“Farkhonda, twenty-four, was born southwest of the capital, in Ghazni, and as a toddler in early 2001 moved with her family to Kabul. … Farkhonda is part of a generation of young Afghans raised in a post-Taliban country, believing in the ideas of freedom and democracy they’ve learned from an early age. The American invasion didn’t bring only soldiers to Afghanistan, after all—it brought aid workers and entrepreneurs and teachers, too. … This is the flip side of the forever war, … one many Americans … tend not to consider when bandying about that term. For the vast majority of Farkhonda’s conscious existence, she’s lived in an open-ish society, where a young woman could study and work and dream. Was all of Afghanistan like this the past twenty years? No. But hers was.
Farkhonda says America’s withdrawal began to feel real ‘in the last three months. … The situation got tenser … and then the war spread everywhere. … It all happened so rapidly.’ She feels betrayed in particular by Ashraf Ghani, the democratically elected president whose flight from the country with a reported $169 million in cash birthed a denial and countless conspiracy theories …
Fear now reigns in Kabul, she says: ‘Almost every shop is closed, even the bakeries. You do not see a single woman on the streets.’ … I ask what she thinks will come next. ‘Honestly, I have no idea,’ she says. But she knows her objective. ‘Primarily, we have to get out of Afghanistan.’”
– Matt Gallagher, “Leaving Afghanistan Behind,” esquire.com, October 7, 2021