I meet Hoots by an intersection in Greenfield, an impoverished town in Weakley County, Tennessee. The motorists this chilly weekend morning don’t seem particularly interested — beyond the rough weather, the evangelists also face a few obscene gestures — but there’s plenty of agape to go round. That’s partly of the Christian variety: open-air ministries like this thrive all over the state’s western fringe, where Tennessee hits Kentucky. Yet time and again, over my time in Weakley, I saw agape of a different kind, with many here willing to make vast sacrifices for their blond-haired messiah.

In 2016, Donald Trump secured over almost three quarters of Weakley votes. Yet the President’s 2018 tariffs cost farmers billions, with bankruptcies spiraling by a fifth and Tennessee’s lucrative soybean markets ceded to competition abroad. In 2024, meanwhile, Trump pledged school vouchers, inevitably shutting country schools. But despite the hurt, both promised and delivered, Trump again won four-fifths of locals. Nor is this just a Weakley phenomenon. As I learned, what happens here speaks poignantly to the republic’s rising tribalism, as Americans increasingly use politics as a badge of identity, even if they suffer the impact themselves.

For rural Tennesseans, backing Trump has become something of a tradition. Beyond Weakley, the President won at least 75% of the vote in nearly every one of the state’s back-country counties. It’s a similar story nationwide: in both 2016 and 2024, Trump secured the backing of 62% of rural Americans. On the ground, too, this affection shines through. As I crisscrossed Weakley County, I met dozens of people who see Trump as somewhere between a protector and a profit. “You Can’t Fix Stupid, But You Can Vote it Out” read the pro-Trump signs that line the roads. “Democrats kill babies and let the immigrants enter,” one local Republican told me. “You can’t possibly be a Democrat because you are a Christian.”

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To an extent, this enthusiasm can be understood in policy terms. In a county that has the state’s second-highest rate of sexual assaults against minors, the President’s promise to “protect kids” is popular in Weakley. Tariffs doubtless hit farmers — but they could also boost auto production at Blue Oval City, an upcoming $5.6 billion Ford factory a few counties over. “Trump is addressing issues that have animated Tennessee’s rural voters for a great deal of time,” says Daryl Carter, a history professor at East Tennessee State University. “These rural areas have been hollowed out. Jobs gone. Hospitals closed. Opioid abuse. They have a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about America.”

Yet if Trump, the man, is popular, and his rhetoric is too, it’s also clear that his actions are unwelcome in spots like Weakley. One good example is education. In January, the President tweeted support for a Tennessee school voucher scheme. The bill extends 20,000 vouchers to rural and urban school districts, encompassing both private and public institutions. It’s also opposed by 77% of rural Tennesseans, who fear losing students, and public money, to private schools. Yet these reservations didn’t deter state Republicans. In a hastily convened special legislative session, the party rammed through the so-called Education Freedom Act, which Governor Bill Lee duly signed into law in February. Local Republicans are far from pleased. “It was a mean trick to railroad the bill through before folks could learn about it,” says Steven Vantrease, a conservative member of the Weakley County school board.

At root, the furore suggests the Tennessee GOP is willing to betray its rural base — if it can secure more votes statewide. In the past, conservatives traditionally aimed vouchers at low-income parents, often racial minorities in big cities, offering them added flexibility in picking quality charter schools for their children. But with rising fears around “woke” curriculums, there’s an electoral incentive to expand the scheme statewide. The problem for rural voters, typified by their broad opposition to the plan, is that added choice can wreck local education. With kids increasingly scarce in places like Weakley, added choice can close small town schools that rely on a handful of students.

It’s an issue that transcends brick-and-mortar buildings. “School consolidation is a small-town killer,” says Dale Hutcherson, a handsome 31 year old, and Weakley County’s Republican mayor. “If a school dies, then the heart and soul of a community dies.” As Hutcherson explains, hometown teachers go to all the football games, supervise clubs, and keep tabs on their kids beyond class. In rural Tennessee, it really does take a village. No wonder defending public schools is an issue that crosses political boundaries. A case in point is Nicolle Gallagher, former chair of the Weakley County Democrats, who calls them “the pride and joy” of a local community. Fair enough: ranked sixth in the state, students here score in the top 25 counties nationwide in math, science and social studies.

That begs the question: with bipartisan opposition, why aren’t Tennessee Republicans reaping an electoral whirlwind for their cynicism? For Gallagher, the answer begins not in policy but in place. “Politics,” she says, “is about tribal belonging” — and I certainly got that sense during my time in Weakley. I’m told that Martin, home to the University of Tennessee branch campus, is “where all the liberals live.” But even here, Trump wins in a landslide and locals flew upside-down American flags during the Biden era. As one Martin Republican says: “It is us versus them.”

Being outside the tent can be painful. In these small, tight-knit communities, voting blue can bring a form of social death. Friends from high school no longer acknowledge you. Meanwhile, no one new moves to town — so who will you befriend? “People will know you are a Democrat,” Gallagher says. “It can hurt you personally and professionally.” As she continues, that can bring more than loneliness, noting that Weakley County no longer has any actively Democratic teachers. Amazed, I ask Jess Piper, a former educator and a rural Democratic organizer for the Blue Missouri campaign group. She guffaws at my question, before telling me that her politics meant she lost her career. “I got my husband fired,” she adds. “He was a teacher too.” Though certainly illegal, such discrimination is nearly impossible to prove without costly lawyers who anyway live miles away.

Tribalism can be nasty even if you’re apolitical. Shannon Taylor, who lives in Dresden, the Weakley County seat, tells me that face-to-face encounters are pleasant enough. Locals embrace the lesbian bartender at the American Legion. Momz Honky Tonk, in nearby Cumberland, hosts a monthly drag show, and no one blinks an eye. Online, though, some locals express their ire at those who trespass what Taylor calls their group mentality. “They care about their community and care so much that they spew hateful rhetoric,” she says. “They think they are protecting their communities.”

It didn’t used to be like this. As recently as 2008, Weakley County, like much of western Tennessee, was a Democratic stronghold. Democrats occupied every local office. But when it moved blue to red, the transformation was devastating. In 2006, Tennessee Democrats controlled the governorship, congressional delegation, and both general assembly chambers. But by 2013, everything had changed. Once in the minority, the GOP now dominated both houses of the Volunteer State’s legislature. Democratic state senate leader Reginal Tate put it best: “Man, we could have caucus meetings in my car.” Today, no Weakley Democrat inhabits a local office. What happened here was a national phenomenon too. From 2008 to 2016, Democrats lost 13 seats in the Senate and 69 in the House, as well as 11 governorships, 913 state legislative seats and 30 state legislative chambers. Weakley, then, was merely a microcosm of a national political earthquake. “I knew that was the end of the Democratic Party around here,” Gallagher admits. “It was like the lights went out.”

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As the timeline implies, this shift can partly be understood by the Obama effect. Yet if there’s surely a racial element here, Carter stresses that isn’t the whole story. In 2008, after all, Obama invested heavily in rural America. On election day, he made small yet significant inroads with rural voters from Montana to Virginia. Even in those states he lost, his efforts helped Democrats win seats nationwide. Yet eight years on, the bottom collapsed, giving Trump the White House and both houses of Congress. Why? Because, insiders say, the party got drunk on “yes, we can” and rested on its laurels. Carter witnessed this duality in rural Tennessee. Obama, he says, “scared the bejesus out of people” — but was also a “piss-poor party leader.” Without inspiring candidates or local organization, Tennessee Republicans had a free hand, branding Democrats the “them” and conservatives the “us.”

Carolyn Ideus, a Democratic official in Weakley County, says the Republican wave created “huge social pressure” to join the “us” party. And quite aside from all that small-town browbeating, some experts suggest rural Americans are especially prone to partisanship. “Rurality is an identity and worldview that transcends income and education,” argues Nick Jacobs, a political scientist and co-author of The Rural Voter. “A rural worldview is classed by geography not occupation.” Once more, it’s something I witnessed firsthand. On Martin’s main drag, a giant Donald Trump cardboard cut-out stands in the window of the GOP headquarters. A local Republican, who asks to stay anonymous, laments that even school board elections are now increasingly partisan.

Little wonder, then, that Carter says the Trump movement is much bigger than bickering over charter schools, especially when bias in big cities only fuels the reaction in places like Weakley. “There are perverse incentives to malign Trump voters,” is how Lisa Peruitt, a professor at UC-Davis puts it. “It helps accrue social capital.” That’s especially when the man himself cheerfully bashes powerful corporations, media elites and East Coast political dynasties like the Clintons. These, Peruitt says, are the exact people Trump says “rigged the system for their benefit [and] will do anything and say anything to keep things exactly the way they are.”

Either way, there’s obviously far more to Weakley County Republicans than simply being deluded by “false consciousness” to vote against their own interests. With a fight for America’s soul on their hands, it’s little wonder that Jake Bynum, a former county mayor, should argue that “love of country and perceived way of life” naturally outweigh “pocketbook issues” — charter schools or soybean exports be damned. Nor should progressives really be surprised here either: there’s little Upper West Side liberals love more than sacrificing their paychecks for the poor. Agape, it seems, remains a bipartisan affair.

Yet Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act is also a bizarre moment. Consider that the law stipulates that the government can fine people violating the act between 500 and 5,000 dollars. On the face of it, these are not numbers that seem commensurate to punish violators of the most powerful emergency law in the Canadian state’s armoury. But the reason these numbers seem so strange is simple: the law hasn’t been updated to keep up with the times, or inflation.

The oddness doesn’t end there. A law that in a real sense was forgotten — and designed to handle the most extreme situations a nation state can find itself in — is now dredged up to deal with a fairly routine political protest. Trudeau, and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, have also called on financial institutions to freeze or suspend any bank accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund the protests. They believe, as David Frum writes in The Atlantic, that the truckers represent a “form of performative intimidation”.

Compared to the mass burning and vandalism of Catholic Churches in Canada last summer — which Trudeau both denounced and sympathised with, calling the arsons “understandable” at one point — the truckers hardly represent a nadir of public order. Across the border in the United States, the rioting that occurred there in the summer of 2020 involved loss of life, and massive damage to property. Back then Kamala Harris’s response was markedly similar to that of Trudeau — hand-wringing, sure, but also sympathy with the motivations of those who rioted.

Perhaps buildings being burned down, sometimes with their occupants still inside them, is just part and parcel of living in a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, a protest that has led to zero loss of life and no torched buildings is cast as a grave threat to democracy. Put up bouncy castles for kids to play in and have public barbecues, as the truckers have done? Then, in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, you are “far-Right”, and represent a “test of democracy” itself.

Or you will be accused of “sedition” by the usually phlegmatic Mark Carney. The former Bank of England governor may support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers, but by all indications it is a spectacularly ill-conceived move. Many provincial leaders are already openly rejecting the necessity of such extreme measures.

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But the presence of open division among Canada’s political class — though fatal enough on its own — pales in comparison to the much deeper issue here. Throughout the protests, it’s been clear that the authorities — from Trudeau’s government down to the city of Ottawa itself — have lost control of the situation on the ground.

Tow truck companies openly refuse to tow trucks, and even the police force has proven itself to be unreliable. After an order came down to cut off the demonstrator’s supply of fuel for their trucks, the OPS did some perfunctory confiscations of jerry cans, but the only real result was that demonstrators started carrying around jerry cans en masse as a form of resistance. Not that they had to resist too hard; few police officers seemed interested in doing any policing in Ottawa — they were too busy being filmed hugging and greeting the protestors.

The same can be said of the Canadian Armed Forces, who do not seem bothered enough to play a role in resolving these demonstrations. In fact, the military is now investigating at least six of its members for actively supporting the trucker protest. Two of those under investigation belong to the elite Joint Task Force 2. Compared to the total manpower of the CAF, this might seem like a trifling matter, but as an indication of overall political reliability, it cannot be dismissed. The US military has seen similar indications of political unreliability with its own Covid mandates, so this is hardly some issue unique to Canada, either.

Where does all this leave the Trudeau government? Critics talk about creeping totalitarianism in Canada — though with the invocation of an outright legal state of exception it’s hard to say whether totalitarianism is actually “creeping” anymore. Others, mainly Americans, mutter darkly about “a certain F-word”. One can sympathise with the alarm informing these remarks, without fully buying into them. It only takes a couple of minutes thinking about the situation in Canada to realise how incredibly weird it is — and that weirdness requires some serious explanation.

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When was the last time we saw totalitarianism associated with a government that has unreliable control of its police? That can’t control the roads of its own capital? A government calling for something akin to martial law but emphatically rejecting using the military — because they probably wouldn’t follow any orders to enforce it that they were given?

Tucker Carlson is calling Trudeau “the dictator of Canada“, but this seems like a very odd dictatorship indeed. One of the reasons given for calling this state of exception was that it allowed Trudeau to draft tow truck companies into performing paid but involuntary work.

This may well prove to be a crisis that undermines yet another plank of the post-Cold War liberal era, but V for Vendetta it is not. In that dystopian society, the state of exception is simply a normal way of life. Here, the police will not hesitate to shoot you the moment you cause trouble, and the fall of the totalitarian government comes after it is no longer able to keep the population in check through violence and intimidation. In Canada right now, however, the truth is much stranger than fiction. The state of exception has belatedly arrived only after clear signs from the police and the military that they are absolutely not going to be shooting anybody to begin with.

In regards to Trudeau’s actions being a form of “fascism”, that is perhaps an even harder case to make. It’s a point understandably overlooked today, but fascism, seen in its own day, was most definitely a forward-looking political force. The official hymn of the Italian fascist party under Mussolini, Giovinezza, literally means ”youth”. In the context of the early Twenties, fascists saw themselves — and were seen by many Western contemporaries, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and David Lloyd George — as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force, whether for good or ill.

So let’s be honest with ourselves: it is impossible to look at this weak Canadian government — barely capable of enforcing its will on its own security forces — as a Mussolini-style fascist New Dawn. This sputtering display is about as far from a youthful springtime of the nation as it is possible to get. Trudeau seems mostly tired, under siege, and bereft of ideas, and politicians like him — who self-style as “defenders of democracy” — are now clearly becoming a sort of spent ideological force, barely able to muster a lick of respect from their unruly subjects.

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But perhaps that is the new day that is dawning. Perhaps we are all headed in the same direction as Canada, where political polarisation between the rural population and the urban managerial classes, between the people who give orders and the people who are supposed to follow them, eventually produces a situation so untenable that the system simply snaps.

Not every part of the system, though. It is notable that Trudeau is calling on the banks and tech firms to help restore public order, while excluding any meaningful role for the military. The banks, as well as various parts of the tech sector, are increasingly looking like the only powerful institution that the managerial classes can expect to count on in a true crisis. Especially once the cops, truckers, firemen, pilots, rubbish collectors, special forces operators, sailors, and meter maids bid their politicians farewell and thanks for all the fish.

Unfortunately (or maybe not), those who derive an almost pornographic pleasure from fantasising about imminent totalitarian dystopia are likely to be sorely disappointed in the days and years ahead. Acts like the one just undertaken by the Canadian government amply illustrate that there’s no ten-thousand year Reich of Technocracy coming anytime soon.

The gulf in our societies between the people who work in the real world — those who keep the planes flying and the power on — and the restive and radicalised “email workers” of the urban class keeps growing more and more ominous and intractable. Trudeau can freeze as many bank accounts as he wants. If he thinks it’s a workable solution to this crisis, then the chaos is just getting started.

The hunting season in France, which begins as early as August in some north-eastern départments, is in full swing — and inevitably, there will be deaths between now and March, when it closes. According to the National Office of Hunting and Wildlife (ONCFS), since 1999 more than 3,000 shooting accidents have occurred, with in excess of 420 mortalities. Some of the dead were absolute innocents: a 69-year-old woman was shot in her own garden after a hunter fired through her hedge; a driver was killed by a bullet that had rebounded off a wild boar. Most of the dead, however, are hunters themselves, engaged in a pastime which is not just dangerous for the animal.

The ONCFS attributes the deaths to “a failure to comply with basic safety rules,” but one needs to acknowledge the nature of the game in the Hexagon. Significant beasts on the French “to-shoot list” include deer and wild boar, both of which require a round from a rifle — which can spin a projectile a whole kilometre — as opposed to the shotgun standard in British shooting, the range of which is mere metres. Yet the most obvious, and the most culturally significant, reason for the mortalities is the sheer number of people involved in the pursuit. If the number of registered hunters has gone down since the start of the century, it still stands at 1.2 million. By a long shot, hunting is France’s third most popular hobby, after rugby and football.

Hunting is also part of the national bloodstream, part of France’s sense of itself. It may be Europe’s most sophisticated country (Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermès, the globe’s three leading luxury brands, are all Gallic), yet it is stubbornly rural, with non-urban areas accounting for one-third of the population (compared to a European average of 28%, and 17% in Britain). And France’s rural population inhabits 551,500 km², making the mainland population density just 11 people per km² — about a quarter that of England. Thus, the nation’s National Institute of Statistics concluded, France is the second most rural country in Europe, after Poland.

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Not unrelatedly, the French are Europe’s most persistently anti-globalist nation, the most possessed by the notion of heritage. It is a country with a strong sense of Patrimoine, a country where bull-fighting and cock-fighting remain legal because they are preservations of the past — and in France heritage can trump animal ethics, let alone the prejudices of “townies”.

In 2019 second-home owners on the Ile d’Oléron, off the west coast, brought a case against a cockerel, Maurice, for crowing too early. The locals supported Maurice, and a judge upheld the cock-a-doodle-doos, ordering the plaintiffs to pay €1,000 in damages to Maurice’s owner, Corinne Fesseau. After a host of similar cases in which the unholy trinity of “neo-rurals”, Brit ex-pats and – worst of all – holidaying Parisians complained about the loud and smelly ways of France profonde, the National Assembly backed a bill from Pierre Morel-À-L’Huissier, a deputy from the Lozère, to protect France’s “sensory heritage”. By this was meant “the crowing of the cockerel, the noise of cicadas, the odour of manure.”

President Macron, before he discovered Tik-Tok and the young metropolitan electorate, brazenly tried to win the rural vote by lauding la chasse. He even re-launched the presidential boar hunt at Chambord, the Loire valley hunting castle of the 16th-century French king, François I. Cannily, in the so-called “Chambord Pact”, Macron halved the cost of the hunting licence to €223.64.

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In France, unlike in the UK, hunting is not primarily an elite activity; les chasseurs in our neck of the Charente woods are the local boucher, the boulanger, the garage mechanic, the nurse and the peasant farmer, who all tip up in white Citroen Berlingo vans. It is the hunt that donates the boar to the charity roast, it is the guys from the hunt who mark out the paths in the forest for the village communal walk.

Quite literally, hunting in France doesn’t need to get off its high horse; hunters primarily hunt on foot, rather than aboard an equine. The right to shoot game was won from the aristocracy during the Revolution, and if French property rights are abstruse, it is generally accepted, courtesy of 1789 and All That, that hunters have a right to roam, unless formally forbidden by the landowner. In France, hunting is a Revolutionary act, as opposed to confirmation of class status.

So why do les chasseurs go out on a Sunday with a gun? Some are pragmatic. “It is food on the table, and will keep the family going for a week,” one acquaintance told me about the wild boar in the back of his van. For others the hunt, in shooting crop-destroying boar and deer, is performing a public duty. Many seek immersion in nature, to find their inner selves; or, as Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset described in Meditations on Hunting, the world’s classic on the subject (recently re-published in French as Sur la chasse): “One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.”

Such semi-mystical chasseur-speak draws ridicule from the pressure group Rassemblement pour une France sans Chasse (RAC) (“the Union for a France Free of Hunting”) and the actress-turned-animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot. Opponents of la chasse are increasingly vociferous, and believe they have time and political fashion on their side; the majority of hunters in France are men over 45 years old, and younger generations are polled as being averse to the killing of wild animals.

The poor safety record of the hunt hands ammunition to its critics: there are now calls galore for restrictions on hunting so that joggers, walkers, cyclists and drivers going for a Sunday spin can enjoy their pastimes in peace and safety. A recent online petition directed at President Macron, organised by the Association for the Protection of Wild Animals (ASPAS), called for an outright ban on Sunday hunting and garnered almost 200,000 signatures.

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The most essential phrase in French life is: C’est compliqué. In what is perceived as a calculated blow to hunting, the glue-trapping of birds was finally outlawed by Macron in June, bringing France into line with the rest of the EU. (For decades, France has claimed a derogation under the “preserving heritage” rubric.) In August, trapping with nets and cages was similarly banned as being contrary to the 2009 EU “birds directive”. Perhaps 5,000 hunters engage in the practices, which are abhorred even by some fellow chasseurs. But should the glue-trappers and the netters be defended by the hunting fraternity — and the countryside generally — because, to paraphrase that other essential clause of French life, “an attack on one, is an attack on all”? C’est compliqué.

In the tension between city and country, it is not only the former ramping up the lobbying, the petitioning and the campaigning. The powerful Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs (or FNC), headed by Willy Schraen, has committed itself to combating “the erosion of biodiversity” — to the relief of its members, who consider themselves the original appreciators and champions of nature. After all, the French countryside is speckled with little metal signs in the Tricolour’s red, white and blue announcing land Réserve de Chasse et de Faune Sauvage under a government directive from 1991.

Increasingly, the FNC is targeting Big Farmer and intensive agriculture, which will play well in a country where peasant agriculture plucks the heartstrings. Moreover, in the public war over hunting, the chasseurs are finding allies which give their middle-aged male image a useful makeover. Model and Instagram star Johanna Clermont has become the torchbearer for younger and female hunters, as has 25-year-old Jessica Héraud, leader of the FNC-approved Charente-Maritime women’s hunting federation “Les Dianes”, named for the Roman goddess of hunting. “The fact that women are in the minority in what for years has been a man’s hobby does not mean that they do not have a place in it, quite the contrary,” the FNC states on its website.

The hunters also have friends in the highest branches of the political tree. In the National Assembly, one in five MPs is a member of the Hunting and Territories group; in the Senate, the Hunting and Fishing group has more than 70 members. If Macron himself has now lined up with the environmentalists and animal rights activists, other prominent members of his party are siding with la chasse. Alain Péréa, an En Marche member of the National Assembly, is co-president of the Hunting group.

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Last Saturday, there were pro-hunt protests across all corners of the country — in Mont-de-Marsan, Amiens, Redon, Caen, Charleville-Mézières and Forcalquier. The demonstration in Mont-de-Marsan, a modest-sized town in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, was attended by an intergenerational crowd of 20,000, many of whom were wearing the orange hi-vis vests of the hunter. “Démonstration de force des chasseurs,” went the headline of the regional paper Sud-Ouest Dimanche. The hunters played their trump card: along with the calls for preserving la chasse were the calls in defence of ruralité. In the French mind, la chasse and the countryside are still one, still intertwined. “Macron gravedigger of our traditions” read one placard.

Three years ago, the President first had trouble with the Gilets Jaunes. He should be wary, today, of tangling with the Gilets Oranges. There has been hunting in France since the Paleolithics painted animal scenes on the walls of the caves at Lascaux in the Dordogne. It will take some killing.

We did the wrong thing, perhaps for the right reason. We wanted to develop that country and rescue Afghan women. Their lives were hellish, girls banned from school, women forbidden to leave their homes except in the company of a male guardian, vigilantes beating them with sticks if their burqa was too short. We wanted them to enjoy the pleasures of modernity and live full, happy lives.

Along with the rest of that failed nation-building venture, we got this part wrong too. And now, instead of recalibrating, we are full speed ahead compounding the harm.

Our mantra now is: “We can’t abandon the Afghan women.” And what we mean by that is visas and evacuations. But obviously, we can’t fly out all Afghan women. As for the others, we’re handing them off to confront a medieval regime all on their own, having skimmed away anyone who is educated, affluent, articulate, connected and savvy. We’re leaving them in poverty and on the brink of famine, after whisking away those who staffed the food programmes and the clinics. The US embassy is shuttered. That, folks, is what abandonment looks like.

The sad secret underlying our Great Afghan Liberation Project is this: when we set out to rescue Afghan women, we had no idea of who, how or why. We worked with those we could readily find and interact with, the urban and urbane, the ones who figured us out and gratified our need for photogenic success. We never got to the ones in the slums and the villages.

Even now, we seem unaware that there is no such entity as “Afghan women”. Yet the circumstances of their lives, their mindsets and the forces to which they are subject, make them as distinct from each other as different species.

So I propose: A Field Guide To Afghan Women.

Let us start with the group that no one ever starts with: the ordinary, average, downtrodden, ignored and unloved women who make up the great majority of their country’s female population. They are Afghanistan’s nightingales, peering out shyly from behind the mud walls of their compounds, shapeless silhouettes in drab clothing, accustomed to being ignored and secluded. And possessed, I believe, of a uniquely beautiful voice, if circumstance would ever allow.

Type One: The Invisible Real Women of Afghanistan

The largest segment of Afghan women are the urban poor, the rural population and the internally displaced living in camps. Their lives have barely changed over the past two centuries — never mind the past twenty years. The Communists tried, launching the only true effort to reform an entrenched system of deeply patriarchal, tribal, feudal oppression. The stakeholders of that system resisted, and in our zeal to beat the Soviets on this proxy battleground, we made sure they prevailed.

The lives of these women are sad and difficult. Their birth is regretted, their mothers scorned or even punished for having failed to produce a son. Their childhood consists of training for servitude, starting with their brothers, who are encouraged to order them about. Too soon, it is time for marriage, often to a relative or to a much older man the family wishes to please. Love is not present to soften the lot of these women, and given the segregated lives that reduce contact between husband and wife to a crude minimum, it has little chance to develop over time. A woman’s standing does not improve until she has adult sons; that gains her the right to lord it over her daughters-in-law, who instead of female solidarity, can expect one more tyrant.

What did America’s two trillion-dollar investment buy for this group of Afghan women, in terms of an improved standard of living? Spoiler alert: not much.

According to UNICEF, half of all deaths of Afghan women between the ages of 15 and 49 were attributable to untreated complications of pregnancy and childbirth — statistics straight out of the Middle Ages. In 2017, Doctors Without Borders declared Afghanistan “one of the most dangerous places on earth to have a baby.” This is the result of 15-plus years of Western projects and funding.

What about everyone’s pet project, education? No public speech about Afghanistan failed to tout this as the great triumph: “3.5 million girls back in school, four-fifths of primary school girls enrolled in class.” Wonderful. Applause. The only problem? It’s not true.

Human Rights Watch in 2017 reported that: “Sixteen years after the US-led military intervention that ousted the Taliban government, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not go to school.”

These are the things we failed to do. Here is what we did instead:

1. We created and coddled a tiny, entitled urban elite of professional feminists who were great on the Western lecture circuit but were disconnected from — and I venture to say, uninterested in — the actual lives of Afghan women, and who rarely used their privileges to benefit their poorer sisters.
2. We loved to build girls’ schools. It was fashionable, and we ignored early signs that the mantra “build it and they will come” wasn’t true for Afghanistan. There weren’t enough teachers, and the unending violence made it unsafe to undertake anything but a very short journey. It surely would have been better to build clinics instead, and trained traveling nurses and midwives, and focused on nutrition projects and water projects and basic public education on hygiene and first aid.
3. Then came 2021 and suddenly the Taliban were in Kabul, and we reacted with hysteria. A Plan B would have been judicious, a ready visa process in the event of imminent danger to educated people or high-profile activists. Instead, we preemptively grabbed as many male and female professionals as we could possibly shove onto airplanes — all the people with useful talents: doctors and nurses, journalists, women with artisanal skills, teachers, IT experts. Anyone who could have kept civil society, economic relations, social services and moderate values alive was hustled onto a plane and flown as far away as possible. Not an evacuation, more like a reverse cultural revolution that erased in the space of days what we had nourished over two decades.

How did we go so far off the rails? We had a goal: liberation and empowerment. And we had a theory. We had to educate Afghan women, make them economically independent and get them involved in politics.

I first glimpsed the missing piece of that formula in 2002. I was in my office at the RAND Corporation with a pile of reports and statistics about Afghanistan. What jumped out at me was a problem no one seemed to be seriously considering: the basic physical condition of the average Afghan woman.

Almost everywhere in the world, women slightly outnumber men and have a longer life expectancy. This is particularly the case in countries at war, because while the entire population suffers, the fighting is primarily done by men. But in Afghanistan, there was a clear overhang of males.

The reasons were no mystery. Good food and medical care were given first to boys and men. This made girls far more prone to illness and malnourishment, which led to stunted growth and immature bodies. Couple this with child marriage, and you have 12 and 13-year-old girls being impregnated, losing the baby, being berated for their failure and made to try again. Girls and women were dying disproportionately, of neglect, rough treatment, deprivation, withholding of care and physical abuse.

I also remember when I first began to question my deeply hostile attitude towards the Taliban. It was 2018. Russia had hosted a meeting about the peace process, and the Taliban had issued a “Moscow Declaration” explaining their platform. One section addressed the issue of women. As expected, I found the usual prevarication: women would have “all the rights guaranteed to them in Islam”, whatever that would mean in the interpretation of Taliban men.

But then came this:

“Women are faced with a lot of disasters. The so-called women rights activists stayed in Afghanistan for 17 years; in this period billions of dollars came to Afghanistan, but still Afghanistan is at the top of the countries where many women die during delivery due to lack of health facilities. Afghanistan is still among the top countries of the world where the average life expectancy rate of women is only 45. It is among the top countries of the world where there are more than one million widows. Due to corruption, the expenses brought and spent under the title of women rights have gone to the pockets of those who raise slogans of women rights…”

This was surprisingly empathetic. Nor could I disagree. Afghan feminists and their international supporters had not seemed to care about the bulk of the country’s women, had made no real attempt to address their most pressing “disasters”: lack of food, lack of health care and basic physical safety.

Personally, I had long since lost respect for the self-promoting feminists of Kabul, who knew exactly which Western buttons to push but deployed that skill almost exclusively for their own benefit. They loved attending conferences abroad, were expert at obtaining lucrative contracts to “train” each other in such skills as public speaking, leadership and “advocacy,” and enjoyed being celebrated for their “courage” in foreign news media. You wouldn’t find them in the provinces, trying to uplift rural women. And when leadership and their much-vaunted courage were urgently required, they decamped for the West. Like their country’s national army, they were a colossal disappointment.

Afghan Woman Type Two: The Living Success story

Afghan girls playing soccer. An Afghan woman street artist. An Afghan girls’ robotics team.

What else but extreme condescension explains the delighted surprise with which we received such stories? Why is it so amazing that Afghan girls can learn how to play a musical instrument or kick a ball? Why shouldn’t they be like any other girl in any other country, if given the chance? Given the dire situation of the average Afghan girl, were these really the activities that deserved our attention?

The American University of Afghanistan has an annual budget of 28 million dollars, with which it educates 1700 students, almost all on full scholarships, around half of them girls. The campus is beautiful, the infrastructure state of the art. Surely these students comprehended their great good fortune and were determined to give back to their countrymen and women.

But when the moment of truth arrived, they performed as spokespersons only for themselves. They wanted to be flown to the US — and who can blame them? These are the spoiled children of our bad parenting, the products of an education that taught entitlement over idealism. In the past, groups of them used to be brought to Washington DC and trotted out at gala fundraisers in five-star hotels. At the end of the evening, they’d be brought back on stage to press for additional donations.

To support some programme for the underserved, literacy tutoring for village girls, perhaps? No, they were prompted to ask for money for new sports jerseys, and everyone applauded and got out their check books. Wonderful! Afghan girls shooting hoops.

The adult members of the Living Success Story typically hail from affluent families or clans. Many have dual nationality or family overseas. They are well-travelled and have passports and visas. Most of them were well away even before the airlift.

Afghan Woman Type Three: The Bold Activist

But, you say, some educated women obviously stayed; we can see pictures of them demonstrating and joining in marches.

Let’s take a closer look. The activists’ debut took place in front of the Presidential Palace, eight women holding up signs demanding their rights, followed by slightly larger groups on subsequent days representing the same message before various public buildings. The photos show them angrily yelling and raising determined fists.

Will their demands be met? Am I confident that the Taliban intend to create an atmosphere of respect and safety for women? Not at all.

But let’s not fool ourselves. For most of that country’s women, an Islamic system would represent a step up, because the worst problems they confront come not from religion but from tribal traditions. Islam does not allow forced marriage and does not require women to cover anything more than what modesty demands; it does not ban them from public spaces, and it energetically prohibits Afghan customs such as settling disputes by giving a girl to the enemy clan as a slave.

The real worry is that the Taliban, not exactly a group of sophisticated theologians, will interpret their religion in the same eccentric way as last time. Last time they forbade the keeping of songbirds, which I promise you is a rule found nowhere in the Quran. Any outside help now can best come from other, more advanced Muslim societies and their religious scholars, and from educated women across the Islamic world who have dealt with, and surmounted, comparable challenges. Even last time around, though, they seemed to have some scraps of pity for women. It was a well-known embarrassment during the years of the Western-backed government that a Taliban court in one of the areas under their control would affirm a widow’s ownership of her land, while a government court was likely to accept a bribe from her greedy neighbour.

Afghan Woman Type Four: Madrassa Teacher’s Pet

The Taliban, goaded, had a response to “our” women’s demonstrations. They bused in hundreds of Taliban-supporting, slogan-shouting women in the most extreme form of all-black full-cover dress — the kind that Iranian feminist poets used to say made women look like crows — to march through the streets of Kabul and other cities in support of strict Islamic rule.

These women didn’t suddenly materialise out of the ether. They were educated in madrassas right under our noses, and in significant numbers, during the supposed years of enlightenment and freedom during the secular era we were so proud of. Yet we had no idea they were there.

This pitting of one set of women against another is a very unfortunate development, and it’s entirely our fault. “We don’t need women who left Afghanistan telling us what to do,” their banners read. A fair point.

I’m truly not sure where we go from here. Our twenty-year liberation experiment failed, to the tune of dizzying amounts of dollars. We invested in exotic frivolities and threw money at those who needed it least, and who have since proved all too ready to bite the hand that wrote the cheques. And so — as heartless as it sounds — it is probably best if we resist the “last temptation” and stay well away. And hope that one fine day, in her own time, in her own ecosystem, the nightingale will sing.