Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan by Ann Jones

From the Publisher

Soon after the bombs stopped falling on Kabul, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city. This is her trenchant report from the city where she spent the next four winters working in humanitarian aid. Investigating the city's prison for women, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, Jones enters the lives of everyday women and men and reveals through small events some big disjunctions: between the new Afghan "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between American promises and performance, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends upon our own.

The New York Times - William Grimes

On the big picture, then, Ms. Jones offers a fairly predictable catalog of abuse. But as an observer and analyst of Afghan society, and of the multiple problems bedeviling it, she can be eloquent and persuasive. Above all, she is a compassionate voice for the plight of Afghan women, who, on her evidence, will have to make enormous strides to move from miserable to merely abject.

Publishers Weekly

In February 2003, Jones and her fellow NGO relief workers watched with disbelief and horror as Fox News declared the American war in Afghanistan a success-the Taliban totally defeated, all Afghan women "liberated" and the infrastructure completely restored. The reality they knew on the ground in Kabul was starkly different. Jones (Women Who Kill) presents her version of the events in this fascinating volume, which tours Kabul's streets, private homes, schools and women's prison. The political and military history of Afghanistan, as well as its cultural and religious traditions, inform Jones's daily interactions and observations. Describing an English class she taught, for example, Jones says, "Once, after I explained what blind date meant, a woman said, `Like my wedding.' " Jones focuses particularly on Afghan women, whose lives are often permeated by violence. Her sharp eye and quick wit enable vivid writing, as when she witnesses a fistfight from her traffic-blocked car: an old man hit by a cyclist socks the cyclist, a young man punches the old man, then a traffic cop joins and socks the young man. Seconds later, all get up and continue on their way. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Afghanistan is fading as a current-events topic, but this report on the postwar situation is a creditable contribution. Drawing on her experiences as a humanitarian aid worker in that country, Jones (Next Time She'll Be Dead: Battering and How To Stop It) focuses on the problems that the U.S. government claims to have solved: political anarchy, destruction of infrastructure, and equal justice. The three sections of her narrative are set, respectively, "In the Streets," "In the Prison," and "In the Schools." Part 1 sets the context for the book through encounters with various local fighters, the press, and Afghan men bitter over broken American promises. The prison section is the most painful to read, as Jones documents the impossible situation of women imprisoned for the crime of having been abused in various ways by men (e.g., a woman forced into prostitution by her husband was charged with adultery). Jones is particularly biting in her criticism of nonprofit agencies that don't stay for the long haul (though she doesn't account for the small number who have stayed and had some success). Scholars will disagree with some of her generalizations about Islam and will cavil about the short postwar time span her book covers. Still, for policy issues, this book pairs nicely with editor Antonio Donini's Nation-Building Unraveled: Aid, Peace and Justice in Afghanistan. Recommended for large public and all academic libraries.-Lisa Klopfer, Eastern Michigan Univ. Lib., Ypsilanti Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A writer who has focused on violence against women travels to Afghanistan after the American-led invasion and finds plenty to write about. Shaken by the Sept. 11 attacks and the "strut and bluster" of America's president, New Yorker Jones (Next Time, She'll Be Dead, 1994) seeks to do something about it. In 2002, she moves to Kabul, volunteers at a small non-profit dedicated to assisting the country's thousands of war widows and also begins to teach English to local educators. She finds a country traumatized from years of war and violence, where women, who struggle under an oppressive patriarchy, are locked in prison for "crimes" such as being forced into prostitution by their husbands. Jones visits others who have been hospitalized after setting themselves on fire out of shame because they did not bleed after having sex on their wedding nights. Jones writes angrily of the divide between the upbeat reports Americans see on the news and receive from political leaders, and the harsh reality of life in Afghanistan. She details the blunders of the well-funded but often misguided international community, which throws millions of dollars at projects that have little impact on the daily lives of the country's people. From the Afghan perspective, Jones writes, foreign aid workers live like kings, riding around in large SUVs and grabbing the city's best housing. In the meantime, Afghanistan has reestablished itself as the world's leading opium supplier, with profits from the trade flowing to warlords and politicians alike. The story is most captivating when Jones steps outside her own anger and simply describes the women she meets in the course of her work; the narrative occasionally bogs down whenshe attempts to pack in centuries of Afghanistan's complicated history. A passionate-often grim-account of a country and a people trying to find peace after decades of war.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0641951493
  
• ISBN-13: 9780641951497
• Format: Hardcover, 336pp
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated
• Pub. Date: March 2006
• Edition Description: Bargain
• Sales Rank: 12,240

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     On Thursdays, the Ministry for Martyrs and the Disabled gives out stipends to certifiable war casualties. Early in the morning, they make their way to the Ministry: women in faded, tattered burquas and men wrapped against the cold in pattus of military brown. They come singly or in twos and threes, assembling into a grave procession of the lame, the halt, and the blind. One-legged men, victims of land mines, hobble on their Red Crescent crutches. This is the country of one-legged men.
     Officially disabled, they drag their shattered bodies over the rough pavements, stopping traffic at every crossing. They press on amid the honking horns, seeking no miracles, merely the wherewithal to make it through another week. Every day, the mines that salt the roadsides and the dead orchards and the fallow fields explode to create new martyrs and new casualties. Every New Year’s Day, thousands of Kabulis visit a hillside shrine and somebody steps on a mine—this year, it was an eighteen-year-old boy who lost both legs. And every week, the Thursday procession grows longer and more belligerent. They are Kabul’s most aggressive pedestrians.

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Kabul in Winter

Metropolitan Books

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ISBN: 0805078843

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Excerpted from Kabul in Winter
byJones, Ann
Copyright © 2006 by Jones, Ann.
Excerpted by permission.
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