Due Diligence
October 23, 2021
League of Their Own
October 25, 2021
Chronicle of a Collapse Fortetold
Professor Emerita Robin Varnum’s new memoir portrays Afghanistan as few remember it: at peace
BY BRENDAN GAUTHIER :: PHOTOS COURTESY OF ROBYN VARNUM
Varnum and her twelfth-grade English student, Hashima, in the classroom at Lycée Jahan Malika, in Ghazni.
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban again seized control of Afghanistan. The following day, Afghan citizens, terrified by what that means, clung to the sides of a departing US Air Force jet at Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, as if it were the last helicopter out of Saigon. It’s believed some fell to their deaths.
By the time you read this, US troops, if all goes to plan, will have fully withdrawn from Afghanistan after a two-decade-long humanitarian effort nullified in a matter of days.
“I’m afraid that we’re going to go back to square one,” Robin Varnum, professor emerita and retired chair of AIC’s English department, told Western Mass News. Varnum served in the Peace Corps in the city of Ghazni, ninety-some miles southeast of Kabul, between 1971 and 1973, an experience she recounts in her new book, Afghanistan at a Time of Peace. Her time in Afghanistan overlapped with the first of what would be a series of coups d’état that saw power exchange hands five times before Mohammad Omar and the Taliban first took control in 1994. “In retrospect,” Varnum added, “I see that that was the beginning of the slippery slope, the demise of Afghanistan.”
I spoke to Varnum about her memoir—as well as the United States’ impending troop withdrawal—not two weeks prior to the collapse of Afghanistan’s democratic government. Below are her insights, edited for brevity and clarity.
From left: Varnum, then-husband Mark, Juri, and his colleague, Akbar, outside Kabul’s Hotel Inter-Continental.
Why the Peace Corps?
I joined the Peace Corps in 1971 because I had just graduated from college and, although I wanted, ultimately, to go on to graduate school, I did not have the funds to do so at the time. My job prospects in the United States seemed limited, but the Peace Corps offered me the opportunity to do important and challenging work overseas, to gain work experience, and, of course, to travel. Years later, whenever my advisees at AIC asked me for advice about what they might do after they graduated, I always plugged the Peace Corps.
Why Afghanistan?
I was delighted when the Peace Corps offered me the opportunity to serve in Afghanistan because, as a child, I had lived with my parents in two Islamic countries—Iran and Libya—so I already was familiar with Islamic culture. While in Iran, I had learned to speak the Persian language, and since I knew that Persian was also the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan, I felt I had a good background for working there.
From left: Then-husband Mark, Robin Varnum, and Juri Zagarins.
I am impressed by the depth of detail in this book. How did you recall all this—every name, every date, every Christmas gift?
I worked from two sets of letters. The first consisted of the letters I sent to my mother from Afghanistan nearly fifty years ago, and which she saved. The second consisted of the letters which my husband, Juri Zagarins, sent to his parents. Juri had written to his parents in Latvian, their home language, but he very kindly translated his letters into English for me. Juri’s work for the Peace Corps required him to travel to remote village schools, so he saw more of rural Afghanistan than I did. Working with his letters enabled me to give a fuller picture of Afghanistan in the early 1970s than I could have done if I’d had to work from my letters alone.
Six days after the July 17, 1973, coup, Varnum boarded a bus to Herat: “Mark and I sat near the front of the bus in the section normally reserved for women …. The brakeman … hefted our one small suitcase … to the roof rack. Two sheep, several chickens, and several turbaned men rode up there as well.”
Varnum seated in her then living quarters.
You write near the end of the book, “I had taught English to a few young women and had, I hoped, taught them something about the value of education for women.” Did you enter the Peace Corps with that specific goal in mind, or was it a function of the circumstance—being in a religiously conservative, gender-segregated country?
As I mentioned, I had already lived in two Islamic countries, so I was familiar with gender segregation in Islamic societies. Before sending us abroad, the Peace Corps invited us to a “Pre-Invitational Staging,” or PRIST, at which two PC staff members told us that although most women in Afghanistan were confined to their homes, some girls were attending school. I learned at the PRIST that if I accepted the opportunity to serve in Afghanistan, I would be teaching English in a girls’ school. Although I did not yet understand why Afghan girls needed to learn English, I believed fervently that they needed and deserved an education. I welcomed the chance to work with young women and to promote women’s education.
How did your Peace Corps experience influence your stateside academic career?
I decided after teaching for two years in Afghanistan that I wanted to make teaching my career. I also decided that I wanted to teach English, not English as a foreign language, but English composition and English literature. I welcomed the opportunity to teach at AIC because of its diverse student body and its relatively large number both of foreign students and of students who were the first in their families to attend college. In my classes, I always stressed that good communication skills, including the ability to write, are key both to personal advancement and to the effort to build friendship and cooperation among people.
Fellow Peace Corps participant and Varnum’s now-husband, Juri Zagarins, beside his landlord’s shop at the Ghazni bazaar.
You detail your parents’ divorce throughout and write quite candidly in the afterword about your own divorce from your first husband, Mark. I couldn’t help but compare these and other depictions of Western, traditionally monogamous relationships with those of Islamic law, which, you explain, allows a man to have up to four wives. More than one of your high-school-aged students, if I’m remembering right, were entered into such marriages. (You relate a grim scene of a tenth-grader “crying … wretchedly” in reluctance to marry a man more than twice her age.) Did your time in Afghanistan affect your views on marriage and interpersonal relationships (gendered or otherwise)?
Marriage is a major theme in my book. I contrast Western-style marriages with Afghan marriages, which typically are arranged by family elders rather than by the couple most directly involved. Both kinds of marriages have their pitfalls.
Divorce is much more common in the West than in Afghanistan. Before we ever left the United States, Mark and I were warned that Peace Corps service could be hard on a marriage, and as it happened, our marriage did not long survive our return to the United States.
I also write about Anwar, one of Juri’s colleagues, who married a woman he had never laid eyes upon and who had never stepped outside her father’s house. Anwar swore that arranged marriages are more amicable than Western-style marriages because both the man and the woman resolve in advance to make the marriage work. Now, having recently celebrated the forty-third anniversary of my marriage to Juri, I can agree with Anwar that success in marriage requires determination and work.
Varnum, taken in 2020.
You were in Afghanistan for the July 17, 1973, coup that saw Mohammad Daoud Khan depose his cousin, King Zahir Shah. And you detail in the afterword how that regime change was the first in a chain of geopolitical events contributing to the country’s ongoing instability. Why did you decide to write this book now, nearly half a century later?
A number of things, including knee surgery in 2017, the pandemic, and my retirement from full-time teaching gave me the leisure to write Afghanistan at a Time of Peace. But the efforts of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, and President Biden’s decision to do so by September 11, 2021, compelled me to advocate for Afghanistan.
I had opposed President George W. Bush’s 2001 intervention in Afghanistan, and I said so in an article I published in The Yellow Jacket on October 31, 2001. Now that the United States has maintained a military presence in Afghanistan for twenty years, however, I believe that our country has incurred the obligation both to support Afghanistan’s democratically elected government and to aid in the country’s reconstruction and development. I also believe that American security depends on stability in Afghanistan. If the US turns its back on Afghanistan, the war-torn country is likely again to descend into chaos and civil war and to become a haven for terrorists. I worry about what will happen to the good people, and especially to the women, of the country I long ago learned to love.
Where can people buy the book?
Afghanistan at a Time of Peace is available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions.
