An Afghan Girl Grew Up to be Her Country’s U.S. Ambassador by David Ignatius

Political Crossfire An Afghan Girl Grew Up to be Her Country’s U.S. Ambassador

Now, She Watches Progress Lost

By David Ignatius

In this Thanksgiving week, when we think about our blessings of peace and plenty, here’s a reminder of the suffering of people who are not so fortunate. The story begins with an Afghan woman named Adela Raz.

Raz was in the sixth grade when the Taliban first took control of Afghanistan in 1996. They banned girls’ education as un-Islamic and closed her school in the Macroyan neighborhood of Kabul. She had been constructing a model of a skeleton for a school biology project that term. She hid it in the closet.

But the young women of Kabul were hungry for learning, and after a few months, their parents began organizing secret classes in people’s homes. If the Taliban became suspicious, the girls would move to another location. Raz spent five years moving among makeshift classrooms. She would hide her schoolbooks under her burqa.

After the United States toppled the Taliban in 2001, Raz was able to return to regular classes, and she excelled. She had learned English in those furtive years of study, and when she graduated, she found a job with the United Nations.

Raz was determined to succeed in the world that had opened to her after the overthrow of the Taliban. She won a scholarship to Simmons College in Boston, where she earned a 3.98 grade average, and then a graduate degree from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “I wanted to learn everything,” she remembers.

Raz was thriving in the United States, but she felt she should be helping her country, so she returned home in 2013. She became, in succession, deputy spokesperson for President Hamid Karzai, a senior aide to President Ashraf Ghani, deputy foreign minister, U.N. ambassador, and, finally, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States.

The Taliban seized power in August, soon after Raz arrived in Washington. Back in Kabul, the mullahs once again banned young girls’ education in secular schools. Under the new regime, women can’t work in many government offices; they can’t appear in television dramas; they can’t walk outside without cloaking their heads and bodies.

I spoke with Raz this week, as Thanksgiving was approaching. She’s still in charge of the embassy, technically. And she speaks her mind, as her generation of Afghan women learned to do in their years of freedom. Watching the Taliban try to erase the gains her country made over the last two decades is “surreal,” she says. The Taliban may hope she’ll quit, but she still goes to the embassy every day, talking about her country’s plight to anyone who will listen.

If you wonder whether the United States achieved anything during those two costly decades in Afghanistan, it’s worth thinking about the transformation of Raz’s life, and those of millions of other Afghan women. It’s worth thinking, too, about what’s happening to people like them now, under Taliban rule.

Raz says that she gets several desperate messages every day from women who are still in Afghanistan. She quotes one she received the day I saw her: “Help me get out. I am suffocating.” She tries to help, where she can, but there’s little she can do.

Night has fallen on Afghanistan. A United Nations report this week warned that the banking system is in “disarray” and near “collapsing.” With no banks, merchants can’t finance needed food imports. The United Nations’ World Food Program report predicted that more than half the population, about 23 million people, face severe shortages this winter. Ten of the country’s 11 most densely populated urban areas will experience conditions approaching famine.

Banking and commercial activities are shattered because of sanctions against the Taliban, who have refused to form an inclusive government or guarantee basic human rights, such as education for women, as the international community has demanded. But it’s the people who are being crushed by these punitive measures, not the Talibs.

The situation is “infuriating,” Dominik Stillhart, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said this week after visiting Kabul. “Economic sanctions meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.”

Raz is careful with policy advice. She doesn’t want to help a Taliban religious leadership that appears to be as deeply opposed to women’s rights today as when she was a girl hiding her biology project in the closet.

But she argues that the international community must find a way to provide food and restore the basics of economic survival. She’s right. The United States must find a way to provide more humanitarian aid to the country, without giving the Taliban a cut.

Americans probably share mixed feelings about Afghanistan this Thanksgiving – happy that our troops are home after the nation’s longest and perhaps most frustrating war, angry that power has been reclaimed by a Taliban government that treats women so shamefully and worried how the population will survive a cruel winter. The one thing we shouldn’t do now that we’ve left is to forget that nation and its pain.