Last night, I watched Bill Moyers interview Sarah Chayes, onetime NPR correspondent turned fulltime Afghan businesswoman and activist.
It's impossible to summarize what she says and stands for, but watching her you are convinced that she is absolutely certain of the rightness of what she is doing.
She is determined to forge a connection between the West and Afghanistan to their mutual benefit.
She runs a business in Afghanistan, because that's what the local people asked her to do. They need work and a working economy.
Her obstacles are legion: endemic corruption, mounting violence, and U.S. policy that appears dedicated to maintaining a veneer of progress, instead of the real thing.
Read the excerpt of her new book. It scratches the surface of what she is trying to convey.
Lest anyone think this is a book plug - go read her interview on Now. She's a formidable person and tells a story that gets you by the throat. This is not just another country we should be saving - this is foreign policy, human tragedy and a fight against evil.
You just have to cheer for her. I just hope what she says resonates with those in power.
1 comment:
our involvement in afghanistan disappoints me completely. not *that* we are involved, but rather that we got involved for such a profoundly self-interested reason, and so f-ing *late*. afghanistan became 'the handmaid's tale' in real-life back in the *80's*. we left afghanistan totally alone while the taliban enslaved half of the population. i consider myself a liberal. but liberal does not equal 'total pacifist'. there are things i would die for -- and, frankly, kill for. amazingly, one of those things is my own right to drive a car. i don't really enjoy driving cars. but whether i drive one or not is nobody else's f-ing business.
i do wonder in a limited, superficial way, how history would have played out had we and the international community *not* more or less ignored the taliban when it first came to power.
- thorn
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