My Afghanistan

This week’s cover story on Afghanistan is personal. 

Twenty-three years at The Christian Science Monitor have shaped me in many ways. 

I have seen Usain Bolt cross the finish line of the 100 meters at the Beijing Olympics with such an unearthly blast of energy that he looked back over his own shoulder in laughing disbelief. 

I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when a tiny lander crept off its platform and started beeping its astonishing images of Mars back to the piney hills of Pasadena, California. 

I’ve trekked up the Amazon, tracked an insurgency through the Indian jungle, and witnessed the journey to the first Boston Red Sox World Series triumph in 86 years.

Yet no reporting assignment left more of an impression than the three trips I made to Afghanistan from 2006 to 2009.

Just before I was sent to South Asia as the Monitor’s correspondent, I asked the foreign editor: “Can I go to Afghanistan as little as possible?” But by the end of my stint, there was no place I would rather go.

My expectation, in the beginning, was of chaos, carnage, and hatred. But there was another Afghanistan, it turned out. One of exceeding hospitality, humor, and otherworldly beauty. And what I remember most, in many ways, were the people whose lives were changed by the fall of the Taliban.

In the back alleyways of Kandahar, women who would not have been allowed outside the house before glided quietly to bring health care to the needy. In Kabul, Marzia Faizi was determined to be a police officer, even if family members stopped talking to her. In Bamiyan, the Hazaras went from beating back a campaign of ethnic cleansing to holding top posts in government.

Expectations, I learned, are important. When I found an Afghanistan that was radically different from the one I imagined, my expectations changed.

What has the war in Afghanistan accomplished? The answer to that question, too, is largely bound by expectation.

Afghanistan is not America and never will be. Was there an attempt to make it a Kansas of the Hindu Kush? Yes, and it was mostly a failure. So much money was wasted because people didn’t see what a better Afghanistan looked like. 

The broken, fearful, backward country of many people’s expectation is certainly there. I saw it. But efforts that went into the other Afghanistan helped it put down stronger (though still tenuous) roots during the past 19 years. Monitor correspondent Scott Peterson writes beautifully about that Afghanistan in his cover story this week.

Does that progress make the war a success? I’d argue that it’s best to stop seeking a yes-or-no answer. The war was filled with false assumptions, among them the idea that peace can come to Afghanistan without addressing the meddling of neighboring Pakistan. The war has not done those things that it was never realistically going to do in the first place.

Yet to call it a failure does not fit with what I saw and who I met. And those are the seeds of Afghanistan’s best self.