On Day Two, post-Helsinki summit, President Trump sought to ease the shock and awe over his jaw-dropping disavowal of his own intelligence services, saying he misspoke: He does believe their assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, Mr. Trump stated Tuesday at a meeting with members of Congress.

But the aftershocks of his performance in Helsinki will surely be felt for some time to come.

Never before, in living memory, had an American president stood on foreign soil and sided with a rival foreign leader and against pillars of American government – in this case, the US intelligence community, Justice Department, and FBI.

Historically, US presidents traveling abroad put domestic politics aside and represent all the American people, not just their supporters. But in Helsinki, Trump seemed caught in the vise of his own apparent belief that evidence of Russian meddling in 2016 created the appearance that he did not legitimately win the election. And so his impulse, a feeling widely shared by his base, has been to push back on all aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation – the Russian meddling, the possibility that Trump associates colluded with Russia, and obstruction of justice.

“I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place,” Trump said Tuesday afternoon before a meeting at the White House with GOP members of Congress. But the admission came with caveats: “Could be other people also. A lot of people out there. There was no collusion at all.”

The White House also put out a press release with this title: “President Donald J. Trump is protecting our elections and standing up to Russia’s malign activities."

Tuesday morning, top members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat, had continued to push back hard on Trump’s disavowal in Helsinki of his intelligence services’ assessment. Trump had made such statements before – questioning the conclusion of Russian meddling – but to do so standing next to Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, at a post-summit press conference, was almost incomprehensible.

“They did interfere in our elections – it’s really, clear,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Tuesday morning, reinforcing his message Monday of outrage and suggesting openness to new sanctions. “Russia is a menacing government that does not share our interests, and it does not share our values.”

Speaker Ryan’s comments were mild compared with those of Democrats and “never-Trumper” Republicans, who used words like “shameful” and “disgraceful” to describe Trump’s statements – or, in the case of former CIA chief John Brennan, “treasonous.” Few Republican members of Congress came to Trump’s defense, an exception being Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson also defended Trump, but former House Speaker Newt Gingrich – usually a Trump stalwart – said that he had committed “the worst mistake of his presidency.”

Support for Russia among Republicans nearly doubles

Where this episode leaves the president politically remains to be seen, particularly as it has shined a light on Trump’s habit of giving Russia the benefit of the doubt. On July 13, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned of Russian cyber-intrusions – likening the situation to the period before 9/11. Trump’s posture has raised speculation that the Russians have compromising information on him, an issue that came up at the Helsinki press conference.

But it’s far from certain that Trump’s performance with Mr. Putin is a turning point, at least domestically. Republican voters’ views of Russia have improved dramatically under Trump, and as with many of the president’s norm-busting actions, his supporters may well go along with the latest twist and turns, in spite of the initial shock expressed by many GOP elites.

“Let’s see how the country responds over the next several weeks,” in the run-up to the November midterms, says Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Is there a movement in polls among Republicans in the Midwest, who might be having doubts about trade and Putin?”

While 40 percent of Republicans say they view Russia as an ally, up from 22 percent four years ago, according to Gallup, they’re still a minority within their own party. And given that Trump’s warmth toward Russia and Putin represents a recent shift from the longstanding Republican view of suspicion and outright hostility toward Russia, and before that the communist Soviet Union, this spike in Republicans’ positive view may not last.

“While polling has shown a broad change in Republicans’ assessment of Russia and Putin, that’s not bone deep,” says Professor Jillson. “Many of these are lifelong Republicans who grew up and spent the bulk of their life disdaining Russia and now see Putin as the great enemy.”

Many Republicans in Congress still hew to that view of the Russians.

"I don’t think we can let them get away with what they’re doing, and I don’t think the president’s remarks have been very effective either,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a brief Monitor interview before Trump reversed himself on Russian meddling. 

Democrats unmollified

Like Speaker Ryan, Senator Hatch also suggested the possibility of new sanctions legislation against Russia, but added, “I’m not sure of a probability.”

Democrats, for their part, were not willing to forgive and forget after Trump’s attempt at damage control.

In a statement, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Trump’s statement “24 hours too late, and in the wrong place.”

“If the president can’t say directly to President Putin that he is wrong and we are right and our intelligence agencies are right, it’s ineffective, and worse, another sign of weakness,” Senator Schumer said.

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed to this report.

Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik/Kremlin/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin (l.) is interviewed by 'Fox News Sunday' host Chris Wallace after his meeting with President Trump in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16.

The Helsinki summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin might as well have been two different events held on separate planets, to judge by the overwhelming media and establishment reactions in the United States and Russia.

The Russians went into the meeting hoping to arrest the death spiral in bilateral relations over the past couple of years. They came away very pleased with the upbeat tone struck between the two presidents and the real, if modest, pledges to restore dialogue on a variety of critical issues, ranging from nuclear arms control to a political settlement for Syria. Tuesday morning’s headline in the government newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta reflected a high level of official satisfaction: “Trump: Putin looked strong in Helsinki.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, the mood expressed in major newspapers seemed one of near despair over Mr. Trump’s perceived kowtowing to Mr. Putin, and refusal Monday to support the US intelligence community’s findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. “Why Won’t Donald Trump Speak for America?” asked The New York Times in an angry editorial that accused the US president of being “singularly naive, or deliberately ignorant” in failing to call Russia to account for its alleged wrongdoing. (On Tuesday, back in Washington, Trump claimed he misspoke, and that he accepts the conclusion that interference took place.)

Remarkably, there is little indication that most leading Russian commentators take seriously the storm of anti-Trump outrage in the US. Nor are they concerned that it might drown out any actual progress made during the two-hour Trump-Putin tête-à-tête in Helsinki. Most Russians greet the allegation that Putin controls Trump with derision. And while they wouldn’t be surprised if the Kremlin did attempt to meddle in the 2016 election, they don’t believe that it was Russian efforts that put Trump in the White House.

But a few Russian experts, people with extensive contacts in the US, say they are worried. They say their American friends have never before expressed such unalloyed fury at Russia and blanket rejection of anything Putin says. The danger, they fear, is that anything Putin and Trump cook up together will be tainted and unacceptable to many Americans.

“If we were living through normal times, we would be justified in seeing Helsinki as a moderately successful summit,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the foreign policy journal Russia in Global Affairs. “But these are anything but normal times. These days, issues of strategic policy are subordinated to domestic affairs, and any achievements can be derailed by the kind of angry, hostile reactions we are seeing” in the US.

“Trump certainly made a mistake by failing to seriously address the meddling issue that Americans are so preoccupied with. He even seemed to be taking sides with Putin,” Mr. Lukyanov says. “Many people in Moscow appear pleased at how good Putin looked in Helsinki, and may not be aware of the risk that it may have been completely counterproductive” to Russian long-term hopes of rebooting the relationship.

Pressing topics amid the politics

While no formal agreements were made or documents signed in Helsinki, the two leaders committed to re-establishing channels of communication that have been largely shut down amid the acrimony of recent months. They also agreed to look into extending the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty. Otherwise, if the treaty expires on schedule in just three years, it will leave the two superpowers with no negotiated framework of strategic arms control for the first time in over four decades.

Trump seemed to endorse a deal for a Syria endgame, initiated last week between Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which would see Bashar al-Assad remain in power and Russia exercise its influence to limit Iranian military deployments near Israel’s border with Syria.

“One thing we think was very significant is that Putin, for the first time, publicly spoke about Israeli security as a goal of Russian policy,” says Lukyanov. “Americans should join this deal, and it would be a shame if it got ruined by the toxic political atmosphere surrounding Trump.”

Masha Lipman, editor of Counterpoint, a political journal published by George Washington University, says she worries that Trump may not be the only one in the US making bad decisions amid the present political turmoil.

“I know many Americans are seized with a desire to punish Putin and get Trump,” says Ms. Lipman, who had a regular column about Russian affairs in The Washington Post for 10 years.

“This may be in tune with their emotions, but it is not good politics. Trump’s critics are looking at the summit as just another occasion to go after him, to roast him over the allegations of Russian meddling, but they should stop at attacking the process itself. Look, nothing bad happened at the summit,” she says.

“Americans are angry at Trump for something he cannot possibly deliver. He isn’t able to make Putin confess about election meddling. Putin will just deny it, as he has many times before. Are we saying that it’s impossible to move beyond that, to discuss things that urgently need to be talked about between the US and Russia?”

'Russia needs to get smarter'

Putin’s apparent complacency about his summit success, and the general feeling in Moscow that Trump must have prevailed over his domestic opponents, may be due to a lack of understanding in the Kremlin of how the US system works, says Andrei Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry.

“Putin is the ultimate leader in Russia. His word is final,” he says. “He tends to project that on other leaders he meets, which is why he does very well with authoritarian leaders, who have similar weight within their own political systems. It is difficult for him to see that the US system doesn’t work this way,” and that anything Trump decides might get canceled out amid public outcry and congressional push-back.

Russia policy risks becoming a long-term casualty of Trump’s domestic battles, he says.

“Russia needs to get smarter, and diversify its outreach to various segments of the American establishment. We should be talking to the Democrats, Congress, think tanks, and others, explaining ourselves and forming relationships. It’s just not enough to meet the top guy and decide things with him. We urgently need to realize this,” he says.

Twelve years ago, Terry Edge, in his mid 20s and descended from Wisconsin dairy farmers, turned his back on the family business and took a job in construction. It didn’t last long. Six months later he bought 50 cows, moved them into his grandfather’s old barn, and threw himself into the subtleties of cow breeding, determined not just to follow the old dairying life but to improve on it, raising animals that were healthier and better suited to grazing on the lush green hillsides of southwest Wisconsin.

“I went that route thinking it would help me make ends meet,” he says. “But it didn’t work out that way.”

Now Mr. Edge has come to the end of the line. He sold most of his cows at an auction last month, undone by a stretch of low milk prices that has lasted 3-1/2 years and imperiled dairy farmers across the country.

Some like Edge are being forced out of the dairy business. For others, the hard times are focusing new attention on strategies that go beyond just milking cows in big barns, such as making cheeses or switching to goats or sheep. ​And some farmers, pointing to a quota system of production in Canada that keeps milk prices more stable there​, say new policies might be the answer​.

“This is probably the biggest challenge dairy farmers have faced in their lifetime,” says Darin Von Ruden, a dairy farmer and president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union.

Overproduction worldwide has yielded a glut of milk, driving prices below what farmers say it costs them to produce it, for months at a time. Farmers are used to fluctuations in milk prices, but previous downturns have usually lasted only a year or 18 months.

The US Department of Agriculture predicts that milk prices will rise this year and into next. But no one expects a big increase. The Trump administration’s trade disputes and the prospect of trade wars involving agricultural products have only deepened the uncertainty.

‘Running as fast as we can’

As this downturn reaches the middle of the fourth year, many farmers are struggling just to hang on, borrowing against land and equipment to pay their bills, betting the farm that prices will turn.

“Once you’ve invested a million dollars in a milking parlor, you’re going to milk cows,” says Sarah Lloyd, a farmer in Wisconsin Dells. The result, she says, is that “my husband and I are on the treadmill and we’re running as fast as we can. That’s happening to a lot of families.”

Not all farmers are struggling. Some have managed to pay down debts. And, as in other types of farming, large operations often enjoy economies of scale. Big farms can run milking parlors around the clock and negotiate discounts for things like feed and breeding services.

Richard Mertens

Dairy farmer Terry Edge in New Diggings, Wis., stands with some of his cows. Edge was a fifth generation Wisconsin dairy farmer who experimented with different breeds of cows that he thought would do better on the hilly pastures of southwestern Wisconsin. But low milk prices have forced him and others out of the business. He sold his cows at an auction in late June, while keeping some as he shifts his focus to raising beef cattle.

Wisconsin alone lost about 5 percent of its dairy farms between 2016 and 2017. Just 15 miles west of Edge’s farm, William and Kelle Calvert had gone into debt to buy a 450-acre farm, and gave up dairying because they were afraid of losing everything. They sold their cows to save the farm. Now they cash-crop corn, soybeans, and hay and raise a few animals for other people.

“We had a good sale,” says Mr. Calvert, who now works at an agricultural feed company. “There were tears shed, but we felt it was a good day.”

Finding new pathways

The milk crisis has also inspired farmers to think harder about new strategies with their dairy herds, including alternatives to conventional dairying. Some are championing rotational grazing, a method that involves sending cows out to pastures rather than confining them in big barns, as many dairy farms do. Grazing requires a lower investment in buildings, machinery and feed, and dairy experts say it offers a small economic advantage over conventional dairying.

Organic milk production has for decades offered a profitable alternative for smaller farms, and although organic milk prices have fallen recently, too, organic producers haven’t suffered as much as conventional producers.

Other farmers are trying to diversify, raising beef cattle or producing milk for a niche market. Some have switched to milking goats or sheep; the number of goat and sheep farms in Wisconsin almost doubled between 2015 and 2017. Richard Cates, who directs the Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers, says he “can’t imagine” starting out as a conventional dairy farmer these days. “You have to be innovative and entrepreneurial,” he says. “You have to do what other people are not doing.”

The Marcoot Jersey Creamery, in Greenville, Ill., is one example. It grew out of a common predicament: an older farmer thinking of selling his cows. Instead, he and two daughters started a cheese-making operation on the farm in 2010. Today Marcoot has 14 employees and about 100 cows. It makes 20 varieties of cheese, which it sells at an on-farm store and ships to scores of restaurants and grocery stores in the Midwest.

“It made the most economic sense to turn the milk into cheese,” says Laura Wall, who gives tours on the farm.

Meanwhile, some young people are still finding a way – carefully – into dairy farming. John Richmond, who is 24, is a grazer, feeding his cows grass and hay that he grows himself. He has avoided massive debt by renting rather than buying land and equipment. He’s still not sure if he’ll break even.

Mr. Richmond is a realist: If he can’t make a living as a dairy farmer, he’ll switch to some other kind of farming. “Really,” he says, “someone could do anything with this land.”

A model in Canada?

As farmers struggle, agricultural agencies in dairy states are trying to help, offering financial advice, credit mediation services, and access to counseling. But across the countryside, farmers are feeling angry and bewildered.

“Our pride and perseverance has allowed us to survive the hardships of the past,” wrote Thomas Litkea, a 67 year-old farmer in New Lisbon, Wis., in a recent letter to Dairy Star magazine. “However, we need actions and answers now more than ever.”

A growing number of Midwestern dairy farmers are showing an interest in policies that would raise milk prices by controlling production. They’ve looked to Canada, which has a supply management system that imposes quotas on farmers (and barriers on imports from countries like the United States).

“It has kept prices stable,” says Alan Ker, director of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Food and Agricultural policy at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ont. “It takes out a lot of risk for farmers.”

This spring, hundreds of farmers converged on meetings in Michigan and Wisconsin to hear about the Canadian system directly from Ontario dairy farmers. “As farmers especially, we need to take a look at why we keep producing more and more when there’s no market for it,” says Mr. Von Ruden, who helped organize the meetings.

On his farm in New Diggings, Terry Edge decided he could no longer make it work. On a recent morning, there’s activity everywhere. Hunting dogs strain at their leashes, turkeys waddle through the long grass, and calves bawl in small sheds. The yard is muddy from an early downpour.

Looking to his next chapter, this fifth-generation dairy farmer is now planning to raise beef. “My hope is within two years to have maybe 100, 120 beef cattle,” Edge says. He’ll have more time for work off the farm. He’ll also have more time at home with his wife (a nurse) and three children, who were often asleep by the time he got home from milking his cows.

But the farming won’t be the same. He’ll miss the close work with his cows, the familiarity with them that for many farmers is both the pleasure and burden of dairy farming.

He walks to the edge of a large pen, not far from the barn, where a small, brindled cow strains against the wooden fence. He reaches down and scratches the coarse hair between its ears.

“Any dairy farmer will tell you, it’s more the interaction with the animals than anything else,” he says. “That’s what I’ll miss the most.”

The war came to the zoo here on a Friday, just after the afternoon prayer.

It was 2014 and Aliyu Yusuf, the head of the zookeepers, was doing his rounds. He looped past the crocodile enclosure, where a dozen of the scaly green reptiles napped on the concrete beside their pool, mouths gaping. Nearby, the zoo’s two skinny elephants, Jummai and Izge, dangled their trunks over a muddy vat of water. He passed by them and moved toward the primate enclosure, where a teenage chimp swung from the bars of his cage like they were, well, monkey bars.

That’s when the first explosion hit, a clap of sound so powerful it rattled the ground beneath him. When Mr. Yusuf looked up, he could see a cloud of smoke rising from the direction of the post office just beyond the zoo’s gates. People were screaming. Around him, the animals began to panic.

His ostriches ran frantic zig-zags across the length of their pens. An eland antelope charged back and forth in his enclosure, horns bared. And Yusuf ran, not stopping until he reached the zoo’s administrative building nearby.

“You don’t think when you become a zookeeper that someday you’ll become afraid to do your job,” he says. “But that day, I became afraid.” 

Nearly a decade ago, a violent insurgency began to put this city in Nigeria’s arid northeast, known locally as “the home of peace,” on the global map for a very different reason. Splashed across the world’s front pages, Maiduguri suddenly became “the birthplace of Boko Haram,” a place of random terror and brutal suicide bombings.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Binta Lawan, who lives in Bakassi, a camp for displaced persons on the edge of Maiduguri, said the city's zoo reminded her of home. In the four years she has lived at the camp, she says her visit to the zoo was the first time she has come into the city for anything other than selling firewood to supplement her family's food rations.

But it was never only that.

Even in the war’s darkest days, as hundreds of thousands of people poured into the city to escape Boko Haram’s campaign of terror in the countryside and attacks showered the city, normal life also carried on, as mundane and ordinary as ever.

Maidugurians still gathered for meals of goat meat and fragrant red jollof rice. Students at the local university still stayed up late cramming for exams in biology, accounting, and engineering. The city prayed, it haggled, it gossiped.

“It speaks to the resilience and vitality of the place that people have determined that life will go on,” says Geoffrey Ijumba, chief of the Borno field office for UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency. “They are saying, Boko Haram won’t shut down this city, they can’t. We will keep going.”

And people went to the zoo. 

They went to the zoo a lot, in fact.

“When the insurgency was at its peak, this was one of the safest places in the city, because it was a kind of no man’s land where you wouldn’t be worried that you would be a target,” says Peter Ayuba, the director of forestry and wildlife for Borno state, where Maiduguri is located. “It got to the point where we could hardly manage the influx.”

Public-private oasis 

All day long, people would stream into the zoo, and they often stayed for hours, looping around the enclosures or slumped on park benches. Every evening at closing time, many visitors had to be coaxed to leave, says Mr. Ayuba. “No one wanted to go home.” 

But if people’s reasons for going to the zoo shifted over the course of the war, it had long been one of the city’s most iconic cultural institutions. For decades, during holidays and festivals, its green walkways had filled with families in shimmery boubou robes and dramatic wax-print dresses, posing for photo after photo against the verdant backdrop.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Schoolchildren wander the grounds of the Maiduguri Zoo, one of the city's most popular cultural attractions.

“There is nobody who’s somebody in this city who doesn’t come to the zoo, especially during festivities,” says Tijjani Ahmed, head of veterinary and conservation education at the zoo.

It’s also the place where an untold number of the city’s romances have begun. 

“It’s a place away from prying eyes, like our parents for instance,” says Ali, 20, as he and his girlfriend Ruqayya, 17, sat watching the zoo’s two elephants chow down on acacia leaves on a recent afternoon. (They asked that their last names not be used in this story, since the whole point of going to the zoo was to avoid drawing attention to their relationship.)

In the zoo’s small tin photo studio, meanwhile, Elizabeth Siktuwe and her boyfriend, Alex Ibrahim, had just changed out of the matching red dashiki tunics they had donned for a zoo photo shoot. 

“I’m studying to be a microbiologist, but this is maybe the only place I can actually go safely and be in nature,” she says, her eyes flicking over the photos.

Ayuba, too, discovered the zoo as a student. When the young ecologist began coming here, “It was like seeing my study books in three dimensions,” he says. “It sparked my curiosity. I began to ask questions.”

And he quickly became committed to the zoo’s mission. “It’s so our kids and those still unborn know the natural heritage of the place where they come from,” he says.

As Boko Haram has devastated communities across northern Nigeria in recent years, it has also blighted the country’s landscapes. The Sambisa Forest, for instance, is now the insurgents’ hideout, where they keep camp and hold hostages like the Chibok girls, who were kidnapped from their boarding school in a nearby town in 2014.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Women dance at the Maiduguri Zoo on a morning in May 2018. The women were part of a group of displaced persons brought to the zoo for the day by a local philanthropist.

And so for many in Maiduguri, the zoo is the last remaining patch of open space they have.

“The place I come from looks a lot like this,” says Binta Lawan as she wanders between enclosures one morning recently. Ms. Lawan has come to the zoo with a group of about 100 others, all of them residents of a bleak displaced persons camp on the city’s outskirts called Bakassi. In the four years they had lived in the camp, several say, this is the first time they’ve gone into the city for anything other than collecting firewood or buying food. In the camp, Lawan explains, the landscape was flat and monotonous, row upon row of tents staked in the gray dust. 

“Here there are trees, there is shade,” she says. “It revives me just being here.”

Nearby, meanwhile, the organizers of the trip – representatives of a local businessman preparing to run for office in next year’s elections – have rigged a pair of speakers to a generator. A campaign song blasts out:

All the people are yearning for him to run. 

He is cool headed.

Just like cold water. 

He is the man for us.

'We did it for the love'

Still, Mr. Ahmed is the first to admit, the zoo has challenges far beyond the insurgency. For one thing, they’re broke. Each day, zookeepers trawl the city looking for acacia branches they can prune to feed the elephants, and some months they have to beg rotting meat off local butchers to feed the carnivores. (The park’s 50 naira admission fee – US $0.15 – can’t cover the costs). The crocodiles, meanwhile, swim through thick knots of garbage – ice cream wrappers, pineapple juice bottles, empty water sachets – that have gathered in their pools.

On a recent morning, as Ahmed circled the zoo with a visitor, shouts went up from the elephant enclosure. When he glanced over, Izge had her trunk curled around the waist of a small child, and was lifting him off the ground.

Then, just as suddenly, she dropped him, and the boy, a street child wandering the zoo to collect plastic bottles for recycling, scrambled out of the flimsy enclosure to safety.

The zookeepers seemed unperturbed. “Kids are always breaking the rules and jumping into the cages,” one muttered quietly.

The crowd around the child quickly broke up and moved on. A boy clutching his mother’s hand motioned toward a woman walking past with a tray of dates and peanuts balanced on her head. An ice cream vendor’s cart clanged as it made its way over the rutted paths.

For Ahmed, who has nursed the zoo’s lion cubs in his own living room and let baby chimps roam his office until they were ready for their adult cages, seeing the zoo alive like this reminds him why he keeps showing up to work each day.

“There have been times, in the early days of insurgency, when even coming to feed our animals was a risk,” he says. “But we did it for the love of this place.”

Hasht E Subh

This image of four girls embracing each other adorns the cover of "You Are Not Alone," a guide for Afghan women who are facing gender-based violence. It's one of several titles published by Free Women Writers, an organization that uses literature to promote gender equity in Afghanistan.

Rabia Balkhi was one of the first female Persian poets. She was killed by her brother, a king, hundreds of years ago for falling in love with a slave and daring to write poetry in a male-dominated culture. Much like her, women of modern-day Afghanistan, including journalists, still face violence because of their writing, or are murdered because of love affairs.

In late 2016, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) investigated 5,575 cases of violent crimes against women, noting that most cases go unreported due to traditional practices, stigmatization, and fear of consequences for victims. A 2009 United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) report states that women participating in public life face threats, harassment, and attack. In extreme cases, some have been killed for holding jobs that are seen to disrespect traditional practices or are considered “un-Islamic.” Now, about 11 centuries after Ms. Balkhi’s murder, her nation’s daughters have launched a nonprofit organization to stand up for their rights through writing. It’s called Free Women Writers.

Founded in 2013 by Afghan activists Noorjahan Akbar and Batul Moradi alongside a collective of writers, students, and activists, the nonprofit hopes to improve women’s lives by simply telling their stories, in their own words. Their first book, “Daughters of Rabia,” an anthology of Afghan women’s writings inspired by Balkhi’s story, was published the same year.

One of the collective’s members is Roya Saberzada, a painter and writer who lives in Mazar-e-Sharif. Ms. Saberzada is unafraid of laughter, but her smile suddenly disappears when speaking about the status of women in Afghanistan. “The situation is bad,” she says. “Violence increases every year.” Yet she remains optimistic, because awareness is growing. “The more women are aware of their rights, the less violence they will face,” she says, adding that there’s still much work to be done.

Ms. Akbar, who was featured in Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women of the World in 2012 for her advocacy work, says she wanted to use this book to raise awareness of gender inequality among Afghan women – who rarely have access to feminist literature – but also among men who wish to join their fight.

“In the streets of Kabul, many vendor children were selling extremist books written and published in Pakistan for 30 Afghanis (40 cents). Most of these books were about women and they spread misogyny under religious pretenses. We wanted to provide an alternative,” she says. Using Akbar’s personal savings, the organization managed to print 1,500 copies.

“All the copies were distributed within a month. People from six provinces came to Kabul and took the books back to their provinces and schools,” she recalls. In order to make the contents of the book accessible to everyone, they then decided to publish it on social media and on a website. “We drew a lot of attention and many other women began to send their writings,” Akbar says. They have now published poems, memoirs, and articles written by more than 140 women, and some men, hundreds of which have been translated into English thanks to the work of volunteers based in Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Washington, D.C.

Over the past couple of decades, international nongovermental organizations and institutions have tried to foster women’s rights in the country with initiatives often funded by the Afghan government, but the results of these efforts generally remain imperceptible. For Afghan women to find empowerment, Akbar says the change must come from them.

“It was very important for me to work independently and not to receive any financial assistance from governments or foreign embassies because I have always wanted us, the women of Afghanistan, to value our own priorities,” she says, adding that unless Afghan women start seeing themselves as independent humans with human rights, a shift in mentality and gender equality will be unlikely.

In September 2017, the collective published its second book, “You Are Not Alone,” a short guide for women facing gender-based violence that provides practical tips for seeking legal aid, forming networks of support, and protecting mental health. It is available in Persian, Pashtu, and English. Profits from its sales allow the nonprofit to finance higher education scholarships for young women in Afghanistan, and to continue producing literature educating women about their rights.

This story was reported by Hasht E Subh, a news outlet in Afghanistan. The Monitor is publishing it as part of an international effort by more than 50 news organizations worldwide to promote solutions journalism. To read other stories in this joint project, please click here.

Reuters

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee in February.

Of all the reactions to President Trump’s statement on Monday casting doubt on Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election, perhaps the wisest came from his own director of national intelligence, Dan Coats. Maybe it was his temperate response that helped cause the president to later retract his statement and is now worthy of some analysis.

Especially worth noting is what Mr. Coats did not do.

He did not repeat any falsehood so as to give it validity or momentum. In the American intelligence community – despite past mistakes that have tarnished its trustworthiness – truth is still a cherished commodity, one that helps prevent making a reality of its opposite.

Nor did Coats, a former diplomat and senator, attach any lie to the president, perhaps counting on Mr. Trump’s ability and willingness to eventually base his policy toward Russia on the facts. Those closest to the president may know something the rest of us don’t.

And he did not raise public alarm about a US president appearing to side with a denial of Russian meddling by President Vladimir Putin. Perhaps the intelligence chief knows that the declaration of truth is the best antidote to fear and ignorance.

What Coats did do after Monday’s press conference by the two presidents was to kindly assert what he knew, relying on the light of honesty and transparency:

“The role of the Intelligence Community is to provide the best information and fact-based assessments possible for the President and policymakers. We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security.”

The president has lately been given similar assessments from others in Washington.

Last week, another of his professional appointees, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, announced that 12 Russian security agents had been indicted on federal charges of hacking into computers in the United States and stealing information for some unspecified interest of Russia’s. The truth of the charges may never be tested in a courtroom as it is unlikely Mr. Putin will hand over the agents for trial. But the charges come after an indictment in February of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for an illegal “information warfare” plot to disrupt the 2016 election. And in early July, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee backed the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian political interference. Also, the president’s national security adviser, John Bolton, has referred to Russian cyberattacks as “acts of war.”

At the least, the president has been encircled by strong contours of information about Russia’s role in the election. The indictments and other evidence have forced him to question his suppositions and claims – and even to now assert the need to prevent foreign meddling in American democracy.

For any person or country in the dark, truth can be liberating if presented in gentle and persuasive ways by those seeking to show the power of truth. Falsehoods lose their punch when they are revealed to have no punch at all.