The man at the head of the tablecloth was a security official who claimed to be a secret agent for the FBI and therefore wouldn’t tell me his name. Despite the unsettled conditions in Afghanistan, he said, tribal and ethnic divisions no longer matter. He addressed the 35 men and boys in Dari, and they called out their tribal affiliations: “Tajik!” “Pashtun!” “Hazara!” “Uzbek!” As the day wore on, little boys climbed into the trees and shook windfalls of mulberries loose. They couldn’t do enough to welcome a foreigner.
—Patrick Symmes, in a now-classic piece for Outside Magazine in 2003. My, how times change. Can you imagine a picnic like that now?
Read that whole thing. There are some delicious tidbits in there about the regrettable NGO Bubble, and of course Rory Stewart.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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