Women's Stories of 9/11

Voices from Afghanistan and the West

Christopher Hilton

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780750996723, 9780750930215
• eBook ISBN: 9780750997614
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001 sent shockwaves across the world; they were the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil in US history, killing nearly 3, 000 people and injuring thousands more. For those whose lives it directly impacted, the effects are enduring and deeply felt.

Women's Stories of 9/11 observes the events that unfolded from a woman's perspective. It is a series of interviews with eleven very different women – some from the West, some from Afghanistan – who each offer remarkably candid insights into their own personal experiences before, during and after the attacks. In the honest and heartfelt stories that emerge we hear the voices of women whose ordinary lives were suddenly changed, emotionally and physically, and who became actors in some of the most far-reaching events of the modern world.

SIX

The Reporter

The Taliban made it clear that they had banned all foreigners and expelled all foreigners. They kept issuing these edicts, like if you were caught with a satellite phone you’d be hung. But I was planning to go.

For Christina Lamb from south London, Pakistan was an enchanted place she discovered by accident, and, in a way that now seems inevitable, it led to a love affair with Afghanistan. As a journalist on the Sunday Telegraph, she has been able to separate the love affair with reporting aspects of reality well enough to win an award of genuine prestige.¹ In conversation this reveals itself in an intriguing way. She can talk descriptively about witnessing the horror of a civilian population being shelled and bombed, but retreats far into modesty if you mention the award. Like the photographer Marilynn K. Yee, she doesn’t stop being human when she does her job but she’s had to arrange aspects of that to accommodate some very strange situations.

She’s thirty-six and married to a Portuguese man. They have a two-and-a-half-year-old son, Lourenço.

‘I always wanted to write – books – and travel. When I left university I thought working on a newspaper would be the best way to make some money and see the world. The idea was to do it for a short time and make enough money to stop, then write the novel – but I got addicted to it and I’ve never stopped.

‘When I left university I spent the summer as an intern on the Financial Times (FT) Foreign Desk, and one day we had an invitation to a lunch which the Foreign Editor couldn’t go to. He looked round for somebody and I was the most junior. It was a lunch for south Asian politicians – quite senior people. Benazir Bhutto² wasn’t there, but the secretary general of her party was so I got talking to him and he said, “Would you like to meet her?” – she was living in exile in London. I said, “Yes, I’d love to.” He arranged that, I went and we got on very well.

‘It was also when she announced she was going to marry and we ran that in the FT. It was my first big piece. At that time the Pakistani press was banned from reporting her, so the foreign press was her only way of getting out her message.

‘After that we kept in touch. I went off training at Central TV, and it was very male orientated – very sexist – and quite difficult. I’d get sent on the worst kind of jobs, anything to do with babies and knitting. I was renting a room and working long hours, so I virtually never saw daylight – the central office was underground! One day I got home in the evening and on the mat was an invitation written in gold script to Benazir’s wedding, in Pakistan. I took two weeks off work and went to Karachi. She’d invited me as a friend so I went to all the women-only parts of the wedding and it gave me an incredible insight into Pakistan. I’d never been there before. I’d been to India. I just fell completely in love with the whole thing, the smells, the colours, it was all so intense. So I came back and decided to go and live in Pakistan!

‘Because I’d spent the summer with the FT and got on very well with them they said, “We have someone in Pakistan but we’ll pay for what we publish.” It didn’t occur to me to talk to anyone else, I just went.’

She calculated that with the war underway in Afghanistan it was a place where she was getting ‘two ongoing stories’ in one. Her eye settled upon Peshawar (see map on page viii), a place she knew nothing about ‘except having read Kipling. I took what was known as the Flying Coach – mini busses that go between Islamabad and Peshawar. They used to go on to Kabul. It was completely mad. I had this huge suitcase containing all my worldly belongings. It was much too big and I couldn’t carry it. I arrived in the old city of Peshawar at about sunset. I got off the Flying Coach – I was the only foreigner and the only woman – and thought, “What the hell am I going to do?” Peshawar had old bazaars and people selling everything. It used to be a beautiful place and these days it’s far more Afghan than it was then, it’s really an extension of Afghanistan and it’s not as friendly as it was. I would be less happy about arriving there on my own now that I was at the time, and that’s nothing to do with being older, more than Peshawar is different, there are more of the so-called fundamentalists.

‘Anyway, I ended up getting in a rickshaw to a hotel called Green’s, which was where all the arms dealers used to stay. It was completely mad.

‘This was the beginning of 1988 and the Russians were still in Afghanistan. They were negotiating to leave but they hadn’t started leaving. For almost two years I lived mostly in Peshawar and then Islamabad, and I was going back and forth to Afghanistan. Peshawar is a big Asian crossroads, so it’s where merchants have always passed through. In those days, because of the war in Afghanistan it was full of spies from all sides, even unlikely ones – like Italian spies. Then there were aid workers and all kinds of other people. You never knew quite what anyone was. There were so many aid agencies and a lot of them gathered intelligence, there were a lot of journalists who weren’t really journalists – they were ex-army people who’d gone out. Everybody was there trying to get in. There were lots of spokespeople who could arrange it for you, even diplomats.’

How did you feel as a woman going in there?

‘In an odd way this was more of an issue with other journalists than with the Mujahideen themselves. A lot of the journalists were Vietnam vets and this was an ideological thing for them as well as a story.⁵ I used to get into terrible arguments with them because I wasn’t that impressed by the Mujahideen. On one level I could see they were very romantic figures – medieval clothing and fighting with their Kalashnikovs against one of the world’s most powerful armies – but on another level they were incredibly disorganised, they were all fighting each other and exaggerating all the time. They’d say, “We shot down eleven helicopters yesterday,” and no helicopters.

‘To go there at twenty-one always having lived in England and then – I never met women. I went to tribal areas and I met men. Women were always somewhere else. Sometimes because I was a woman they’d say, “do you want to come and meet our women?” I always felt very uncomfortable because I was taken into the woman’s area behind a curtain and all the women would come out and they’d all touch me – because they’d never seen anything like me before. I must admit that I still find it uncomfortable when I am taken into this purdah area.

‘Sometimes they were educated women and they even spoke English. It was shocking to me to see women the same age as me, I’d been able to travel all over the world and they were also educated but must have been brought up living like sheep. And to find that they had read Shakespeare and James Joyce! I’d talk to them and say, “How can you live like this?” and they’d reply, “Well, actually we can’t understand how you live. We are shocked. You women in the west are just sex objects.” In the same way that we caricature women under the Taliban a little bit, they caricature our lives – we are available to every man, and a lot of men there act assuming that. They think if you’re a Western woman you’re available.’

Did you have experiences of that?

‘Yes. More, oddly, with Pakistanis than Afghans. Afghan men tend to be very honourable. This is something I can’t explain to myself – what happened prior to the Taliban to change that. Now everybody tells stories of how awful it was, women being raped all the time, and it must be true because lots of people swear that this happened.

‘Yet I travelled a lot of times with Mujahideen for weeks in the middle of nowhere and I was the only woman. Many may never have seen a Western woman. I was very young and never once did I have any problems. I know their commanders used to say to them at the beginning, “Anything happens to her I’ll chop you up into pieces.”

‘What always worried me about travelling with the Mujahideen as a woman was something else, that you were a liability and they would think of you as that – somebody else would be risking their life to help you. In fact I was always chatting with Abdul Haq, the Kabul commander who lived near me and he refused to take me with them because, he said, “You’re a woman.” It made me more determined. As a woman doing this type of work you have to be much more determined than men – you’re not as physically strong and you can’t show that. You have to compensate for it. In the end he did agree.

‘Being a war correspondent is addictive. I was completely addicted to the whole danger and adrenalin of it in the two years I lived in Peshawar, going in and out of Afghanistan. I was fascinated by Afghanistan and what was happening, and I never ever thought anything would happen to me. I think most war correspondents are like that and it’s very dangerous. When I left Afghanistan all I wanted to do was go and cover another war.

‘When I came back the first time from living there I felt really foreign here. It was the Thatcher years and everybody was obsessed by making money. Because I’d only graduated two years before, lots of my friends had gone into very high paying jobs – investment, banking, trading – and they were earning huge amounts of money. That’s all they thought about and I found it so odd because I’d seen people being killed. I also thought that what we were doing in the West was not helpful because it brought in people like bin Laden. I was very shocked to come back – I couldn’t talk to people about it because people weren’t really interested.’

When she finished her time there, still addicted to war, ‘I was furious because I was working for the FT and they said, “Oh, we’d like you to go to Brazil and be our South American correspondent.”’

Soon enough Lamb would be putting her k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: 9/11/01
• One: The Policewoman
• Two: The Refusenik
• Three: The Firefighter’s Widow
• Four: The Organiser
• Five: The Businesswoman
• Six: The Reporter
• Seven: The Fiancée
• Eight: The Naval Chief
• Nine: The Coordinator
• Ten: The Exile
• Eleven: The Insurance Attorney
• Notes