Category Archives: Central Asia

All convicted criminals, even murderers, were released in most parts of country, making big news on radio and TV. According to the minister of education, “The doors of the prisons are being closed and the doors of the schools are being opened.” Yet, paradoxically, the political kidnappings continued and people still disappeared. The jails were being emptied to make room for the new political prisoners!

People were getting tired of all such propaganda. As I was crossing Puli-Baghi Umomi Road I noticed that someone had written under the government’s famous slogan of “Food, Shelter, and Clothing for All,” in large letters that could be read from far away, ‘Address: Puli-Charkhi Prison.” Whoever did it took a big risk to write such words on a very busy road.

SOURCE: An Afghan Woman’s Odyssey, by Farooka Gauhari (U. Nebraska Press, 1996),
p. 107

Our New Year came on March 21 and I don’t think people celebrated it the way they used to. School started right after the New Year. My daughter told me that a new subject, one hour daily, had been added recently to their curriculum. It was called itla-at, or “information” class. During this class the teacher asked the students about their homes, what went on there, what their parents said about the new regime and who visited them. This was a new wrinkle in the spy network that was spreading through the schools.

Rumors were rampant that even children had been disappearing from schools and the streets. The Marxists had supposedly taken them to special “indoctrination schools,” but people kept quiet and didn’t talk about their missing family members.

Both of my sons were going into the tenth grade, while my daughter was in the fifth. They were growing fast and making new friends. There were times when I felt so uncertain about decisions. I wanted Saleem’s opinion when it came to raising my children. One day Ali wanted to go out and play football with his friends but I wouldn’t let him. I was scared, I was scared even of my own shadow. I didn’t know who I could trust anymore. I was afraid that if I let him go and play, he would not return safely. I didn’t know his friends. Times had changed so much that I was afraid I might lose the children exactly the way I had lost my husband–and I wouldn’t be able to find them either. When I told Ali no, he cried. His tearful eyes were killing me.

SOURCE: An Afghan Woman’s Odyssey, by Farooka Gauhari (U. Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 113-114

I’ve started reading Pakistan: Eye of the Storm, 2nd ed., by Owen Bennett Jones, a worthy successor to Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban under the Yale U. Press Nota Bene imprint. I’ll refrain from excerpting Jones’s original reporting, like his enthralling chapter on the 1999 coup that brought Musharraf to power, but I’d like to share a few passages of the rich background history he includes in the book.

The conflicting views of the modernists and the radicals are reflected in the different schools of Islamic thought on the sub-continent. While some 75 per cent of the Pakistani population are Sunni Muslims [20% are Shi’a], there are significant fissures within the Sunni community. Some Sunnis in Pakistan describe themselves as Barelvis; others say they are Deobandis. It is an important distinction.

Deoband is a town a hundred miles north of Delhi and a madrasa was established there in 1867. It brought together many Muslims who were not only fiercely hostile to British rule but also committed to a literal and austere interpretation of Islam. The founders of the madrasa saw modern technology as nothing more than a method by which the people of the West kept Muslims in subjugation. They argued that the Quran and Sunnah (the words and deeds of the Prophet) provided a complete guide for life that needed no improvement by man. Despite the fact that most leading Deobandi clerics were strongly opposed to Jinnah’s call for the creation of Pakistan, many Deobandi teachers moved to the new country in 1947. They have been a vocal, and often militant, element of Pakistani society ever since.

Talibs (religious students) from Deobandi madrasas formed the backbone of the Taliban movement that swept to power in Afghanistan in 1996. Some leading Deobandi clerics, such as Sami ul Haq from the famous Haqqaniya madrasa at Akhora Khattak in NWFP [Northwest Frontier Province], have freely admitted that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters they closed down their schools and sent their students to Afghanistan. The Deobandi talibs have also tried to impose their views within Pakistan. In December 1998, for example, just before the onset of Ramadan, some Deobandis began a campaign to purge the Baloch capital Quetta of video rental shops, video recorders and televisions. The campaign has continued periodically ever since. In late 2000 young religious students encouraged by madrasa teachers and local mullahs ordered the burning of television sets, video players and satellite dishes in a number of villages in NWFP. ‘This is an ongoing process,’ said one mullah who helped organise a TV bonfire. ‘We will continue to burn TV sets, VCRs and other similar things to spread the message that their misuse is threatening our religion, society and family life.’

General Musharraf has never shown any sympathy for the Deobandi mindset. His claim that only around 10 to 15 per cent of the Pakistani people opposed his decision to align Pakistan with the US rested on the fact that some 15 per cent of Pakistan’s Sunni Muslims would consider themselves part of the Deobandi tradition. A far greater number, some 60 per cent, are in the Barelvi tradition. Compared to the Deobandis, the Barelvis have a moderate and tolerant interpretation of Islam. They trace their origins to pre-partition northern India. There, in the town of Bareilly, a leading Muslim scholar, Mullah Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi, developed a large following. Barelvi and his followers felt there was no contradiction between practising Islam and drawing on the subcontinent’s ancient religious practices. The Barelvis regularly offer prayers to holy men or pirs, both dead and alive. To this day, many Pakistanis believe that pirs and their direct descendants have supernatural powers and, each year, millions visit shrines to the pirs so that they can participate in ceremonies replete with lavish supplies of cannabis and music. The Deobandis shun such practices as pagan, ungodly distractions.

Ever since Pakistan was created, the Barelvis have been the Islamic radicals’ most effective obstacle. In a fascinating study, an American academic, Richard Kurin, has illustrated why that is the case. Kurin went to live in a small Punjabi village so that he could assess attitudes to Islam in a typical Barelvi community. He found that two men in the village were trying to propagate Islam: the local syed (descendant of the prophet) and the mullah. The syed’s chosen method was to commandeer the loudspeaker of the village mosque at dawn and deliver a lecture on the merits of following the ways of the Quran and the Prophet. He would speak for several hours at a time. Much to his frustration, however, the villagers failed to show much interest in his exhortations and he regarded most of them as uneducated cheats. In private, the villagers would talk about the syed as a man who took life too seriously and who got worked up about issues that didn’t really matter.

The second Islamic figure in the village, the mullah, was expected to preside over the daily prayers, teach the Quran to young boys and generally, as the villagers put it, ‘do all the Allah stuff’. Like the syed, the mullah felt he had to put up with a somewhat wayward flock. Only a handful of the villagers would say their prayers five times a day and in the month of Ramadan most only managed to fast for five to ten days rather than for the whole month. Worse still, around a dozen villagers were having adulterous affairs that were the subject of much idle gossip. The villagers did, however, show considerable enthusiasm for attending the many shrines in the area. Virtually every man in the village had a pir who would offer him spiritual guidance.

The picture presented by Kurin is true of many villages throughout Pakistan. Clearly there are important cultural distinctions that affect attitudes in different parts of the country. In many Barelvi communities in Sindh, for example, any hint of adultery would be taken far more seriously and could well lead to the murder of those involved. Such conduct, however, is more a reflection of cultural as opposed to religious conservatism. The situation is complicated by the fact that in many parts of the country a Deobandi-style interpretation of Islam is used as an excuse to justify regressive cultural practices. Separating Deobandi orthodoxy from traditional practice is not easy not least because, to some extent, the two feed off each other. It is nonetheless important to remember that most Pakistanis are loyal to the Barelvi tradition. That fact has had an important bearing on the nature of the Pakistani state.

The dispute between the modernists and the radicals predates Pakistan’s creation. As he advanced the arguments for a separate Muslim state, Mohammed Ali Jinnah relied in part on an appeal to Islam. Indeed, religious identity provided the basis for his demand. The argument that Jinnah presented to the British was that the Muslims and the Hindus of the subcontinent constituted two separate nations that could not live together. In 1947 his arguments prevailed and Pakistan was created as a Muslim homeland. But what did that mean? Was it simply a country for Muslims to live in or was it, in fact, a Muslim country? Was Jinnah the founding father of an Islamic state or merely a state in which Islam could be practised without fear of discrimination? Ever since 1947 the modernists and the Islamic radicals have fiercely contested these questions.

SOURCE: Pakistan: Eye of the Storm, 2nd ed., by Owen Bennett Jones (Yale Nota Bene, 2002), pp. 9-11

WOMEN ARE OPPRESSED in all Moslem societies. But among the rural Pathans, women simply don’t exist. “They’re not even in the background. They’re just not there,” said a Pathan woman who left the Northwest Frontier to live in New Jersey. Here are three Pathan proverbs:

Women have no noses. They will eat shit.

One’s own mother and sister are disgusting.

Women belong in the house or in the grave.

You rarely see women on the Northwest Frontier or in Afghanistan; you do see moving tents with narrow holes for the eyes. Photographers who walked through minefields and sneaked into Soviet bases were afraid to take close-ups of Pathan women unless they were at least a hundred yards away and had a lens the size of a mortar–and provided not a single mujahid was looking. A close-up of a Pathan woman was more prized and difficult to get than a photograph of the undercarriage of an MI-24 helicopter gunship. The only Pathan females I was ever allowed to see were all five years old and younger. Some of those girls were beautiful, with long, dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and doe eyes. What Pathan women look like when they are older is a secret that only Pathan men know.

A desert Arab, after he gets to know you, may invite you to his home, where you may steal a brief glance at his wife while she serves the food. A Pathan may also invite you to his home, but either he or another man will carry in the food that has been prepared in the women’s quarters. The food, in turn, is often the traveler’s only clue to the presence of a woman nearby. If the dish is relatively clean and the meal appetizing, it means there is a woman in the adjoining room who cooked it; if the food is inedible, a Pathan man did the deed.

A Pathan won’t even tell you the names of his wife and mother. To ask him is an insult. It would be like asking him to undress in front of a crowd. “Women are as private to a Pathan as his private parts,” a Pathan lawyer remarked to me. “Women are the holy of holies in a culture where the men act as the barricades.” The first time I interviewed Abdul Haq I made the mistake of asking him the names of the men and women in his family. The names of the men he told me. Concerning the women, he blushed and turned away. “I wish you wouldn’t ask such personal questions,” he said. I felt ridiculous for days afterward and worried whether he would agree to see me again.

The very existence of women in a Pathan’s life is an intimate secret, sacred to him but also a source of shame. Women threaten the façade of splendid male isolation that is central to a Pathan’s sense of self. A Pathan knows women are needed for procreation, but that is an unfortunate and embarrassing fact to him, and if he could change it, he would. In the Arab world and even in Iran, pregnant women are a common sight. Among the Pathans, one never sees them, for as soon as a woman’s womb begins to expand, she is locked away in the house.

After enough time on the Northwest Frontier you forgot about Pathan women altogether. They became invisible. You forgot that the mujahidin had wives and mothers, because you never saw them and the men encouraged you to forget. Only rarely did that other, hidden world break through to the surface, as when a colleague of mine asked Abdul Haq why he always kept his hair short. “Because my mother would slap my face if I grew my hair long,” he said, turning his head away, embarrassed.

In Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan, many women were educated, held proper jobs, and didn’t hide themselves in black sheets. That was more because of Westernization than Communist influence. The mujahidin were, for the most part, backwoodsmen, and they suffered no threats or complexities in any of their personal relationships. They inhabited a self-contained world of men, a world of sharp cutouts, where women were held in contempt and the only sure touchstones of masculinity were bravery, the ability to endure physical pain, prowess with a rifle, and the length and thickness of one’s beard.

Men without beards were distrusted by the mujahidin. After all, women didn’t have beards–and neither, thought the mujahidin, did homosexuals. Nor did the Soviets and their Afghan Communist allies. Nor, for that matter, did the more modern, secular mujahidin within the seven-party resistance–the ones who drank Coca-Cola with journalists at the Pearl Continental Hotel and who were thought to do little of the fighting. In Peshawar, a beard meant credibility. It was striking how many Western journalists and relief workers who had contact with the guerrillas had beards. You would grow one before you arrived in Pakistan and shave it off as soon as you went back home. Once, when I shaved off my beard before leaving Peshawar, a mujahid friend laughed at me and said, “You look like a woman–no, like a Christian!”

SOURCE: Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1990, 2000, 2001), pp. 49-51

“Soldiers of God is a thoughtful, insightful, highly readable book. Battlefield smart, rock solid.” –Dan Rather

Pakistan has never been well governed. After the military fought its catastrophic war with India in 1971, hopes were placed on the new democratic leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a wealthy landlord from Sind. But Bhutto turned out to be a divisive populist who sowed fear with his security service and surrounded himself with sycophants. His 1977 re-election was marred by fraud; riots broke out and Bhutto declared martial law. Soldiers fired on people in the streets. The military wasn’t happy; the army chief of staff, Zia ul-Haq, led a coup.

It was Zia who released the fundamentalist genie: though moderate himself, he allied the military with Sunni radicals in order to win support for his new regime. After his death, in 1988 in an air crash that has yet to be explained, democracy returned with the election of Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, as Prime Minister. Though educated at Harvard, Benazir had no political or administrative experience and had made what by all accounts was a disastrous marriage to Asif Ali Zardari, who later became her Investment Minister. Zardari’s large-scale theft of public funds undermined his wife’s government. Elections next brought the Punjabi businessman Nawaz Sharif to power. Together with his brother, Shabaz, Sharif ran Pakistan as a family enterprise; the brothers’ reputation for taking huge kickbacks and other financial malfeasance outdid even that of Benazir’s cabinet. By his second term, reportedly, Sharif was amassing so much money that it was feared that he could perpetually buy off the members of the National Assembly and create a virtual dictatorship. The Sharif and Bhutto governments stand accused of stealing $2 billion in public money, part of some $30 billion smuggled out of the country during democratic rule.

When, in October 1999, General Musharraf toppled Sharif’s government in a bloodless coup, the West saw it as a turn for the worse. However, Pakistanis saw the accession of General Musharraf as a rare positive development in a country where almost all trends are bad. The local media are (at least for now) freer under the military than they were under Sharif, whose aides frequently intimidated journalists. Musharraf has initiated no extensive personality cult. He has said more to promote human rights than have the officials of recent democratic governments, working to end such abhorrent tribal and religious practices as “honor killings” and “blasphemy laws” (though radical clerics have forced him to back down on these issues). Mehnaz Akbar, of the private Asia Foundation, in Islamabad, says, “This is the most liberal time ever in Pakistan.” Musharraf, an admirer of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, is a like-minded modernizer. He shakes hands with women in full public view, and one of the first pictures taken of him after he assumed power shows him holding his two poodles, even though dogs are considered unclean by traditional Muslims. Most important, as one Pakistani journalist told me, “Musharraf speaks with conviction and people believe him, whereas Benazir, though an intellectual, was never believed.”

President Bill Clinton’s visit to Pakistan in March was not a public-relations success. Clinton, who was opposed to the military takeover, refused to shake hands with Musharraf for the television cameras. A day later Pakistanis saw Clinton, on television in Geneva, clasping the hands of the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad–whose regime, they knew, was far more repressive than that of any Pakistani military ruler since the founding of their state.

Musharraf is characterized in the West as a dictator who supports fundamentalist terrorists in Afghanistan and Kashmir and who is not moving fast enough to restore democracy. The truth is somewhat different. Musharraf, one of the last British-style aristocratic officers in the Pakistani army, is a man in the middle. The West demands that he stop supporting Islamic militants; his fellow generals, who carried out the coup in his name, are Islamic hardliners, capable of staging another coup if Musharraf puts too much distance between himself and the Taliban and the Muslim fighters in Kashmir. Moreover, some analysts in Islamabad worry that Musharraf might be moving too fast on too many fronts in his drive to reform Pakistan. In addition to promoting human rights, a free press, and local elections that threaten tribal mafias, he has challenged the smugglers throughout Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier. As the gun battle I saw in Quetta demonstrated, Musharraf has struck hard against various ethnic nationalists and criminal groups. Unlike previous anticorruption drives in Pakistan’s history, Musharraf’s has indiscriminately targeted officials from all political parties and ethnic groups. And Musharraf has not relied on fundamentalist organizations like the Maududi-influenced Jama’at-I-Islami (“Islamic Society”) for support, as Zia did. He has in fact alienated many vested interests, who have the will and the means to fight back–which is why, despite his liberal instincts, Musharraf may yet declare martial law.

Even if Musharraf’s reformist plans succeed, one crucial element will remain: the military itself, which with its own factories, agribusinesses, road-construction firms, schools, hotels, and so on, constitutes a parallel state. No less than the civilian sector, the military is mired in corruption, and yet it is exempt from investigations by the courts. Tanvir Ahmad Khan, a former Foreign Secretary, told me that Pakistan’s only hope may be “a genuine hybrid system in which the army accepts responsibility for poverty and illiteracy in return for limited political power.” A successful hybrid system, he went on, would “democratize the army.” Rifaat Hussain, who chairs the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Quaid-Azam University in Islamabad, agrees: “I will not rule out a formal constitution on the Turkish model in order to create a national-security council and give the army constitutional privileges. We must find a way to legally stabilize civil-military relations.”

SOURCE: Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1990, 2000, 2001), pp. 249-252

“Soldiers of God is a thoughtful, insightful, highly readable book. Battlefield smart, rock solid.” –Dan Rather

My own fascination with Kandahar began with the name itself. According to Peter Levi, Kandahar is probably the only Greek place name to have survived in Afghanistan, stemming from the Arabic form of Alexander’s name, Iskander. In 330 B.C., a year after his decisive victory over the Persian forces of Darius at Gaugamela, east of modern-day Mosul in Iraq, Alexander the Great led his army of thirty thousand men through what is now Kandahar. He left his elephants in the mud swamps west of the present-day city, then crossed the snowy summits of the Hindu Kush on foot.

I visited Kandahar briefly in November 1973, passing through by bus on my way from Herat to Kabul. I stopped for a night at a cheap hotel by the bus station near the city’s Herat Gate. The darkness and my own discomfort–I was slightly ill and horribly cold in the unheated hotel room–gave the evening a surreal quality. All I could recall later was a wind-blown square filled with bearded men in high black turbans smoking a water pipe. I sometimes wondered whether that square in my memory survived the years of bombing.

More recently, I came to know Hamid Karzai, a thirty-year-old Kandahar native and spokesman for Mojadidi’s Afghan National Liberation Front. Hamid was the son of Abdulahad Karzai, the khan (headman) of the Popalzai tribe, the branch of the Abdalis that produced Ahmad Shah Durrani. With Abdul Haq, Hamid Karzai represented for me all that was larger than life in the Afghan character. He was tall and clean-shaven, with a long nose and big black eyes. His thin bald head gave him the look of an eagle. Wearing a sparkling white shalwar kameez, he affected the dignity, courtly manners, and high breeding for which the Popalzai are known throughout Afghanistan. Hamid, unlike the crowd at NIFA [= National Islamic Front of Afghanistan], whose royalist sentiments and moderate politics he shared, was not a “Gucci muj[ahidin].” When he did wear Western dress, he preferred conservative blazers and slacks or a leather jacket. He moved between the Occidental and Oriental worlds without pretension or falsity. I remember him in his Peshawar villa, sitting on a carpet in a shalwar kameez, speaking Pukhtu [sic] with his turbaned Kandahari kinsmen, a copy of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss nearby. Hamid was one of six sons, but the only one who had not gone into exile in Europe or North America and who aspired to succeed his father as head of the Popalzai.

Throughout his childhood, Hamid had resented the restrictions placed on him as the son of one of Afghanistan’s most important men. He longed to escape Kandahar and the stifling routine of tribal ceremonies. He wanted to serve his country, but only as a diplomat living abroad in the West. His first shock and humiliation came as a student in India in 1979, when officials at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi informed him that the Taraki regime had imprisoned his father. A few months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. “I suddenly realized how spoiled I was,” Hamid told me. “I realized that I had been consciously rejecting all the things that were really important and now were lost.”

A few months later, in 1980, Hamid visited a refugee camp near Quetta. As soon as he entered the camp, hundreds of Popalzai tribesmen gathered around him, smiling. “They thought that just because I was the khan’s son, I had the power to help them. I felt ashamed, because I knew I was just a naive student who was spending his college years thinking only of himself and his ambition. I was not what they thought I was. My goal from that moment on was to become the man that those refugees thought I was. To become a man like my father.”

The man that Hamid Karzai became was one who never tired of talking about the rich history of his tribe and the region of Kandahar. The story of the founding of the Popalzai–first told to me by Hamid–sounds like one of the archetypal tales in the Book of Genesis.

Abdal, the patriarch of the Abdalis (later the Durranis), died at the age of 105 and was succeeded by Rajar, who in turn passed over his oldest son and picked the younger but smarter Zirak to be headman. Zirak ruled for many years and had four sons. One day, near Kandahar, the family was breaking camp. By then Zirak was over 100 and too old even to move, let alone saddle his horse. He asked his oldest son, Barak, for help. Barak laughed and made fun of his father. The second son, Alik, did the same. The third son, Musa, told his father to get on a horse and follow him. When Zirak was not able, Musa kicked him and told him he must remain behind until the beasts devoured him. Popal, the youngest son, offered to carry his father on his back. Old Zirak never forgot the incident, and when he died at the age of 120, he invested Popal as head of the clan. Thus it was that Popal founded his own branch of the Abdali tribe.

The mythic, elemental quality of the story is enhanced by the fact that, though the origin of the Popalzai is relatively recent–the late fifteenth century–nobody can accurately date when the events took place. It is such stories that, stylistically at least, lend credence to the notion that the Pathans are descendants of the ancient Hebrews. True or not, one could at least say that the desert surrounding Kandahar was to the Pathans what the wilderness of Sinai was to the Hebrews: the seed-ground where an assemblage of tribes grew into a nation. To Hamid Karzai, Kandahar was “the home of our original Afghan culture, the genuine Afghanistan.”

SOURCE: Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1990, 2000, 2001), pp. 194-197

“Soldiers of God is a thoughtful, insightful, highly readable book. Battlefield smart, rock solid.” –Dan Rather

In a war that was in many ways the most dangerous ever for a reporter to cover, Kandahar was the most dangerous theater of the war. Its desert land was flat and cluttered with land mines. When [Soviet] MI-24 helicopter gunships swept in low after their prey, you could run but you couldn’t hide. Because you didn’t have to walk, the Kandahar area was physically less demanding than everywhere else in the country. But never in the mountainous north did a reporter feel as scared and vulnerable as when jammed inside a Toyota Land Cruiser, slowed down by deep pockets of sand, with Soviet helicopters in the sky. The Kandahari guerrillas, more than the other mujahidin, had a reputation for reckless bravado. When mines and helicopters were reported ahead, they slammed on the accelerator.

Kandahar really got to me; it wiped out what was left of my so-called objectivity. Being there made me think that the western media really were a bunch of pampered, navel-gazing yuppies, too busy reporting illegal detentions and individual killings in South Korea and the West Bank–before dashing back to their luxury hotels in Seoul and Jerusalem–to bother about the nuclearlike wasting of an entire urban center by the Soviet military. The throngs of reporters in places like Israel, South Korea, and South Africa, and the absence of them in Kandahar, or even in the Pakistan border area that abuts it, made me think that “war reporting” was fast becoming a misnomer.

Blazers were replacing flak jackets. The warfare most often videotaped and written about was urban violence in societies that have attained a level of development sufficient to allow large groups of journalists to operate comfortably. The worldwide profusion of satellite stations, laptop computers, computer modems, and luxury hotels with digital phone and telex systems was narrowing the media’s horizons rather than widening them. If there wasn’t a satellite station nearby, or if the phones didn’t work, or if the electricity wasn’t dependable, you just reported less or nothing at all about the place. Although the South Africans, for example, merely curtailed your movements, the Soviets tried to hunt you down and kill you. So you covered South Africa while at the same time denouncing its government for the restrictions it placed on your work. But you didn’t fool around with the Soviets, because they were serious about keeping reporters out. I couldn’t think about Kandahar; I could only rant and rage about it.

SOURCE: Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1990, 2000, 2001), pp. 184-185

“Soldiers of God is a thoughtful, insightful, highly readable book. Battlefield smart, rock solid.” –Dan Rather

Jodi of the Asia Pages, has posted a memoir of where she was three years ago on 11 September.

I was in the town of Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in a country not too far from Afghanistan. As one of the few volunteers who had a telephone, I was automatically designated as a safety warden, the go-to person Peace Corps contacted in a time of emergency and the person who is then responsible for relaying that message to the many phoneless volunteers in her area.

September 11 also happens to be my birthday.

When I received the phone call, the selfish person that I am thought, “Oh, how nice! Peace Corps is calling to wish me a happy birthday.”