In 1933, the author Sherwood Anderson traveled throughout the United States. To get a sense of the national mood, he talked to everyone from factory owners to hobos about the Depression. He titled his resulting essay collection Puzzled America.
Though the circumstances are very different, America is puzzled again. Until now, terrorism has always been something that happened in other countries or that could be quickly forgotten. How could the richest, most powerful state ever created be caught so flat-footed? Why, after all the foreign aid we’ve sent to poorer nations, would anyone hate us so much? And who are ‘they’, anyway?
Weeks after the 2001 suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the people of the wealthiest nation on earth launched an intensive, high-technology bombing campaign against the poorest. U.S. policymakers were so unfamiliar with the region that the Central Intelligence Agency was forced to issue a public appeal for Americans fluent in Pashto and Tajik, yet these same people considered themselves qualified to radically restructure Afghanistan’s fundamental culture and politics.
Visa issued by Northern Alliance.
My agent Mary Anne Patey, my wife and I went to discover the results of our war upon ordinary Afghans. We never expected to find The Truth, because that’s impossible. We did, however, attempt to separate propaganda from reality; in other words, to eliminate some of our puzzlement. This book is part of that effort.
Ted Rall, war correspondent. The Kunduz front is on the other side of the wall.
This book is told from my perspective (rather than jointly) for several reasons. First, Afghanistan’s prevailing gender apartheid often caused me to have interactions that my female companions could not, and vice versa. Second, I was still so stunned by the intensity of my experience at the time of writing that I was lucky to be able to articulate my own thoughts, much less synthesize our communal experiences into a coherent group narrative format. Finally, as a reader I’ve always found single-person point-of-view easier to follow, particularly vis-à-vis the graphic-novel portion of this text.
All of us have friends and relatives who demanded to know why we risked traveling to a famously dangerous place, while carrying passports issued by a country then dropping bombs on the locals. My reply was always the same: “It’s just a few weeks. Millions of people live there their entire lives.”
Please think of them when you read this.
Ted Rall
New York City