In The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad (Little, Brown, 2003), a Norwegian journalist spent the spring of 2002 living with a family in Kabul, her stated intention to write an account of their life. Unusually affluent, the Khans were for the most part literate, in keeping with their livelihood. Seierstad was first a customer for their wares, but gradually became embedded in the family without any official plan. Here she shares her understanding of the experiences of many family members, young and old, female and male. Through her eyes we see love and marriage in disturbing ways contemplating life as experienced by women in Afghanistan.

Sharifa, family matriarch, is a competent manager whose husband often insists she stay in Pakistan to look after the business interests there. Leila, youngest sister, makes repeated, frightened forays into the world of bureaucracy hoping to secure a job as a teacher, her only viable escape from being married off as a workhorse to another family. Sonya is a young and illiterate second wife whom everyone scorns when her husband is away, and whom he orders to discard the burka.”I don’t want a prehistoric wife. You are the wife of a liberal man, not a fundamentalist,” he says, ironically ordering her to obey his dictate without question.

Women bearing the load of tradition — or the need to cast it off, as the case may be — is the theme of a related good book by expat Ann Jones, Kabul in Winter. A poignant example of a woman hobbled by tradition in the bookselling family was Shakila, once a schoolteacher until the Taliban banished her to home. An early love affair with an already married man had left her disappointed. Practically on the verge of being considered too old to marry at age 30, she is torn between the safety of what she knows and the lure of a home of her own as the bride of a widower with ten children. Unlike most Americans, being a step-mother to ten hardly seems to faze her.  It is the prospect that her husband will turn from a kind suitor into a household tyrant, perhaps forbidding her to work outside the home once this again becomes possible, that Shakila finds most daunting. Once she takes the plunge, she must submit to the humiliating practice of producing a bloody piece of cloth the morning after, as proof of her “virtue.”

How did this barbaric practice devised to serve patriarchy spread in an area as large as from Sicily, where my best friend’s grandmother had to do it, to central Asia? How many cultures still practice this? Goddess help the poor girl with a differently shaped hymen or one torn by a childhood accident — she could pay with her life.

Warmly written, but with warts on display, Seierstad’s account of the Khans has you rooting for them, especially the women. The difficulties they have making their way around the market in the blinkered visibility and stifling heat of the burka are vivid. And at the same time there’s an awareness of how lucky they are, surrounded by reading material, in a country where education is a scarce, precious commodity.

That’s what stories do. When we hear someone’s story, we have the choice to open our hearts, to reach out with compassion, or turn away, shut ourselves down. It’s especially important that we open our hearts and minds to the stories of Afghan women, that we listen to their pain and fear and hope. When we hear someone’s story, when we come to understand the humanity of the “other”, that “otherness” fades away and we remember that we’re all part of the same human story, the same human family. How can we ever bomb someone after bearing witness to their truest, deepest stories?

Here within CODEPINK, book groups are forming around the country to read The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland by Saira Shah. As we read about Shah’s journey to Afghanistan to discover the land she only knew through her father’s stories, she brings those stories to life for us, introducing us to the Afghan people, showing what life is like beneath the veil, how life changed for women under Taliban rule. You can’t read about her adventures without being deeply moved, even changed. I hope President Obama, an avid reader, will remember to read personal accounts from the land he wants to occupy and attack; I like to think that opening himself up to the stories of the Afghan people will make him think twice about bombing civilian populations again.

My friend, the novelist and journalist Masha Hamilton has covered women’s issues in Afghanistan for various press outlets. She was moved to give Afghan women, who are so often silenced, a voice, and has created the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, an online school where women and girls in Afghanistan can explore and hone their voices as writers. She recently began to post some of their writings here and I am so grateful for the window these writings give me into the everyday lives of Afghan women.

Read these stories, then educate yourself further. Host a book club or a movie night to awaken your friends and family to the true Afghan experience. It’s hard for the women of Afghanistan to share their stories; we need to take it upon ourselves to move their stories forward, to amplify their voices. The more we learn about Afghanistan, the more we share that knowledge with our loved ones and our elected officials, the more we can make a difference as we work toward ending war.

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, The Book of Dead Birds: A Novel, which won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, and Self Storage: A Novel, a Target Breakout Book. She writes the national alert for CODEPINK: Women for Peace.