Kabul in winter : life without peace in Afghanistan / Ann Jones

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-306) and index.

In the streets -- In the prisons -- In the schools.

"After the bombing of Kabul ceased, journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the destroyed city, hoping to being help where her country had brought destruction." "Here is her report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Working among the multitude of impoverished war widows, training Kabul's ill-equipped English teachers, and investigating the city's prisons for women, Jones encounters women and men from every layer of Afghan society: Sharif, a prosperous Kabuli who owns a small fleet of vehicles that shuttle foreign aid workers around the city; Homa, a young widow facing the death penalty, accused of murdering a cousin who twice tried to rape her; Salma, a law student who needs a scholarship to study at an American university to stave off an unwelcome marriage; Nasir, a former soldier (first for the communist government, then for the mujahadin) who now holds two jobs, as an elementary school teacher and as a bicycle repairman. In the streets and markets, she hears the Afghan view of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban and learns that regarding women as something other than full human beings is the norm, not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones unravels Afghanistan's complicated history as a proxy playground for greater powers and confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked - by Communists, Islamic extremists, and Western free marketers - always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between US promises and performance, between the new "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between what's boasted of and what is."--BOOK JACKET.