The infamous blue burkas that hide the faces of Afghan women can’t silence the voices of those who have suffered under the Taliban regime, says Maclean’s contributing editor and Amnesty International Media Award-winning journalist Sally Armstrong. Her new book on Afghan women’s rights, Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots, tells their stories.

Armstrong, who has been visiting Afghanistan since early 1997, says in an interview that since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, many female activists have begun to re-interpret Islam and dispose of harmful and archaic cultural traditions. Customs such as Badal — trading daughters from one tribe or family to another for marriage — were widely accepted, but are now condemned by a growing number of village elders. It is thanks to activists like the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission chair Sima Samar, Armstrong says, that women and youth are fighting for their right to education and seeking protection from abuse. In fact, since the fall of the Taliban, almost half of all children (5.4 million boys and girls) have returned to school, and of these, 34 per cent (or two million) are girls. This is a huge change from life under the Taliban seven years ago, when only four to five per cent of all children had access to primary education.

These statistics give Armstrong hope for the future. She recognizes the dangers that Afghan women still face, but writes about the country’s future with restrained optimism. Afghan women, she argues, should be the ones to reform their country, but activists worldwide should fundraise and provide support. She says Canadian grassroots organizations, like Calgary-based Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (W4WAfghan), have done amazing work on the ground. She shakes with anger at the suggestion (by academics like Chandra Mohanty) that western feminism is incompatible with women’s rights in developing countries. Quoting Samar, she quips that human rights aren’t western or eastern, but human.

“It’s easy to call the game from the bleachers. Academics who sit in their classroom and write important, lengthy papers need to spend some time in the villages before they criticize what other women are doing,” she says. She hopes Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots will give the public — and possibly some stuffy academics — a rare glimpse of life in these villages.

“The story in Canadian newspapers has to be about the insurgency, because our men and women are over there and we are obliged to report on our military when it is in harm’s way…. Still, many reporters say they want to report from the villages, but they are near the four provinces where the insurgency is going on. Remember, there are 34 provinces in the country and in the other provinces things are slightly different,” she explains.

While life is gradually improving for women — especially in the four provinces patrolled by the Canadian military — women are still abused and battered in each of the 34 provinces, she says. Earlier this month, a male mob attacked eight schoolgirls on their way to school in Kandahar City. Six were hospitalized — three seriously burned — after the men flung acid at them.

Even amid such despair, there is hope and optimism throughout the war-ravaged country. The Women’s Rights in Afghanistan Fund, for one, started up a string of human rights training programs, from the town of Mazar-e-Sharif to Kabul, says Armstrong. In her book, she describes how women walked for over an hour each day from all over the district to attend classes in the village of Sharkardara, west of Kabul. Women are making extraordinary efforts like these because, “Hoodlums and bandits are operating under the assumption that girls can’t be educated, and as long as girls aren’t educated, these extremist men will continue to prevent girls from joining civil society. But the culture of Afghanistan is not what we are seeing in the news, and the religion is certainly not what the Taliban are claiming it is.”