On a hot August day last year, President Donald Trump held a meeting with a group of his top military advisers at Camp David.
On the agenda was whether the US should increase its troops in Afghanistan. Trump’s position before his presidency was clear: The US should withdraw from Afghanistan.
“What are we doing there?” he asked on Fox News in 2012. “We don’t have money. We’re a debt nation. We can’t build our own schools, and yet, we build schools in Afghanistan.”
But on that day in August 2017, a photo reportedly influenced Trump’s decision on sending in more troops.
“It was taken in 1972, and it was taken out from this book by a woman named Harriet Logan,” explains Rafia Zakaria, attorney and author of “The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan” and “Veil.” “It showed Afghan women in heels and skirts just walking on a sidewalk in Kabul.”
Zakaria says it was General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s then national security adviser, who pulled out the photo. His argument, she says, was this: “Look, Afghanistan had adopted Western values in the past. This could be Afghanistan again, if we send in more troops.”
Following that meeting, the president authorized sending an additional 4,000 troops to Afghanistan.
Zakaria says this is a telling moment about how we look at women’s clothing in Afghanistan.
“This is important because it represents this idea that if we can take Afghan women back to that moment or put them back in these miniskirts, the work in Afghanistan is done and the liberation is achieved. That’s not the case.”
Today, women’s clothing in Afghanistan is far from the stereotypical blue burqa. Fashion designers are quietly working to give Afghan women more options when it comes to the way they dress.
Rahiba Rahimi is one of them.
I met Rahimi on a tense, spring morning in Kabul. There were more checkpoints than usual. Police everywhere. Few people walking around.
That’s because the day before, there was a suicide attack. Another one.
Source: Read Full Article