In the Sunday Book Review at the Washington Post reviewer Pamela Constable took a look at Ann Jones's Kabul in Winter, a book I just finished reading. While I do agree with her that Jones wears her politics on her sleeve (she totally can't stand Pres. Bush and makes that clear when it really isn't necessary to the text), Constable mainly uses the review to focus on all the same old stories about women in Afghanistan and completely ignores what Jones has to say about how the US is not (nor has it ever) helped those same women.

This is what Constable focuses on:

...Jones's book gathers power as it goes on, and her anger serves her increasingly well as she compiles a painstaking litany of frustrations and failures in her mission to help Afghan women. She skewers the hypocrisy of a culture that forces women to "keep themselves under wraps" as a protection from the "uncontrollable God-given sexual appetites of men." Imposing the burden of "honor" on women, she points out, "frees men to live as they please" but makes them fearful and cruel. A Muslim woman, she concludes, "wears the whole weight of the Islamic world." Jones visits girls in hospitals who have tried to burn themselves to death rather than face the shame of not having proven their virginity by bleeding on their wedding nights. She visits a prison where young women are confined for such sexually related "crimes" as running away from abusive husbands. Many recount tangled tales of forced marriages, family rejection and sexual enslavement. The common theme is the powerlessness of human property. "Murder a favored wife," Jones notes grimly, "and you owe her family . . . four new copies of the Quran, four women, and one fat sheep."

Most depressing of all are her efforts to get the local legal establishment to defend women's rights. Even female lawyers at the brand-new Ministry of Women's Affairs treat her with indifference, suspicion and bafflement. "In my country it is against the law for a husband to hit his wife," Jones tells them. "In Afghanistan not," they reply, in halting English. "In my country it is against the law to force a young girl to marry an old man she doesn't want to marry," Jones says. The lawyers shake their heads. "In Afghanistan not. In my country is custom," one says.

Okay, we all know that it sucks to be a woman in Afghanistan and has for a long long time. But Jones writes about how the US is donating money to build a new woman's prison - instead of sending legal assistance and dollars to the lawyers and human rights activists who are trying to help the woman already wrongly incarcerated. And she also stresses how the US is determined to spend education dollars on primary education, rather than directing some to students, especially female students, in the upper levels who wish to graduate high school and teach - something women can do in Afghanistan, if they have the education. The US prefers the more "democratic" way of providing only early education to all - those who already have some education are considered "elite" and don't need dollars to assist them.

Yes, you read that right, if you want to be a teacher you are elite.

Jones writes:

Educate an educator I thought, and the educator would do a better job of educating others right away - or in the language of the aid business, this 'investment in human resources' would deliver an 'immediate return'. 'That may be true,' said my insider acquaintance at USAID, 'but it's not sexy.'

Sexy is how something plays in politics and tv - how USAID can say it is teaching children to read because that is the cute and cuddly picture we want to see as opposed to teaching English speaking adult men and women to teach English (and other subjects) - that's boring and no one wants to go with boring in an election year. It's the same warped logic that gets us more testing and "No Child Left Behind" when kids are bored out of their skulls and getting fatter by the minute in the US. We want slogans and scores and statistics, and all of that, more than anything, adds up to sexy.

But Constable didn't mention any of this in her interview.

If the only thing you read about Kabul in Winter was the Washington Post review then you would think this is a book about women suffering in a male dominant culture written by a soft hearted liberal. You would have no idea of the facts about education and imprisonment and the insanity of the US printing textbooks that include only Saudi Arabian history and not Afghani history and then passing them off to students. (Honestly!) Constable could have enlightened the country to some of the very real concerns that Jones raises about just how the US builds nations, but she didn't do that. She gave us the same empty crap about Afghanistan that our national media has been serving up for the past few years.

How sad that even book people can't be brave; even a book reviewer has to play politics.