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afg han i stan Between 1980 and 1990, some 6 million Afghan citizens fled their homeland , primarily in the direction of Iran and Pakistan. By 1990, there were 3,274,000 officially registered refugees living in Pakistan (another 500,000 to one million were unaccounted for).1 Seventy percent of refugees resided in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).2 Urban refugees systematically fled to cities, settling into what became semi-suburban shantytowns, whereas the rural population joined family or village members in camps, attempting to re-create familiar social units. Since March 2002, more than 4.7 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan . It was estimated that in 2008 approximately 2 million refugees were still living in Pakistan. Because the situation in Afghanistan continues to be unstable, camp life often represents a safe and desirable alternative. Even when major camps close, many of the inhabitants simply move on to other refugee settlements within the country, refusing the pitiful $100 handout offered by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) for repatriation. Why return to a homeland where the prospect of peace remains as distant as it has for the past thirty years? An entire generation of Afghan refugees has grown up in the camps. Sustained only by yearnings for an imagined homeland, their identity and expectations are products of harsh camp life. The particular configuration that has linked the destinies of the border populations of Pakistan and Afghanistan has resulted in long-term consequences , especially for Afghan women. Members of the Taliban have been much demonized by the West, depicted as instigators of reactionary politics against women. This delayed reaction from the West, precipitated by the events in the United States of September 11, 2001, came six long years after the Taliban swept into power. Many suggest that the Western response to the Taliban has been nothing more than a propaganda tool to justify allied intervention in Afghanistan. 3 froM refugee CaMp to kabul The Influence of Exile on Afghan Women C aro l Man n 53 froM refugee CaMp to kabul In this chapter, I demonstrate how the previous generation of Westernsupported mujahedin, initially fighting America’s proxy war against the Soviet Union, were the precursors paving the way for Taliban excesses. I further argue that since the fall of the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, women especially have suffered from a combination of hard-line Islamist radicalization and the exacerbation of traditional patriarchal practices promoted in Pakistani refugee camps over the past twenty-eight years.The ideological mix emanating from the camps, unique in the Muslim world, has successfully eliminated Afghan alternative secular nationalist discourses.This includes the subversion of progressive Islamic trends, all of which were present in the late 1970s, before the 1978 pro-Communist coup. As Edward Said has argued, this represented a clash within a single civilization, rather than a clash between East and West, as suggested by Samuel Huntington.3 These progressive alternatives were swept away by massive Western support of the mujahedin in the protracted conflagration of the Cold War, the catastrophic results of which form the basis of Afghanistan’s problems today. The Afghan government’s decision to grant blanket amnesty and legal protection for war crimes in the name of the National Stability and Reconciliation Bill has made it possible for onetime warlords to occupy positions of unchallenged and uncontrollable power.4 What has unified these warlords since the war against the Soviets is a threefold dynamic: their active engagement in the modern global capitalist economy (e.g., through drug trafficking ), their purported religious orthodoxy, and their particularly reactionary policies towards women. That which remains is a caricature of the East/West dialectic. A loose reactionary ideology inherited at once from the mujahedin and the Taliban is presented as the sole alternative to dominant Western democratic-liberal economic discourse embedded in reconstruction politics in Kabul. Much of the clout behind this reactionary force draws on the perception of Western options as a failure to address Afghan cultural values. The gap between women’s theoretical constitutional rights and their daily reality—especially in Afghanistan’s rural areas—has been one of the main consequences of this situation. Despite visible improvements in some urban areas, the standard of Afghan women’s lives (that is to say, 85 percent of the population) may well be sinking. The most relevant indicator is the rate of maternal mortality, still the highest in the world, especially in the Badakhshan region. Neither U.S.-directed...

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