I was given a list with the names of the “martyrs”⁵ and their “addresses” to start my work on the MoI project. More precisely, it was a list of the districts in Kabul where their homes were located and descriptions to help identify each house (for example: next to the bakery with a green door; facing the cemetery and next to the kite shop; find shopkeeper Abdullah at the corner general store and he will escort you to the front door). Everyone in each neighborhood knew where the widows and orphans of this suicide attack lived; in general, in any district in Kabul, most everyone knows the houses where widows and orphans reside.

I walked into the courtyard and was met by Rehana’s father-in-law, Kareem’s father. I introduced myself by telling him that I was there to speak to the widow of Kareem, to see how she was and to learn about her life since she lost her husband. He led me inside the house, where first I met his wife. I sat down on the floor cushions with her and a young child of about five years old, Kareem’s nephew, Rasheed. As I sat talking with the mother, the father went to summon Rehana. Meanwhile, Rasheed got up and returned seconds later with a framed copy of Kareem’s official police photo. Kareem’s mother held the picture to her chest and began wailing. Rasheed started crying. Rehana, a shy girl of nineteen years, entered the room. She had married Kareem when she was seventeen, and she was pregnant with their first child when he was killed. The baby was asleep in the next room.

As Rehana sat down with me and her mother-in-law, her father-in-law asked if he could sit with us.⁶ Then, for more than three hours they told me, through their tears, about the kind of person Kareem was—the dreams he had, the jokes he told. As they shared the life of this young man with me, they repeatedly said it was the will of Allah that he was no longer in this world. Although they knew this was the work of Allah and accepted it, they could not reconcile how to make a life without seeing him every day. They told me that they had not gotten through one single day since the attack without sitting and crying together, as they were then, with me.

Eventually, I asked Rehana how she could be helped. She asked what I meant. I told her that I had been asked to see what kind of help the widows of the police cadets wanted, and needed. She asked me to keep her and her child and family in my duas (prayers).

“What else?” I asked.

When I had first arrived at the house, I had made it very clear that I did not work for the state but had come to help her figure out how the state could assist her.⁷ The family told me that they were utterly exhausted from trying to get any of the compensation promised them during the past eighteen months. They were surprised that the state was now interested in helping Rehana.

“What help do they want to give me?” she asked.

“Work . . . they want to give you work, and they ask what job you want to do.”

The otherwise shy Rehana looked at me and vehemently repeated: “A job? That is how they want to help me? By getting me a job? I don’t want a job. I want to care for my son, and be with my family. I don’t want a job. This pain, struggle to get through a day, this is enough work. I cannot do more work than this.”

I had realized before the words left my mouth how absurd it was to convey the offer of a job to her. I was ashamed as I thought of the times during my fieldwork of the previous two years—standing in line with widows at distribution sites throughout the city of Kabul as they received their monthly rations, or sitting on the streets of Kabul with widows who were seeking alms from passing cars—when I had myself wondered why these women did not prefer to work, relying instead on the obligations of care from fellow Muslims, strangers and family alike. Would getting a job not be a more dignified way to navigate life as a widow in Kabul? It was only as I sat with Rehana and her in-laws that I realized how inappropriate it was for me to think that waged work would somehow “rescue” widows from this “dependence,” which is inherent in their haqq (right, entitlement) to be cared for by others.

During the course of that month, I eventually met with twenty-seven of the thirty-one families on my list. As I went from house to house, the women who were widowed in this attack (and their families) all expressed their dismay that the only offer of assistance from the state was a job. After visiting all but four families, I went back to the MoI and tried to convince the administrators to consider another form of assistance. They made it clear to me that they could not change the terms of the assistance. They explained that the reason it took so long (eighteen months after the bomb blast) to get any kind of help in the first place was that they were waiting on a funding line for a program that could help the women who were widowed in the attack. The German NGO funding the initiative through the MoI was beginning a gender empowerment program, and the MoI administrators saw this as an opportunity to include the widows in that initiative by prioritizing them—empowering these women by getting them jobs.

In the context of this international occupation, it is the agenda of donors that ultimately governs the thinking behind the practices of the Afghan state (per very specific criteria that will either enable or disable funding mechanisms). In fact, it was not at all unusual for this program aiming to support the widows to be primarily a gender empowerment program. A substantial amount of the billions of dollars of development aid that has poured into Afghanistan has come in the form of programs targeting gender—which in itself would not preclude the inclusion of males, but in a post-Taliban Kabul, these programs were specified as for women only. Lest we forget: the war in Afghanistan was explained by the United States–led coalition as a “necessary” or “just” war that would save the women of Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban. In essence, the act of war was framed as an act of care for the women of Afghanistan.

The MoI administrators, and my student Jabar as well, were exasperated that the widows did not want to work. All my meetings with them began with, “We Afghans have become lazy.” The MoI administrators asked: “Why do they not want to work? Do they want to be dependent on charity their whole lives?” Jabar put it this way: “Who do they think they are? They want to be cared for and dependent on others? This is the problem of Afghanistan, everyone just wants charity.” Jabar’s questions were rhetorical; nevertheless, I tried to defend the position of the widows and their inherent right within Islam to receive aid and that it should not be understood as charity. His reply was clear: “It is not about their haqq, it is about the programs that the MoI and the German government are creating for them, and they need to work. They need to work to build this country, and it is their duty not to be dependent and lazy. There is no other option for them.” When I also asked about the request the widows made to have jobs provided for their sons or for other male family members, the reply was unequivocal: “No. This is part of a gender program, and it is only for the widows themselves, for the widows themselves to work, not their sons or whomever they want. Besides, their sons should be working anyway.”

Jabar’s response was particularly unexpected, as his own mother was a widow. He would not be swayed from his position, even when I asked him, “When your father left this world, if you had been only three or four (and therefore too young to work), would you have wanted your mother to work?” His reply was simple: “Shukr alhamdilallah [Thanks be to God], when my father left this world I was not four, I was eight years old, and I managed everything so that my mother never had to work [outside of the house] a day in her life.” Both Jabar and the MoI administrators summoned the rather historically inaccurate cliché—often used by Afghans—of Afghanistan as independent and unconquerable. “We are Afghans, we are not beggars. It is not the Afghan way to be dependent on others.”

As part of the fieldwork that I undertook before I met the widows of this particular suicide attack, I sat with women on the streets of Kabul as they asked passing cars for help. The women would simply say “zan e bewah” (widow, in Dari). Most of the cars’ occupants would give some money as soon as those words, “zan e bewah,” were uttered. I often found myself chasing after cars to ask those who gave money why they had done so. Most of the answers these commuters gave went something like this: “We are Afghans, we know what it means to lose in war, sometimes smaller things like property, our ability to work in our own country, the ground beneath our feet. But to be a widow means you lost more than the ground, more than a job and the widows on this street remind me of that every day.” I also came to learn that a few of the women I sat with in the streets were not even widows, yet they presented themselves as such. Thus, I came to understand that widowhood in Kabul is a form of social currency. By uttering “zan e bewah,” these women were more likely to get help. This is the reality after thirty-five years of serial war. Every Afghan family I met had widows in their homes. In some families, every single female, from the age of sixteen to sixty-seven, was widowed, some serially—meaning they had remarried, only to be widowed again. Afghans across the political spectrum, across class, take the obligation for the care of widows very much to heart.

One of my tasks as an anthropologist in the space of contemporary Kabul is to try to make some sense of this. What is the work that work does in the lives of widows? How do the development agendas of neoliberalism aim to restructure patterns of thought and practice in ways that are inconsistent with other systems of moral economy, such as the ethic of caring for widows and orphans that is rooted in Islam? How is it that these same neoliberal agendas, inconsistent in some ways, still resonate in other ways with the deep resentment Afghans have over being made perpetually dependent upon the agendas of others? Finally—the elephant in the room—since my hope is that we are all working toward the elimination of discrimination of women everywhere, why do I have a problem (which Rehana and other widows have taught me I have) with the fact that the only form of formal care widows are receiving from the Afghan state (as mandated by international donors) is that they are being asked to choose jobs? Where is women’s agency, the empowerment of women, if women do not think they necessarily need a job to have agency? What potential harm ensues when Afghans, and widows in particular, are being sold the neoliberal dream—the doctrine of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” being self-sufficient and responsible for your own success or failure—in a space and place currently and historically beset by wars that have come from elsewhere?

Second, there is a body of scholarly literature which holds that, in times of war and conflict, as state institutions disintegrate, people fall back on kinship as the primary structure for support and care. Yet, this is not what I am arguing here, and neither do I want to imply that in prewar Afghanistan zakat and dependence on kinship and community networks were stable and ideal forms of care and support. There is robust anthropological research, in addition to my own, which demonstrates that kinship can be as much about betrayal as it is about loyalty. That is, in my investigations into the everyday ways that serial wars, occupations, and humanitarianism have complicated obligations of care, I attend closely to the fact that kinship itself is complicated and is not always performed in ways that are nurturing and supportive.

To avoid these two possible misreadings, I situate my work with anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli’s research among aboriginal populations in Australia. Povinelli compels us to examine alternative forms of social belonging, vulnerability, and endurance alongside neoliberal forms of governance:

People may be bracketed by liberal procedures for proceeding in the face of alternative social projects and worlds, but these brackets do not vaporize them. Those within these brackets hear the same call for patience as those without. They are just differently positioned to this call. Large groups of people may be, as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it in another context, consigned to the “imaginary waiting room of history.” But they are living within these waiting rooms, whether one wishes they would or not. . . . From the perspective of dominant worlds, the condition in which they endure has the temporal structure of limbo—an edge of life located somewhere between given and new social positions and roles, and between the conditions of the past and present and the promise of the future.¹¹

I want to reiterate here what Povinelli refers to as “the promise of the future”—a promise, yet of an unattainable future embedded in a neoliberal dream. Povinelli and other critical scholars have demonstrated the problems with neoliberalism and capitalist modes of normativity, which make one believe that one is working toward a realizable dream. Even in the United States today, this neoliberal dream of a work ethic, self-sufficiency, a yet-to-be future “success” is a dubious one. And what about the particular problematic posed by this neoliberal ethic, of being responsible for yourself, getting a job to be self-sufficient, when at no time in the past thirty-five years, much less in the history of contemporary Afghanistan, have Afghans been in charge of their own destinies? Frankly, Afghans have been rendered expendable, killable. They are and have been subject to the geopolitical machinations of others. Thus, how appropriate is it, given this reality for a people who have been historically and contemporarily deceived, to burden them with a version of the clichéd, generic hope that is characteristic of neoliberalism?

Still, to say that Afghans have always been subject to the games of others does not mean Afghans are not also doing something else. What might it look like to consider the sentiments of the MoI administrators and of Jabar and of many other Afghans I came to know, their desire for Afghans to be independent because, after all, so they argue, they are Afghan? How do we shift to an exploration of the quiet, unseen projects of endurance and ethical self-making in the face of the often thoroughly exhausting circumstances of a place like Kabul? The emphasis I choose here is on the ordinary, despite the extraordinary nature of what transpires in Kabul: on how lives are shaped even in the midst of the extraordinary; on “what a life adds up to” (to cite anthropologist Kathleen Stewart¹²); on what a life becomes and on the potential it carries within itself, not because of the most powerful international actors and schemes, but despite them.

Anila Daulatzai holds graduate degrees from UCLA in public health and Islamic studies, and received her PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2013. This is an edited version of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program lecture she delivered in October 2014 on her ethnographic research with widows and their families in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is currently writing a book based on that fieldwork.