Afghanistan in glorious sepia

Afghans and Americans alike describe the country in those days as a poor nation,but one that built national roads,stood up an army and defended its borders. As a monarchy and then a constitutional monarchy,there was relative stability and by the 1960s,a brief era of modernity and democratic reform. Afghan women not only attended Kabul University,they did so in miniskirts. Visitorstourists,hippies,Indians,Pakistanis,adventurerswere stunned by the beauty of the citys gardens and the snow-capped mountains that surround the capital.

I lived in Afghanistan when it was very governable,from 1964 to 1974, said Thomas E. Gouttierre,director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska,Omaha,who met recently in Kabul with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal,the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. Gouttierre,who spent his decade in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer,a Fulbright scholar and the national basketball teams coach,said,Ive always thought it was one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Afghans today say that the view of their country as an ungovernable graveyard of empires is condescending and uninformed. Unfortunately,we have a lot of overnight experts on Afghanistan right now, said Said Tayeb Jawad,the Afghan ambassador to Washington. You turn to any TV channel and they are experts on Afghan ethnicities,tribal issues and history without having been to Afghanistan or read one or two books.

Zalmay Khalilzad,an Afghan-American and the former American ambassador to Afghanistan who grew up in Kabul and the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif,said that calling a country ungovernable was a standard reaction when Americans do not want to engage in a conflict,like Iraq or the Balkans. The response,he said,is articulated as,We were wrong to have the objectives that we had because this place is unhelpable,theyve been at war for a thousand years,who the hell do we think we are that we can solve this problem?

Khalilzad would be the first to acknowledge that Afghanistan was always fractious politically,and that there were assassinations and coups even during the era of relative peace. But the current downward spiral did not begin until 1978,when the president,Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan,was killed in a Communist coup,setting off three decades of conflict.

In 1979,the Soviets invaded,occupied Afghanistan for the next decade and were finally driven out by American-backed mujahideen fighters,some of whom went on to form the Taliban,an Islamic student militia,which took control of Kabul in 1996. The Taliban in turn were toppled by the Americans in 2001,but fighting continued.

And by the end of the 1970s,many of the educated elite had fled and resettled across Europe,Asia and the United States. Gone with them was the promise of those earlier decades,when Kabul solicited foreign aid from both Washington and Moscow that brought in electricity,dams and irrigation,and when a young Parliament was trying out a fledgling democracy.

J. Alexander Thier,an expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace who lived in the country during the takeover by the Taliban in the 1990s,said that some Afghans returned to the country after 2002,but that many still lived abroad. He said he was not incredibly optimistic about Afghanistan after eight years of the current war,but that he supported robust reconstruction aid and American help to bolster regional governments throughout the country. I lived in Afghanistan in the absolute darkest days,when if Afghanistan was ever going to break apart into separate states,it would have happened, he said. Now,he said,the alternatives are so much more bleak and dangerous for us that we do need to keep trying.

In the media

Goodbye Baghdad,Hello Kabul

As the Obama administration debates whether to send more troops to Afghanistan,a squadron of journalists has already arrived. Many of them are transplants from Americas other overseas war,in Iraq.

Its like the Baghdad class of 2003 is now the Kabul class of 2009, Richard Engel of NBC said from Kabul,the Afghanistan capital.

No longer overshadowed by Iraq,the forgotten war in Afghanistan,as news outlets had once called it,is suddenly very visible. Television networks have opened small bureaus,and major newspapers have assigned more staff members to the country,and its neighbour to the west,Pakistan. But with the media business under great strain,this war is being covered on a budget.

Afghanistan has always been the poor mans war, Lara Logan of CBS said in an interview; the news media,too,are spending less.

For the first time in years,Afghanistan has emerged as the top story for news organisations in the United States,the Project for Excellence in Journalism reported this month.

Much of the current attention is centered on President Obamas formation of a new American strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But events inside the country are earning more coverage now,as well.

A recent cover article in Time magazine was headlined The War Up Close. The issue featured a photo essay about infantrymen fighting the Afghan insurgency. In a nod to the invisible qualities of the war,Time wrote of the photographs,If its true that sometimes weve let ourselves lose sight of Afghanistan,then as a start,lets look here.

NYT