Salon.com > Tamim Ansary

Dancing on land mines

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 11:12:00 +0000

Because I grew up in Afghanistan, because I often write about it, because I warned against America bombing the poor country back to the Stone Age after 9/11, people often ask me how the country's doing now, five years after the American intervention. Is it bound for glory or headed for hell?

All I can say is yes.

It's not that I lack information. I track news of the country closely. I've been there since the Taliban fell. I keep in touch with relatives who never left and cousins who have gone back. Friends of mine who come and go keep my impressions fresh. Still, I'm undecided.

The United States drove the Taliban out of Kabul with a brief, tightly targeted military campaign that entrusted most of the fighting to the long-standing Afghan resistance and made artful use of diplomatic pressure on the Taliban's Pakistani sponsors. The dreaded shock-and-awe bombardment and eviscerating invasion -- later visited upon Iraq -- did not materialize in Afghanistan. Once the fighting ended, room for hope opened up.

Leaping to conclusions

Mon, 17 Dec 2001 20:20:00 +0000

Some of the language I hear in conversations about women's roles in post-Taliban Afghanistan makes me nervous. It seems that certain misconceptions may have crept into public perception of the issue.

For example, if I go by what I read and hear, women in pre-Taliban Afghanistan lived pretty much as women do in Italy or France. They enjoyed access to all the professions, served in the government, dated and married whom they pleased and wore cosmetics and miniskirts.

Not quite.

Some women did these things, but they constitued a fraction of the population -- 10 percent tops. These were the women who lived in the city of Kabul and belonged to the Westernized, educated, urban elite. In rural Afghanistan, in the villages, smaller towns and provincial cities such as Kandahar -- which is to say, most of Afghanistan -- a different way of life prevailed.

I'm 53, and when I was growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan was a world of villages and walled compounds with virtually no technology, no factories and no industries -- a society of tribal peasants who eked out their subsistence as farmers and herders.

An Afghan-American speaks

Fri, 14 Sep 2001 22:43:00 +0000

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived in the United States for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.