Fear & silence: inside the Taliban's Afghanistan - with Lyse Doucet
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What is the background of Lyse Doucet’s reporting career in Afghanistan?
This is a global production. But women can't go to the parks on their own, they can't go in cars on their own, they can't be heard in public. This ultra
conservative reclusive emir who sits in Kandahar in the south and issues hundreds of edicts, most of them with a singular focus on erasing girls and women from public life. There's no floor anymore that once once girls reach puberty, which of course can happen six, seven, eight, nine, that child marriage is allowed.
Women have to be educated and they have to do something to be more acceptable to the West, the the Taliban, otherwise the whole country is just gonna be a poverty stricken, you know, disease ridden, uneducated hellhole.
I said to him, Are you gonna be proud to represent a country which, if this continues, has no women doctors, no women teachers, no women professionals? And he admitted, this is a problem for us. We've got to do something to fix it.
Hi everyone, it's me, Christiana Manpour in France with the X-Files this week. And I'm joined by a very special guest while Jamie remains on holiday. She is Lise Duset, the BBC's chief international correspondent, and she is one of the most distinguished reporters in the world. Yes, you are. And you've just come back from Kabul, a place we both love and have visited to report many, many, many times. And you've been there reporting on five years since the US withdrawal. You've also, Lise, just won the women's book for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction for your amazing book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, a People's History of Afghanistan. We're going to talk a little bit about that as well. And we'll talk about Iran, because you were there for a couple of times during this war.
So, Lise, welcome.
First of all, it's a great honor to be on your podcast and a double honor because I seem to be standing in for your ex. So that's your double double. Um and to be I don't know what Jamie's gonna think. What? You took a Canadian to stand in for me? Um anyway, and it's a great job. Anytime now you could be the No, you could
be the 51st state, you could be, you know, uh crippled by tariffs. Who knows what your neighbor to the south is going to do to you? Which we will come to, in fact, at least about your neighbor to the south, because it is what he did in uh 2020 before leaving office, Donald Trump negotiated, if you could use that word, an end and a withdrawal to American troops and therefore NATO troops in Afghanistan. After a period of some twenty years since nine eleven. So let me go back a little bit to the beginning, Lise. You first reported from Afghanistan when the Soviets were withdrawing. Isn't that correct? Like that was nineteen eighty eight, eighty nine?
Yes, way back in uh in the dust of of history. Uh yes, it was does anyone remember? I'm I'm sure your loyal podcasters l uh remember those dark days of the Cold War and I arrived in Kabul on Christmas Day when Afghanistan was in the depths of the harshest winter in decades and in the midst of what turned out to be the dying days of the Cold War. It was the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I was taken immediately by the country. And of course, you know the feeling, Christian, when that w I suppose that was the Ukraine war of the time. It never left the between the United States um and what was then at the time the Soviet Union fighting against Afghanistan. Fighting a ra about for Afghanistan.
Yeah, and and Afghanistan has been, I think, rightly termed the graveyard of empires. It's just one empire after the other, from the British to the Soviets to the Americans, uh that have been defeated by the Afghan resistance. And it is actually extraordinary when you think that they have nowhere near the capabilities, whether it's in manpower, in military power. uh that these other empires have had, and yet they have done that. Take us back to eighty nine before we move on, Why is it and what was it about the Afghan people, the Afghan resistance that was able to defeat I think it was what, nine, ten years of Soviet occupation?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the background of Lyse Doucet’s reporting career in Afghanistan?
0:02–6:27
2
How did the Soviet withdrawal and the rise of the Taliban shape Afghanistan’s modern history?
6:27–12:07
3
What are the Taliban’s current edicts that erase women and girls from public life?
12:07–18:25
4
How did the 2021 U.S. withdrawal and Trump’s decisions impact Afghanistan’s crisis?
18:25–24:34
5
What is the lived reality for Afghan women five years after the withdrawal?
24:34–31:07
6
How does Lyse Doucet describe life and protest in Iran after the 2022‑2023 unrest?
31:07–36:48
7
What stories does ‘The Finest Hotel in Kabul’ reveal about Afghan society?
36:48–43:05
8
What recommendations does Lyse Doucet give listeners for supporting Afghan and Iranian voices?
43:05–45:41
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
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