After 9/11 and the American bombing of Afghanistan that followed, Ann Jones set out for the shattered city. As a volunteer working in humanitarian aid, she hoped to help pick up the pieces; but what she learned there compelled her to take up her pen.Here is her trenchant report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Jones works among the multitude of impoverished war widows, and she helps to retrain the city’s tongue-tied high school English teachers, many of them women just emerging from the Taliban’s long confinement. Working in the city’s prisons for women, Jones enters a world of female outcasts: runaway girls, child brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape. In the streets and markets, she hears Afghan views of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban, and learns that keeping women under tight control is the norm and not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones unravels Afghanistan’s complicated history as proxy playground for greater powers and confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked—by Communists, Islamist extremists, and Western free marketeers—always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S. promises and performance, between the new “democracy” and the still-entrenched warlords, between what’s boasted of and what is. Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends upon our own.
ANN JONES
WRITER/PHOTOGRAPHER
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KABUL IN WINTER
Life Without Peace in Afghanistan
