The Qur'an Pass

Don't get out your atlas; it exists on no map. It speaks to to an existential divide that separates Westernized (more on that in a moment) secular society and the traditional Islamic world. Not all who have navigated that pass--Sarah Chayes and Greg Mortenson come immediately to mind, and others I have written about such as Jason Elliot and Rory Stewart--see the landscape on the other side in the same way. Though both Chayes and Mortenson have advised the U.S. military on how to deal with traditional society in Afghanistan, Mortenson finds President Obama's plan unnecessary. He would rely entirely on local shuras or councils of village headmen from a region. Chayes has long championed a vigorous military role, integrated with close contact with those same headmen and shuras.

It comes as no surprise that they arrive at their conclusions from very different perspectives. Mortenson owes his life to a headman in Baltistan in Pakistani Kashmir, and has built schools there and across northern Pakistan and northeastern Afghanistan, especially for girls, ever since. No cooperation from headmen, no schools. Chayes has reported as a journalist, worked for an NGO, founded and run a cooperative, all predominantly in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, and--crucially--advised the military herself, which has led her now to Kabul. She has a complex understanding of a wide range of issues from the price of essential oils-grade rose petals relative to opium poppies, to how to bully warlords, even how to stop a Taliban raid with minimal personnel and limited firepower, the less likely to kill civilians. At a speech this year in Nebraska, which I just watched on youtube, she tells a story of an American battalion commander, a friend of hers and the father of a young family, who prayed with the family of children killed in a mortar attack he ordered when his forces requested it. After praying with him, the families of the dead children forgave him.

I find the most important element of that story not the battalion commander's demonstration to the villagers whose house his mortar rounds hit of the exact circumstances of his troops that night, or even the fact that when he realized he'd killed children he looked at the photos of his own kids on his desk, but that he prayed with them. I'd love to know what they prayed, or what the Afghans thought of how he prayed. Little of that likely mattered to them; it mattered that he prayed, that he knew how to pray, and that he humbled himself, battalion commander or no, to pray with them, thus eliminating the notion that either of them thought of the other as the enemy.

Jason Elliot gained a remarkable insight into the intersection of religion and politics in western Afghanistan when he spent a night with a group of Sufis at a major shrine outside Herat. He didn't so much pray with them as observe them in their remarkable rituals. He observed something just as remarkable; as the night wore on they received a steady influx of Taliban joining them very respectfully, after stacking their Kalashnikovs in the corner by the door. I know of no other journalist who has witnessed such a scene. Mortenson has prayed at mosques, and received correction on his miscues, but condemnation. Rory Stewart one might almost say prayed his way across central Afghanistan, though he certainly would not put it that way himself.

We in the west have no monopoly on secularism. The chants of Allah-u-Akbar stilled called from Tehran rooftops spring, for the most part, from political, not religious motivations; so believes an Iranian Facebook friend. The secularization of the Shah never entirely went away, and one suspects the same holds true for the formerly cosmopolitan city of Kabul.

As a former monastic postulant (the first step of the novitiate), one element of Islamic societies strikes me with particular force as these writers who have lived in it relate their experiences. An Islamic city, town, or village runs on a schedule very much like that of a Benedictine or even an Orthodox monastery, with collective prayer at set times of the day. A bell and a paging chime at a Benedictine or Trappist monastery, a bell alone at a Carthusian charterhouse (witness the movie Into Great Silence), a bell or a striking board at an Orthodox monastery such as those of nuns I visited in Romania, or a muezzin's call in the Islamic world, live or taped, amplified or no. All serve as summons to prayer.

Some monastic Christian orders--the Trappists, the Carthusians--tend to place their houses in the countryside. Benedictines do that, as well, but will also show up in or near cities. The less fully monastic orders such as the Dominicans and Franciscans favor cities. In this they endorse the norm in Islamic society, the refusal to remove the practice of religion and religious community from society. Not that Islam sanctifies society, but it does insist on the visibility and audibility of the sacred within society. This does not Afghanistan or Iran or Pakistan nations of monks, but it does make nations of people ever aware of the presence of Islam, and not necessarily in a punitive mode. We live, in many parts of our country, almost embarrassed of such enmeshing of religion with daily life. We can conveniently hide behind the establishment clause here. There, we have to negotiate the Qur'an Pass.

A group of which I know ministers to Christians in Pakistan. I have very mixed feelings about this project. Pakistan does not tolerate non-Islamic faiths as does its neighbor India. We may find this abhorrent, and the Christians may indeed lead lives of terror. Surely helping them has merit. But the path to working with the Pakistanis or any other Islamic country does not consist in seeking out their oppressed minorities. It lies along the way of finding common cause, of demonstrating common commitment, among other things, to religious values, however different the values themselves. Crudely put, they think of us as heathen, infidels; we have to give the lie to some part of that misconception, as best we can, in terms they can understand, in those cases when "infidel" has more force than merely that of a label. Walking a fine line between aid and proselytizing does not seem best calculated to serve this aim.

My argument may sound more like Mortenson's, except that a soldier accomplished the feat of traversing the Qur'an Pass in Chayes' account, just as Mortenson himself has done it so often he need not do it anymore because of the acceptance he has gained and honors he has received. The Afghans need what security we can help provide; but it will help enormously if they can see that the security comes from men and women who can pray as well--even if if not quite as well--as shoot. Come to think of that errant mortar round, perhaps we can pray even better.

The Codes of War

No, not encryption, but the coded language in which the principals discuss everything they do that pertains to war. The war in Afghanistan--itself a code for a conflict broader than the borders of that one country--offers a case in point, or rather a slew of them. The codes and the issues that occasion their use reveal something about the situation on the ground, and in many cases its greater seriousness than the White House and the Pentagon would like to admit--and they admit freely to its seriousness. Just not all of it.

Take one example. President Obama wants to see significant change in the attitudes of the Karzai government in Kabul. Secretary Gates reinforces that in a Senate hearing the day after the West Point speech by saying we will happily seek out partners in provincial governments if the Kabulis cannot deliver on the promises of Karzai's second inaugural address.

The code, though it will surprise nobody: the White House is having a hard time deciding whether Karzai's incompetence trumps his corruption, or the other way round. They want to encourage competent, upright, reliable provincial administrators to step up beyond the reach of recalcitrant Kabulis to rein in the provincials' cooperation. They have done it before, notably in the case of a governor of Kunar, during our Babylonian Captivity. Gates means to say that it will not happen again.

This problem goes deeper than what the President has said, and one presumes he knows it. If we call ourselves a melting pot of myriad peoples, the Afghans comprise a relatively small number of ethnic groups--four major ones and a few minor ones in border regions--"organized" to use far too strong a word by tribes, especially in the case of the Pashtuns. This organization, if you can call it that, explains the emergence of Hamid Karzai in the shura or council at Bonn that proposed a preliminary government after the overthrow of the Taliban, and his confirmation in the loya jirga or grand council that followed in Kabul. A Popolzai Pashtun, his father had led the Popolzai tribe, and the Popolzai have long had a prominent place or even pride of place in Pashtun affairs. He came in, one could say, as heir apparent on one very big assumption: that the Pashtuns had the best case for leading the country.

One of the great difficulties in governing Afghanistan lies in gaining inter-ethnic cooperation. Before the Taliban Kabul had a fairly cosmopolitan mix of ethnic groups. Herein lies the irony the underlies and undermines, along with bad behavior, Karzai's government. He rules as the head of a minority group, but the largest of the bunch. The Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks, along with a few Kyrgyz and others, out number the Pashtuns as a group, but see their strength not in alliances, which they make and break like the rules in a billiards game at Mark Twain's house, but in pursuing their own regional agendas. Hence the Pashtun ascendancies of the Taliban and Karzai.

Our main difficulty there will derive from the very fluidity with which they understand themselves. The Pashtuns along the Durand Line that delineates the border with Pakistan laugh at its legal standing. They do not so much move back and forth between the two countries as move within what they take as the natural range of Pashtun territory. Obama's language at West Point became very vague on the issue of our pursuit of al Qaeda into safe havens by appropriate means. I have spoken to at least one Special Operations veteran who, without quite saying so, seemed to want me to infer that he had served not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan. Code again. No one will say so, but if the Taliban ignores the Durand Line, it behooves us to do the same thing. What exactly will the Pakistanis do in protest?

One final point along the same lines, which will include a final cavil cum observation. CNN's coverage after the President's address featured Mike Ware and Wolf Blitzer looking at, in effect, a war map of Afghanistan. Their graphic artist had placed the national flags of all the NATO countries to represent the deployment positions of their troops. Mike Ware, an experienced British war correspondent, observed that all the Stars and Stripes sat in the south and east, and all the other flags in the north. We, the Canadians and the Brits, he strongly and dramatically asserted, have taken on all the "hot spots" while our allies have it easy elsewhere.

Two points. This characterization may (more or less) accurately reflect the situation now, but historically some of the bloodiest fighting has taken and may yet take place in the north, particularly the notoriously impregnable Panjshir Valley and Nuristan, and the northwestern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. This occasions a second and much broader point. The most interesting writing on Afghanistan that I have seen has come from a diplomat and journalists, but not from war correspondents per se, or at least not writing as war correspondents. Rory Stewart, Ahmed Rashid, Christina Lamb, Sarah Chayes, Jason Elliot eschew bomb-chasing--though Jason Elliot describes a colleague's days as consisting of little else, and Rashid got caught in a firefight while lunching in a garden in Dushanbe, Tajikistan--in favor of understanding the cultural melange we call Afghanistan.

The really useful writers want to understand the cultural complexities as well as the little rebellions, such as the so-called "sewing circles" Christina Lamb writes about that kept girls' education alive under the Taliban in the culturally rich Persian border city of Herat. Bomb-chasers and embedded reporters have a difficult and very dangerous job. I admire their guts. They are not the code-breakers, however, not the ones who will help us understand what, who, where, and how we must fight. We will do well not to take too seriously their reports from the field, or standing in front of fields of flags in the CNN studio in New York--they simply cannot step back far enough to get appropriate perspective. Their reports constitute part of the code. The military wants them where they allow them for a reason. The story, the important story, will almost always happen somewhere else, underneath the radar of the bomb-chasers, in the places and involving the personnel the code seeks to conceal.

We must hope for a day when we need no longer speak of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia in code. Inshallah, God willing, we will get there. For the sake of Afghanistan, let us fervently hope that we do.

Happy Thanksgiving... Prime Minister Singh

Now, I have not throughly read the response in the press nor viewed that of the media punditocracy to the visit and recorded remarks of Prime Minister Singh of India, nor to the significance of the Obamas throwing their first state dinner not for a long-acknowledged friend but for the head of a state with which we have had an often difficult relationship. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain purportedly felt miffed at not receiving such a dinner during his visit earlier this year. If he sulked then, how must he feel now?

What I have seen so far has centered on the menu--largely vegetarian in respect of Mr. Singh's dietary habits--who came, whether by invitation or no, what Mrs. Obama wore and the fact that she used Indian-American designers and wore lots of bangles, who played as house musicians, and so forth. All very well, and I actually consider the fact that the First Lady wore bangles and dresses with a lot of cloth-of-silver thread important for the respect they suggest of traditional Indian clothing and fabrics. She might have respected Indian modesty by not going strapless agains the Indian First Lady's sari. But so far so good--I guess.

Except if that's all we have to say about this visit, this dinner, this guest, and most of all this timing, then we deserve the shrinking influence so many scholars and journalists attribute to the United States now and into the future. Some of what follows depends heavily on Ahmed Rashid's Taliban (Yale, 2000), an acclaimed account of the rise of the Taliban and the climate in which they developed. That would include the geopolitical climate. Enter India.

India? What about Pakistan, our supposed allies in our funding and their stage-managing the fight against the Soviets from 1979-89, and now? More pointedly, why India, and why all the talk about the Indian-American partnership as though between equals, less than a week before President Obama lays out his Afghanistan policy in a speech at West Point next Tuesday? Why, indeed.

If Gordon Brown probably has a sulk on, one can imagine chairs thrown at television screens in Islamabad, and the senior officers of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in apoplectic fits. You remember the ISI, the Taliban's chief handlers and enablers, who see the Taliban as the leading edge of a pan-Islamist movement. Unfortunately, the Taliban's Pakistan-encouraged extremism has scared everyone in the region and beyond. The Taliban take the Wahhabi movement within Sunni Islam to a bizarre fare-thee-well that even their longtime backer the Saudis, themselves the chief advocates and stewards of Wahhabism, found alarming. They voted with their checkbooks. This all gets us to the situation about ten years ago, before 9/11 and its aftermath.

Some things have changed. The geopolitics have not, except that the Pakistanis have made a half-hearted show of fighting their own Taliban movement--the word simply means "students," as in students at Islamic madrassas, some funded by Pakistan, some by the Saudis. They have attacked South Waziristan with great fanfare. The experts on the Afghan conflict think they need to but will not go after more dangerous groups in North Waziristan. In short, our very unreliable "friends" in Pakistan continue to do little to contain let alone turn the tide of this war, even as it threatens to erupt towards their heartland as much as across the Afghan border.

Once again, enter India. Pakistan's arch-enemy and the excuse for so long for Pakistan to keep their military pointed east toward their borders in Kashmir and Punjab and ignore the Pathan/Pashtun tribal areas along their western border with Afghanistan. But if you stop for a second and see Afghanistan as a problem that leaks across international borders, following both ethnic and sectarian relationships, you see a different picture, one Rashid saw ten years ago. Iran nearly invaded Afghanistan over the Taliban's massacre of the Hazara, a Shia ethnic minority. Turkmenistan stands, or stood, to make a great deal of money in a pipeline deal, but not through a country engulfed in civil war. Uzbekistan watched its ethnic compatriots massacred and at one point worried, with its neighbor Tajikistan, about a Taliban invasion of Central Asia. Even now some Taliban elements operate outside their normal range in northern Afghanistan. They could hardly succeed militarily, but could their warped vision of jihad--which primarily means interior spiritual struggle--have an influence the Tajiks and Uzbeks cannot control?

And India--at last. They have already felt the lash of the extremist whip wielded by Islamist militants bred in Pakistan. Witness Mumbai, witness infiltrations across the Line of Control in Kashmir. Of all the countries Afghanistan and Pakistan border, only China remains out of this, largely thanks to the spectacular wall of the Karakoram that guards its border with Pakistan, and the puny and remote fragment of border it shares with Afghanistan at the eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor.

So, a grand arc of countries, from Iran in the west, through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and probably including even Russia in the north, through India in the east have interests in this conflict. Pakistan, of course, would like to keep it to themselves. That will not happen. And what better way to say that loudly and clearly in the language of diplomacy than by having the Indian prime minister to the first state dinner at a White House that clearly does not plan to give a lot of state dinners, if their first year says anything. Gordon Brown, get over it. Pakistan, take notice. We have other games to play than yours.

We can, of course, hide behind claims of all the other matters we have to discuss with the Indians, which of course we do. But if you think Singh and Obama didn't discuss the geopolitics beyond India's western and northern borders, think again. And if you don't think the Indians would love to have a role in humbling Pakistan in the region, then you really need to read up on your history. And if you think Obama will lose sleep worrying about what the Pakistanis will make of the visit, the dinner, and the timing, forget it. I'll bet he'll split his time the next few days among the West Point speech, enjoying Camp David or wherever he plans to spend Thanksgiving with his family, and getting in a couple rounds of golf. Pakistanis? Not on the agenda this week. Maybe next week...

Memo to the President

Mr. President:

Your election, as you know, both reversed and validated the intertwined histories of racism and the civil rights struggle in this country. Your election makes no sense, nor can one make sense of your presidency, without understanding that history. So, too, must an understanding of history inform your decision regarding whether or not to deploy more troops to Afghanistan, how many, and under the aegis of what mission.

The difficulty of defeating and holding Afghanistan often comes up in arguments against an increased deployment. History actually gives a rather ambiguous record on this score, since part of the tragedy of Afghanistan lies in its so often falling to invading armies, whether Persian, Hellenic, Mongol, Moghul, British, Soviet or American. All of those great powers struggled, and some had more success than others in holding onto their Afghan vassals. My point is probably obvious: we seek no such dominion over them. Kindly take those arguments with a large bag of Morton's salt.

Have we found it a tough place to fight? The mountains pose enormous challenges; just count the relics of Soviet armor in the Panjshir Valley of the Hindu Kush northeast of Kabul. Helmand and Arghand would make great terrain for tank warfare, except the Taliban have no tanks, just RPG's (rocket-propelled grenades, but you know that) and mines. We need more Dari and Pashto speakers, not more armament.

One other obstacle, though not altogether ignored, has gone under-reported. David Martin touched on it in his interview with Gen. McChrystal for CBS News' 60 Minutes. One could hardly not notice it. In a village in Helmand Province villagers wore loose-fitting pants and long shirts covering the knees, all for modesty, and either soft hats or turbans. Our troops, by contrast, wore uniforms sufficiently snug-fitting to appear immodest by Afghan standards. We've dishonored their culture--and our own--before we even open our mouths.

At one point in Martin's piece McChrystal waves his group of bodyguards away, and further away, to seem more approachable. I don't know how much that helps. The troops have so much obvious body armor on that can hardly look anything but terrifying to the average villager. We think of our uniforms as sensible, but stretched as the analogy will sound, so did the British when their red coats gave Afghan fighters the same juicy targets they gave our own militias in Vermont and the Carolinas.

Some cultural problems will take years--yes, sir, not months--to address. This one shouldn't. Presumably the Army and Marines have uniforms in a wide range of sizes. Instead of the expensive though perhaps preferable solution of redesigning the uniforms, reissue current uniforms two-to-three sizes larger than a given soldier ordinarily wears. They will discover the wonderful usefulness of the belt.

They do need at least one piece of clothing they now lack. Every Afghan male--and the women would do well to dress like men, which they do already, anyway--carries an item that combines the uses of shawl, blanket, and turban. If the Taliban can fight in them, why can't we? For all I know--and you would know this--the Special Forces may already dress this way. Surely we have uncut bolts of camouflage material in some garment factory somewhere that could be put to such a use. We don't need to dress as Afghans, as though we'd ever hope to blend, but merely with respect for Afghan norms and values.

One more thing on the McChrystal visit to Helmand, and then on to harder issues. I have read that Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea has become required reading for the military in Afghanistan. If that no longer holds true, it should once again. If it does, McChrystal needs to read it again. His approach to the villagers comes across as fantastically (quite literally, to the Afghans) American, and not in the complimentary sense of the word.

We value terseness, directness, informality, McChrystal apparently more than most. Businesslike to us means let's do business now and we can think about drinks later. Much as the Afghans would respect his abstemiousness--if they know about it, and it should be a priority that they do--he would accomplish so much more in his conversations with village leaders if he let them set the pace. Let them show him hospitality, a tradition of which they are proud. I suspect they find his fly-bys insulting.

His pace suggests arrogance, an unwillingness to spend time--the key word here--in their houses, drink at least one cup of tea, and listen while the village mullah takes the lead in the conversation. Let them find out about us, then we can find out about them. If that slows down his schedule on his days in the countryside, good. You know all about bubbles, sir, and he lives in one in Kabul, as he acknowledges to David Martin. He needs to learn how to be a guest before he can really accomplish anything else. And he needs to learn the meaning of it in Pashto and Dari, Helmand and Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and Faizabad, if he can get into Faizabad without getting blown to smithereens.

Every writer I've read on Afghanistan speaks of the Afghans' hospitality and kindness. What the Afghans--a term that makes no sense to a Panjshiri, a Herati, a Hazara, or a Pahstun-- find incomprehensible about us is that we make such ungrateful guests. If loose uniforms and drinking tea have tried your patience, please stay with me here. I know we went there in 2001 to take down the Taliban and get bin Laden. They don't see it that way. However Brzezinski and Rumsfeld might have thought we camouflaged our contributions to the anti-Soviet jihad--which as you certainly know does not mean holy war, but merely struggle--the mujaheddin knew perfectly well the source of the money that bought their weapons.

To them our presence goes back to 1979, and our failure to help them rebuild after the collapse of the Communist regime counts to them as our reneging on an implied promise to help them rebuild. From 1992 to 2001 the warlords--Hekmatyar, Massoud, Dostem, and Omar--finished the destruction of the country Brezhnev had begun. Then we swoop in, dump more bombs, just like the Soviets, and help set up a provisional government in meetings in Bonn, a place of which most of them have never heard. We breathe a sigh of relief when the loya jirgha rubberstamps Karzai, an old associate from his days in the Mullahs Front of the men who later formed the Taliban, and for all intents and purposes we disappear again. And we wonder that they don't trust us.

And now the hard part. Sir, I respectfully disagree that our main mission in Afghanistan is to capture and disarm al Qaeda. That said, by all means send--or keep sending--Special Forces troops and Predator drones into Pakistan to accomplish that part of the goal, amd probably the less the Pakistanis know, the better. McChrystal may want more troops than you want to send him for political reasons, but this isn't a political conflict. Call it nation-building or whatever you want to call it, but this is a moral conflict that will play out in the political sphere. If we have any integrity as a nation, we stay in Afghanistan. We build schools and infrastructure, where and as they want it. We sit on Karzai and whoever wins the next election until they realize that we will not be gone on the next C-130. Then real change can happen, and we can begin to repay the debt we owe.

Karzai is angry at you right now for forcing him to negotiate an election runoff with Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, before his former Foreign Minister decided to save face by pulling out and and calling for a boycott. As for Karzai's anger, good for him; let him stew in his own juices. If we're going to undo our mess, and the mess he and his friends in the mujaheddin made with more than a little help from the Soviets, we are quite willing to listen to the innocent; the guilty will have to prove themselves worthy of our trust all over again. You will note that I adhere to the perhaps unpopular theory that there exists such a thing as innocence in Afghanistan. Relative innocence, anyway.

More to the point, however, while we have to support civic institutions on all levels, from Kabul out to the countryside, the most important issue here is not your trust of Karzai or his of you--you're stuck with each other (isn't democracy great?). The most important issue is the mullah McChrystal met in Helmand. If he, and a critical mass of others like him in Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kandahar, even Faizabad, can see that we're trying very hard to change our spots, then and only then will we have the chance to pay the debt we've owed them for twenty years. Brzezinski and Rumsfeld may never have signed that promissory note, but it seemed clear to the Afghans that they had.

That has to be good enough for us, and that has to be our mission. Some in your administration won't like it; some loud voices in the Senate will hate it. Call London to speak with Jason Elliot, who wrote An Unexpected Light. See if he can arrange for you to visit Ali Khan in the upper Panjshir Valley. McChrystal will tell you not to go. Go. You'll need a Dari translator, probably Dari Tajik. (Ask Jason.) Drink some tea with Ali Khan and his neighbors. Listen to their stories of fighting, and of disappointed expectations. If part of you objects that the Afghans' unrealistic expectations are not our fault or concern, listen. See if you still feel that way afterwards. And whatever you do, don't wear your American flag lapel pin; in fact, don't wear anything with a lapel. Call Sarah Chayes--you remember The Punishment of Virtue and her interview(s) with Charlie Rose; she'd be happy to consult. If she can cross-dress as an Afghan boy (at 5' 9"), she can give you some pointers on how not to intimidate a medieval Afghan who can operate an RPG, courtesy of Zbig and Rummy.

Fear and Courage and the Travel Book...

... by which I do not mean Rick Steeves, Fodor's, or The Lonely Planet, and definitely not Baedeker's (someone here must have read Forster). I mean the genre to which I have exhibited periodic episodes of addiction over the years. The cast of characters--Eric Newby, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Rory Stewart, Christina Lamb, Sarah Chayes--comes from a much more colorful background and couldn't give a hoot whether people follow their tracks. In many cases they would prefer for a variety of reasons including safety that people go somewhere else altogether. Unfortunately, their writing has so fixated people on particular places that they become obsessions, which have a tendency of winning out over common sense in the end. If I start posting from Kabul or the Wakhan Corridor, you will know what happened.

After all, travel literature has a fundamentally escapist underpinning. Theroux left London to get away from a very painful divorce. Traveling with his portable kayak through Melanesia from a beginning in New Zealand and Australia seemed likely to readjust his perspective. Chatwin lived a notoriously impulsive live open to everything from bisexuality to Greek Orthodox monasticism with a little African post-colonialism and Australian Aboriginalism thrown in for good or ill. Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush ties Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania for best or at least most sarcastic title. Newby left London with a friend who'd flown in from Rio de Janeiro and wound up in Nuristan, challenged for remoteness in Afghaistan perhaps only by the Wakhan Corridor.

Then come the writers--don't worry, I have no intention of cataloguing the types of travel books, just the ones that have appealed to me--drawn by war or its aftermath. These bear some correspondences to the first group, pun intended, since most of them have worked as journalists at one point or another, though none wrote their books as journalism. Rory Stewart, a former diplomat, harkens back to Newby's diplomat companion; more obviously, his book tells the tale of a very long walk in the western Hindu Kush. He encountered enough danger, including getting shot at by a petty warlord and nearly freezing to death, that the warning of Ismail Khan, the very substantial warlord of Herat, that he not take on the trip and certainly not in winter, looked prophetic or at least shrewd in retrospect.

Lamb and Chayes take diametrically opposed approaches. Lamb moves around the country, between Herat and Kabul; Chayes, after a hair-raising ride in from Quetta, Pakistan, spends most of her time in Kandahar, with the odd run to Kabul, Boston, or Washington. The little people interest Lamb as much as the major players. She titled her book The Sewing Circles of Herat after the underground schools that bucked the Taliban's prohibition of women's education, not Ismail Khan and the Fall and Rise of Medieval Afghanistan. Chayes has an instinct for power paired with not just a nose for but an insistence on integrity. She fixes her book in orbit around the Police Commissioner of Kandahar and follows his subsequent career in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, until his assassination, probably by the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) or their Afghan pawns.

Which brings up perhaps my most important point. Chayes' book The Punishment of Virtue, a play on the name of the Taliban's morality ministry--The Department of the Promotion of Virtue and the Punishment of Vice--may not strike some as a travel book at all. When she gets to Kandahar she looks around, as a good travel writer should, but then she moves in, which a travel writer definitely shouldn't. She met the Police Commissioner then, because he didn't think she should move in, either. The single most important thing she does in the book, it gives her a perspective into the life of her hosts that among the other writers mentioned here possibly only Stewart and Chatwin (The Songlines, about Aboriginal central Australia) approach. Like Stewart, she does it in the face of considerable danger.

I promised myself not to write another post on Afghanistan this soon, and in a sense i have only partially broken my promise to myself. I know that nobody will design a radical new course at Duke around the insight that we read travel literature to liberate ourselves from the entrapment of familiarity. That and $2.75 or whatever... Nor does the element of danger hurt an author's sales, necessarily. I do think, though, the people who actually had the courage to do what titillates us both fascinate and frighten us. Fascinate, because of their audacity; frighten, because of our lack of it. We read their books because we know we will never do what they did, or suspect we will not.

In the end, it takes a certain skill on the part of the authors to make sure that we still find them sympathetic by the end of the book. At the end of The Happy Isles of Oceania Theroux, who has risked sounding a bit spoiled while lounging at a Hawaiian golf resort, knows enough not to stop there. The book concludes with Theroux and a local guide paddling with spinner dolphins off the Na' Pali coast of Kauai, than which a more glorious conclusion to a travel book I cannot imagine.

Rory Stewart, on the other hand, closes The Places in Between in tears over the death of his canine companion on the trek, Babur, as a result of misplaced kindness in Pakistan the night before the dog was to fly to his new home in Scotland. After an account in which he had spent a great deal of time revealing as little of himself to some of his hosts along the way as possible, that revelation to us came as both a confirmation of what we had been permitted to see and a glimpse into the fragility of the seam between there and here, the possible and the impossible.

Roland Barthes wrote that "we read because we forget." Perhaps we read travel books because we recognize our fear and want to experience courage, if only vicariously, in a place that resembles our own as little as possible.

Why I'm not Watching the World Series, Game 1

Well, for one thing, I give myself a deadline for finishing a new post of Wednesday midnight every week, which I've only missed once--last week. The time is now 9:58. So I have some work to do in the next two hours. I may turn on i-Tunes and listen to some 15th- or 16th c. music, but the World Series would definitely hijack my attention at worst, or dilute it at best. Why are they cheering? What did A-Drug do now?

That last epithet may sound mean-spirited, and one really can't gainsay that charge very well. And yet my use of it speaks to another reason I have the television off this evening, as most evenings lately. I'll tell you the one program I do watch in a moment. You may have guessed by the time we reach the moment of revelation, but perhaps not. How else to create suspense?

The World Series for me involves memory, a rather profound cluster of memories. I have, for some reason, a very clear memory of the Pirates and the Yankees, Yogi Berra and Bill Mazerowski. I had the tv to myself and found it very exciting, this in the days before I had learned to hate the Yankees. Even this does not explain my not having the World Series on tonight.

The cluster of memories involves the summer 0f 1967 (by which time I did hate the Yankees). Some of those memories, most of them, in fact, took place far from Fenway Park; I don't even remember the game I saw there that summer (or was it the next?) Some of the fondest involve not a tv but any of a number of radios. One of my most important took place on a beach where we went on Cape Cod every summer. My father brought a transistor down to the beach to listen while the Red Sox played an afternoon game at Fenway, an hour-and-a-half away by car. The Sox were in a wild four-way pennant race, and had shown signs of fading. Lately, though, they had, as my father would say, "started playing some baseball."

I don't remember what they did that day, but I remember a tremendous sense of sharing with my parents, sitting on the sand gathered around the radio, my father fiddling with reception every now and again, losing it altogether once and getting it back a few minutes later. I remember my sister getting interested as the season wore on, she realized Jim Lonborg, their ace, was really cute, and that they had a legitimate but fragile shot at the pennant. I do know Tony Conigliaro's career effectively ended with a fastball too far up and way too inside while we were at the beach. Mr. Mooney, a high school principal I thought of virtually as a grandfather and who rented a cottage a couple of blocks from ours, attended that game with his real grandson. He told us of the sickening sound. Conigliaro's demise had a great deal to do with the imposition of the batting helmet.

I remember squeezing in a trip to get cider with my sister and then watching the "impossible dream," as the announcer Ken coleman dubbed it, play out the last day of the season. They had to win the last two games against Harmon Killebrew and the front-running Twins, and then wait for the White Sox, I think, and the Tigers to lose. Lonborg was brilliant, one domino fell, then the Angels of all teams--still a new and not very good franchise--beat the Tigers in Detroit as early evening set in on the East Coast. The Red Sox had made it to the World Series.

Then came the awful realization that they would play the St. Louis Cardinals. Not awful because of the Cardinals' prodigious talent. The Red Sox took them to seven games, and had the home field. Awful because my favorite team had to face my favorite National League team. My favorite group of players had to play my single favorite player in baseball, the tenacious right-hander Bob Gibson. That same Bob Gibson whose inspirational autobiography I'd read. He who took possession of the record number of strikeouts in a World Series game against my Red Sox, as my seventh-grade music class, pre-empted for once, watched in deepening horror. Gibson allowed two runs in game seven, on a quirky inside-the-park only-in-Fenway home run by George Scott, a beloved, porcine first baseman who would never make it in this steroid world.

I had no idea adults considered Gibson all-but-too aggressive as a pitcher. I heard the accolades; the criticisms remained too subtle to overcome hero-worship. We considered Ken Harrelson "colorful" then; I wonder what writers would do to him now. Which brings us back to A-Drug. No doubt kids in New York, New Jersey, northeastern Pennsylvania--where there are very few Phillies fans--and southwestern Connecticut find his talent mesmerizing, his accomplishments galvanizing, and his timing breathtaking at times. Let them have that; let them have Jeter's brilliance and neither know nor care about the off-field stuff. They deserve those memories, high-fiving their mom after a particularly timely home run. They'll have those moments for as long as they have a memory.

None of that can have the same charge for me anymore. Sure, Curt Schilling's bleeding tendon impressed me, but I know too much about his politics. Besides, once they ceased to rely entirely on their farm system they ceased to be the old Red Sox, Tom Yawkey's Red Sox, and became Theo Epstein's Red Sox, a not altogether different thing than George Steinbrenner's Yankees. Pardon my Anglo-Saxon, but yuck.

Memory may deceive, but its value lies in its very purity, even if the things remembered lack such purity. I didn't see the viciousness in Bob Gibson, just the speed, the grace, the efficiency, the intensity. It didn't matter that George Scott weighed too much, he was a gentle soul from Alabama who knew how to reach the Green Monster, the famed left-field wall. Memory certainly has access to pain, and a great deal of it, but athletics offer those of us brought up on them a refuge for sharing. The griefs take on a particular pain over time, or they blur willfully; the joys take on a particular shine, exaggerated or no does not matter.

My favorite tv show? A combination of grittiness, violence, humanity, even eccentricity, brilliance, and passion organized around a complicated but decent man dedicated to the simple but difficult principle of the Marines, "Semper Fi." If you need me to tell you the name of the show--N.C.I.S. (Naval Criminal Investigation Service)--you watch less tv than I do.

Knowing Something about Your Enemy--and your Friends

A recent acquaintance who knows of my fascination with the Afghan conflict--really the Afghan-Pakistani conflict, for several reasons not entirely relevant here--has begun emailing me articles on the subject from The New York Times. He sent me a disturbing one yesterday. A delegation of U.S. diplomats headed by Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke recently visited Pakistan, ostensibly to discuss trade. Holbrooke spoke as encouragingly as he could, while trying to say as little as possible. The reason: Congress may make the kind of exchange he wants to encourage so difficult as to become meaningless.

Meantime, a State Dept. official had an even more disturbing conversation, this one with a journalist known to oppose Pakistan's alliance with the U.S., its tolerance of Predator, C.I.A., and Special Forces operations in their country, and our war on al Qaeda and the Taliban. His general characterization of his frame of mind regarding us and of people who agree with him: "We hate you."

His view may represent the thinking (or feeling) of well less than half of Pakistanis. Still, it struck me as disturbing that we have even among the educated classes and the mainstream press such visceral enemies. This led me to pose a question. In formulating a military strategy and designing tactics to achieve its goals, one basic teaching applies to any and every combat theater: know your enemy. Intelligence estimates, the reading of history and memoirs or textbooks (Patton's reading of Rommel comes to mind), all serve this end. It reassures me, for one, that Gen. Stanley McChrystal devours not only intelligence reports but also history.

So, my question (and if it seems a bit pedantic, I taught for eleven years plus two in graduate school, so get over it): how much do Americans know about not so much our enemy, not to mention our friends, but something more basic than that--where we're fighting, and where our fight goes on quietly or by proxy? A very rough and entirely unrepresentative sample of my fellow workers today revealed a disturbing answer: not much, nor did it seem particularly to disturb them.

So, for what it's worth, I offer you a pop quiz on Afghanistan and Pakistan, based on my own reading over the last couple of months. This will not reflect expert knowledge, merely what an admittedly obsessive general reader has picked up from non-scholarly memoirs and journalistic writing, plus more than a little studying of maps. It is entirely possible (in fact likely) that an error or more will creep in unintentionally. Feel encouraged to find any such, and even correct them. Final hint: feel entirely free to cheat without shame. This quiz, if it accomplishes nothing else, will hopefully teach you a little bit of what you don't know about these two countries at the intersection of central and south Asia--which suggests as good a place to start as any.

1. Name the countries that bound Afghanistan and Pakistan (hint: two countries share a border with each of them).

2. Name four important cities in each country ("important" having a slightly different connotation than "major," and "cities" used somewhat loosely).

3. Name the conflicting religious groups in each country ("Moslem" will not do as an answer).

4. Name four provinces (Afghanistan) or states or territories (Pakistan) in each country.

5. Name the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

6. Name the two major languages in Afghanistan and the principal language of Pakistan.

7. Name our three major military opponents in Afghanistan (confession: the Pakistani Taliban insurgency remains a bit beyond my range).

8. Name the major mountain ranges in Afghanistan and Pakistan (extra points for one that defines part of Afghanistan's northeastern border; points deducted for "Himalayas," even though the major range in northern Pakistan forms their western reaches).

9. Name the principal ethnic groups of the countries (bragging rights if you can name impoverished and neglected ethnic minorities).

10. Name the book that has taught you the most about each country (even if you've only read one book, as is more or less the case with me for Pakistan, though many books on Afghanistan have necessary interludes or starting-points there).

My uncribbed answers, for what they're worth:

1. Afghanistan: Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan; Pakistan: Iran, Afghanistan, China, and India.

2. Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Herat (also Jalalabad); Islamabad, Karachi, Peshawar, Lahore (also Quetta, important by location rather than size--probably more important than Lahore right now, certainly strategically).

3. Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi; largely Sunnis among themselves, including the Wahhabism imported by "the Arabs," i.e. bin Laden, et al. in al Qaeda, and their financial backers in Saudi Arabia responsible for the building boom of fundamentalist madrassas in Pakistan that has benefitted the Taliban; Shi'a in northwest.

4. Kandahar, Arghand, Hazarajat, Kunar; North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Beluchistan, Northwest Frontier.

5. Hamid Karzai (pending election runoff with Abdullah Abdullah); Ali al Anzari (not confident here--the widower of Benazir Bhutto).

6. Pashto and Farsi (Persian spoken in two strains in the west and the northeast); Urdu (also remote areas such as Baltistan harbor obscure languages such as Balti--my Greg Mortenson is showing).

7. Mullah Omar; Commandhan Dostum (still alive?); Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (perhaps the most violent and extreme of the three, for all our focus on Omar and his Taliban).

8. Hindu Kush, Pamir, Karakoram.

9. Pashtun, Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek; Punjabi, Sindhi (from Sindh, Bhutto's home and base in south--shaky answer)

10. Tie, partly because one author goes south and the other straight through the middle: Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, and Rory Stewart, The Places in Between; Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea, probably the one book on this region that people have read who have read no others.

Grade: who cares? We're all more aware of what we know and don't know. The issue I still haven't sorted out: what exactly we do about it, except keep reading. In my case, that means a so far wonderful book by Christina Lamb, The Sewing Circles of Herat, available in the Chapel Hill, NC library as soon as I finish it and a few other titles.