ran to for help to get away from abusive husbands, fathers, uncles, and the Taliban edicts those men cruelly followed. She could set women up in a new village or province and show them how to start their lives all over again. The activist’s days of fleeing were over.
Zabul’s women’s center looked benign. It sat in the middle of a compound whose grasses had long since turned to desert. The compound was surrounded by a high stone wall, like so many places in Afghanistan that were owned by people trying to shield themselves from dangerous activity that existed only steps from their front doors.
Smoke was one of the war’s most independent FET leaders—the product of a more informed command that had learned that denying supplies to military women hurt the overall mission and that getting Afghan women away from abuse and poverty was one of the best tools for defeating insurgents. And unlike Rodriguez, one of her Army predecessors, Smoke focused only on the FET mission.
Women came to Jamila’s center for classes in sewing, gardening, and other skills that the province’s poorest could use to create goods to sell and clothe and support their families. The center’s underground mission was, at first, known only to them. In Zabul and surrounding provinces it was the only place women could send their daughters for freedom from the bonds of child marriage. Knowledge of Jamila’s secret missions spread to women very quickly. It took men in surrounding provinces longer to figure it out. And the Taliban longer still. But once information about the underground shelter spread throughout Zabul, Jamila was a target.
One such mission came not long after Smoke arrived in the country.
An old, slightly rusted white van, which was usually broken down, had been recently repaired by someone, according to Smoke, with suspected ties to the Taliban. Smoke had facilitated the relationship between Jamila and the Taliban informant. Although he claimed not to espouse the group’s sexist beliefs, he was being well paid to report on American activity. He was responsible for arranging the deaths of several US soldiers.
When he had entered the women’s center Smoke was taken off guard. But she recognized him right away from a previous meeting and intelligence reports. She was terrified and glanced over the man’s shoulder to make sure her guard, the woman who was always around Smoke and was armed when Smoke couldn’t be, was standing close by. She couldn’t ask the man to leave without causing offense or suspicion. She knew he was a wealthy, married womanizer. So her first thought was to cater to his ego. She had introduced him to Jamila and talked about how much they could use his help. The general smiled, drank tea, and listened to both women talk about the funding issues they’d been having.
Just days after that meeting the general had the van towed to a shop, repaired, and returned.
And now Jamila was using it to get women and young girls away from the extremist values brought to Zabul Province by the very insurgency the general supported.
One night Jamila’s fifteen-year-old daughter ran into the center looking for her mother. Her daughter’s friend, Haditha, followed. Haditha’s father was going to marry her to a man who was generations older. The fourteen-year-old was scared, didn’t want to be married, and wanted, instead, to stay in school.
They immediately hatched a plan. The girl would stay at the center overnight. Sending her home would be too dangerous—she might not come back. The next night they would drive her to another province with a girls’ school.
As night approached, Jamila whisked fourteen-year-old Haditha into the van sitting just outside the women’s center, near the outer wall of the compound.
Jamila’s solutions to the problems of child marriage, abuse, and sexual assault weren’t always the same, and taking girls away from their families only came after other attempts to mend bridges and develop more humane alternatives within families had failed. She was a mediator, family counselor, and crisis interventionist. And she had surely tried the same things with Haditha’s family.
But Jamila also knew that sometimes the only real solution was to run.
It was pitch black outside. Jamila quickly pulled her scarf from around her shoulders and over her head. She turned to Haditha and tugged on the girl’s head covering, pulling it as far over her face as possible. The two quickly climbed into the backseat of the van. As soon as they closed the van door her assistant started the engine.
Haditha was on her way to a new life.