Popular perceptions of Afghanistan have changed radically since the mid-1970s, when I lived there. Before the communist coup d’état of 1978, it was a relatively peaceful and obscure location, and during the following years of civil war Afghanistan remained inaccessible and remote. By the mid-1980s, when I had a draft manuscript of Three Women of Herat, I had a hard time convincing a publisher that sufficient people would be interested in reading about Afghan women. Now, by contrast, everyone has heard of Afghanistan as a site of ongoing conflict – a sinkhole into which vast sums of money have been poured and thousands of lives lost. Situated on the strategic crossroads of Central Asia, over and over again the real needs of this beleaguered country have been disregarded by self-interested neighbours, super-powers and Islamist groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS. Now and then ‘the plight of Afghan women’ resurfaces, but media images tend to stereotype Afghan women as downtrodden victims of abuse and violation – a simplistic message that does not reflect my own experience.

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