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The Afghan activist has become a celebrated critic of US policy, but her status abroad has cost her legitimacy in her homeland Malalai Joya’s article about the US kill team in Afghanistan expressed the disgust of many if not all Afghans , but her categorical rejection of the US intervention in Afghanistan is unfair. After all, without US intervention, Joya would not have been able to own a passport, let alone travel abroad. Equally, without the international community’s interference, there would not have been the 2003 Loya Jerga where she first gained international fame. Joya’s anti-US military rhetoric resonates with the leftist circles of the west who are her chief audience, and Joya’s celebrity status reached a climax recently when she appeared alongside Noam Chomsky in Boston . Back home in Afghanistan, though, she has become irrelevant. But to understand Joya’s contradictory views, we need to look at how her career began and developed. Let’s go back to the constitutional Loya Jerga of 2003 when Joya first became famous. At the time, she was an independent voice and had the audacity to make a relevant, but politically explosive comment. She said that the inclusion of war criminals threatened to undermine the assembly’s legitimacy with Afghans risking to miss out of a historical chance for justice. Morally, she was absolutely right; but the truth was that, after two decades of violence, it was inevitable that the leaders that had emerged owed their power to war. The international community had to work with what was there – and what was there was war leaders with dubious human rights records. To exclude them from the assembly was unreasonable because it would have driven them to start a new war front. Including them in the assembly meant that the Taliban remained the sole insurgents while the former mujahedin stopped fighting and began a new government. It was a morally flawed but pragmatic solution. Joya was driven by a burning desire for justice – pragmatism has never been her strength. Joya’s outspoken comment took the assembly by surprise. It was up to the assembly leader, Sebghatullah Mojaddedi, to diffuse the situation because he was older and more experienced. But Mojaddedi took offence and ordered Joya to leave the assembly. He then changed his mind and struck a gentler note, “Come back, child, you owe us an apology.” But it was too late: the old man had lost the young woman. And with that, Joya lost a chance to fully develop her potential and work on the kind of constructive and reconciliatory politics that Afghanistan needed. Since then, Joya’s career as MP has been marked by repeats of that crucial early scene of her, a young woman, confronting old jihadi men. The location shifted from the Loya Jerga tent to parliament, but Joya and her jihadi nemesis remained stuck in an endless cycle of accusation and counter-accusation. The Afghan audiences found the confrontations first interesting, then amusing and finally lost interest in them altogether. By then, Joya was ousted from parliament, but her career abroad was beginning to flourish. Her book tour of the US is part of this development. The tragedy of Joya is that she was spotted by the international media and a clandestine radical leftist Afghan organisation at a time when Afghan democracy was in its infancy. At the time, Afghan human rights groups had not yet developed fully to give Joya the kind of support she needed. Isolated and vulnerable, she became an easy prey and was picked up by a group whose politics were steeped in the anti-imperialist revolutionary world of the 1960s and 70s ideological battles. Joya has served as a respectable front for a group that otherwise has little backing in Afghanistan. Joya’s recurrent reference to “warlords in the pay of the US” are all about the group’s bitterness that Washington allied itself with the group’s Islamists rivals in the 1980s, enabling them to defeat the left. The alliance was abandoned between 1992 and 2001, but resumed fully with the 2001 intervention. Little wonder, then, that the group felt doubly betrayed by Washington. But Joya’s sudden fame in the west offered the group an unexpected chance to turn the tables and use Joya’s popularity abroad to give her legitimacy to attack the group’s jihadi nemesis in parliament. Joya’s confrontations often came out of the blue. During a session about trade, Joya raised her hand but instead of asking questions about trade, she questioned the mujahedin’s legitimacy . The speaker cautioned her that her comments were irrelevant because the session was about trade, but the damage was done and the session disrupted. Joya’s disruptions of parliament eerily resembled similar incidents of leftwing versus rightwing fights that interrupted parliament in the 1960s. The resemblance is natural because the parties involved were the same old leftist comrades versus rightwing Islamist brothers. Joya has become simply a new player in an old political dynamic. This also explained the intensity of the jihadis’ reaction to Joya. After all, criticising warlords was nothing unusual by 2007. But Joya was re-opening old wounds. Her repeated reference to the internal wars of the 1990s was the group’s message that the jihadi victory was not complete since they had failed to cement it through establishing a solid state. Needless to say, such nuances have been lost on the western media who presented Joya’s provocations as a woman’s struggle for rights and democracy. The thought that her disruption of parliament was evidence of an anti-democratic attitude on her part did not occur to them. After all, in the simplistic world of western politics, a young woman fighting bearded old men simply cannot be wrong. Afghanistan Noam Chomsky United States Gender Islam US foreign policy US military Middle East Nushin Arbabzadah guardian.co.uk