WE ARE AFGHAN WOMEN: VOICES OF HOPE By the George W. Bush Institute, Scribner, Rs 699

In 2010, Time magazine ran a cover story on one Bibi Aisha. Forced into in an early marriage, Aisha fled from the house of her in-laws to escape the relentless abuse to which she was subjected. She was incarcerated for a few months and later returned to her husband. The local Taliban leaders were furious and wanted to deliver an exemplary punishment to prevent other girls in Aisha's village from following her path. One night, a Taliban leader dragged her out of her house, took her to a mountain clearing near her village and ordered her husband to chop off her ears and nose. While her brother-in-law pinned her down, her husband dutifully carried out the Taliban leader's command. Aisha's mutilated, impassive face appeared on the August cover of the magazine with the title: "What happens if we leave Afghanistan". The title, posed as a declarative sentence, and the accompanying piece went on to argue that an early withdrawal of international forces from the Afghan soil would prove to be "disastrous" for the fledgling rights that women in Afghanistan had started to enjoy ever since the US troops took over the country.

That a magazine of the stature of Time chose to tell a story of medieval barbarity as a justification for a sustained military presence of the US in Afghanistan should not surprise us. For centuries now, the West has asserted its right to rule over the East not just in political terms but also in moral and cultural terms, by sustaining a myth of Western benevolence. This myth is reasserted, once again, in the book, We are Afghan Women: Voices of Hope, which chronicles the lives of 28 women and one man affected by the relentless wars that have plagued the country for decades. Made up of first-person narratives, the book has been commissioned by the US-Afghan Women's Council, a private-public organization operating from Georgetown University, under the leadership of former first ladies, Laura Bush, Hillary R. Clinton and Rula Ghani, all of whom serve as honourary co-chairs of the institution.

The introduction by Laura Bush sets the tone of this cleverly-couched, imperialist justification of the American war policy. For her - as perhaps for most lay American readers - Afghanistan existed in the distant historical memory as a "completely exotic and remote" place till 9/11 exposed the hideous reality of a country under siege. Afghanistan's predicament, however, is a result not just of five years of Taliban rule but also of the way it was treated by a more fearsome enemy: the erstwhile Soviet Union. The Soviets invaded the country in 1979 and this led to the creation of a band of fierce freedom fighters called mujahideens. The withdrawal of the Soviet forces saw the mujahideen factions turn against one another till the Talibans occupied Afghanistan in 1996. The latter did usher in an era of relative peace. But, with the fragile peace came severe gender repression, Sharia strictures and violation of fundamental human rights. Women's rights were the first victim.

Afghanistan under the Barakzai ruler, Mohammed Zahir Shah, had all the trappings of political modernity - a parliament, free elections, democratic reforms and civil rights, including the right of women to vote. But years of fighting with the Soviets, the ensuing civil strife and, finally, the Taliban regime, got the better of the democratic sensibilities of the Afghan people - they barred their women from learning, working and living freely. While all these are facts, the very idea that a reversal is possible and is, perhaps, already in progress under the tutelage of the US is a fantasy that the book constructs through the narratives of the interviewees.

Yet the Afghan women's pains are real and the book does a credible job of bringing those to the fore. Award-winning journalist and author, Lyric Winik, successfully translates their stories into English while retaining the immediacy of feeling. Each narrator talks about his or her personal struggle - but one can hardly miss the recurrent themes that animate their stories. The much-misunderstood concept of veil, the desire for learning, the will to defy vacuous gender norms, the trauma of violence and forced exile appear frequently in their stories.

For Belquis Gavagan, who lives in the US and works as a women-rights advocate, the issue of the veil reflects the conflicting attitudes towards the severity of gender restrictions. While Afghanistan has always been oppressively patriarchal, it has never imposed the purdah uniformly throughout the country. The urban areas, which had some experience of Western modernity, had women walking on roads in skirts in the Sixties and Seventies. According to Gavagan, the Taliban imposed the veil with much more severity in urban areas than they did in, say, the rural areas, where women had generally been more conservative.

As for education, it is truly a matter of life and death. During the Taliban regime, schools were burned while schoolgirls faced grenade and acid attacks. But the desire to learn was so strong that women found ingenious ways to continue their education. Sakena Yacoobi opened schools in the refugee camps for Afghans in Pakistan by convincing a local mullah about the value of learning. Nang Attal, the only male voice in the book, talks honestly about how he used charred firewood and stolen chalk from his school to teach the local girls, who read and wrote in his mother's kitchen.

Classrooms are not the only places where the battles for self-worth and dignity are fought. Women defy patriarchal rules, sometimes with horrific consequences, even in places where restrictions on women are severely imposed. Farkhunda Malikzada, a young religious-studies scholar, tried to argue with a local leader against the practice of selling amulets and good-luck charms in mosques, pointing out that this runs counter to the tenets of Islam. The shrine attendant falsely accused her of burning the Quran and instigated a mob against her. She was pushed from a roof, dragged and run over by a car and repeatedly beaten with sticks and stones. She was burned alive and her body was thrown into the Kabul river. Local women salvaged her body for burial, insisting that no man should touch her.

For some other women, patriarchal violence knows no geographical boundaries. Asía Frotan's mother, who migrated first to Germany and then to the US during the Soviet invasion, had to fight neo-Nazi tormentors and an abusive husband even in the liberal environment of the West.

The book comes at a time when it is clear to the authorities in Washington that 'enlightened' values cannot be imposed upon a traditional community simply through military means. However, there is also a fear in some quarters that the process of democratic reforms will come to an end with the withdrawal of the US troops. Perhaps unintentionally, the book argues the case for a purely military solution to the problems faced by Afghanistan. It ignores recent reports of physical and sexual violence perpetrated by the US-backed Afghan armed forces, of a growing drug trafficking industry and allegations of the muzzling of the press, even in the presence of the US military. The central argument of the book seems biased in so far as it fails to acknowledge the limitations of the US policy in Afghanistan.