A Rope and a Prayer Read Online Free PDF

collapsed under heavy American bombing in early November, exuberant young Afghans thronged Kabul’s streets and hailed the fall of the Taliban. They devoured cellular phones, computers, and any other means of access to the outside world. Girls flocked to school and women relished basic freedoms. After twenty-four years of Soviet occupation, civil war, and brutal Taliban rule, Afghans welcomed stability, moderation, and foreigners. On December 22, 2001, I watched Afghan men weep with joy as Hamid Karzai was sworn in as the country’s interim leader. Hope filled the hall and the city. The Taliban appeared vanquished.
    Like other foreigners, I was beguiled by Afghans, their bravery and sense of honor. I wanted to follow what unfolded in the country over the long term and answer a central question: how can religious extremism be countered?
    I had been intermittently covering religious and ethnic conflict for the past fourteen years. I covered the war in Bosnia for The Christian Science Monitor in the mid-1990s and after joining The New York Times in 1996 reported on religious conflict in Israel-Palestine, Kosovo, Indonesia, and Nigeria. After covering the fall of the Taliban in 2001, I served as the newspaper’s South Asia bureau chief from 2002 to 2005, reporting on sectarian tensions in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh as well. The vast majority of my time, though, was spent reporting in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
    I visited Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan for the first time in 2004 while reporting a story on Charles Grader, the last American to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, mission in Kabul before the 1979 Soviet invasion. A quarter century later, Grader had returned to Kabul at the age of seventy-two to manage an agricultural development program. We drove into Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s provincial capital, and he raved about how the town had changed since the 1970s. Stores brimmed with food, household goods, and televisions.
    “Look at that construction!” Grader shouted as we drove down through the city trailed by a half dozen Afghan security guards. “Look at the tractors!”
    Lashkar Gah had fascinated me ever since. The town was built by American engineers as part of one of the largest foreign development projects in United States history. For thirty-three years, from 1946 to 1979, a massive American Cold War program tried to wean Afghans from Soviet influence.
    In a bleak stretch of Afghan desert that resembled the surface of Mars, several dozen families from states like Montana and Wisconsin lived in suburban tract homes with one-car garages, green lawns and backyard barbecues. The Americans constructed a new provincial capital, two earthen dams, 1,200 miles of gravel roads, and 300 miles of irrigation canals. They promised to make 350,000 acres of desert bloom and create an Afghan version of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Depression-era hydroelectric system that spans five American states.
    In 1960, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee visited Lashkar Gah and declared it “a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape.” The American-designed town was an “ultramodern world of workshops and offices,” Toynbee wrote in a memoir of his journey. Afghans called it “Little America.”
    Laid out in a neat square grid, Lashkar Gah during the Cold War was a sweltering, dust-covered settlement of 15,000 residents perched above the swirling brown waters of the Helmand River, according to books and reports from the time. It had a four-lane, pine-tree-lined Main Street, a new hotel with a swimming pool and tennis court, and southern Afghanistan’s only coeducational high school. Downtown, a movie theater played the latest Indian films. The province and its massive development project was even a setting of a James Michener novel. After traveling through Afghanistan in the 1950s, Michener wrote Caravans, a 1963 novel that described local Afghan disappointment with an