Female combat veteran: I feel helpless, and I fear for little Afghan girls I once saved
As a woman who served with Green Berets near the Pakistan border, I saw girls' lives threatened over getting an education. What will happen to them now?
As soon as the Biden administration announced in April that the United States would be withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, I started worrying about the fate of the girls I met there almost a decade ago.
When I watched news footage Sunday of the Taliban turning the nation into total chaos and collapsing the government in Kabul, my fears about the loss of rights for women and girls escalated tenfold.
In 2012, I served as a cultural support team (CST) leader alongside Green Berets at Combat Outpost Herrera, in Paktia province on the Afghan-Pakistan border. These teams – two female soldiers and an interpreter – attached to special operations units, specifically tasked to interact with local women and children because it was culturally inappropriate for these elite all-male Special Forces teams to do so.
As CSTs, part of our work involved identifying the root causes of instability in villages near our outpost, and how to implement security, governance and development measures to make those areas safer.
During our time in Afghanistan, my female teammate and I were able to meet and partner with local male school teachers. We worked in an ethnically and tribally Pashtun district, where the villagers wanted to educate all their children, so they quietly operated schools for girls. The consequences for teachers or villages who allowed girls to go to school was dire. During one of my first intelligence briefings on local threats and Taliban activity in the area, our CST was shown videos of the Taliban kidnapping teachers, taking them to barren lands and shooting them with a recoilless rifle, which severed the bodies in half.
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Regardless, the villagers in our district kept teaching their daughters.
To keep everyone safe, classes were taught behind walled complexes and men from the village joined the local police force, which allowed them to keep a watchful eye over their children. If they heard reports of Taliban activity, they would cancel school and send the girls home.
Over time, one of the things that our CST learned was that school supplies were being pilfered and confiscated by Taliban forces along the Pakistani border. We notified the Green Berets, the Afghan Special Forces team partner and the local police. Together, the men quickly implemented additional security checkpoints and patrols along the border, which eventually allowed supplies to finally reach the schools.
Together with our Afghan Special Forces team, our CST was able to coordinate with an Afghan nonprofit that provided Pashtu storybooks and teachers' manuals to the schools in the district. When the books arrived, every little girl was given her own set to keep.
The children could barely contain their excitement. Many had never owned a book before. Several waved their books in the air, dancing, overjoyed at their luck. Others immediately opened them, captivated by the colorful illustrations. Watching their utter joy was inspiring.
Sitting on the cool mud ground with a small group of girls and my interpreter, we took turns pointing to various images of animals on the pages. I practiced my Pashtu and then I taught them some English. The girls listened with wide eyes and smiles, completely enraptured.
Now that the Taliban have regained control of the country, I fear that there will be no more dancing, no more storybooks and no more girls schools.
Those little girls are now teenagers, and I worry about their future. I worry that many will be forced into marriages very young. I worry about their lack of opportunities and education now that the Taliban have returned. I worry about the violence many will face.
As a veteran watching the Taliban retake control of Afghanistan, I feel helpless. But by advocating and helping our Afghan allies with visas and pointing concerned family members and friends to humanitarian aid organizations, I’m hopeful that these small acts of kindness will have ripple effects.
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I also wonder whether any of those girls still have their storybooks. I wonder whether they will share them with their own children someday and teach their daughters to read.
I hope so. I hope those stories and those books live on through generations. And that more girls continue to flip through their pages – a seemingly small gesture that has now become an act of defiance.
Jackie Munn, a nurse practitioner and freelance writer in the Washington, D.C., area, graduated from West Point and served with the Green Berets in Afghanistan.