A Rope and a Prayer Read Online Free PDF Page B

expensive foreign aid project that failed to meet their high expectations.
    Toynbee, Michener, and other foreign visitors were enthralled by the Pashtuns, a fiercely independent ethnic group of 40 million people that predominate in Helmand, southern Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan. Their ancient system of governance is Pashtunwali, a 5,000-year-old tribal code of honor that governs all aspects of a Pashtun’s life. Under Pashtunwali, all Pashtuns must display hospitality toward guests, give asylum to anyone in distress, exact revenge on those who injure or insult them, protect the honor of women, and always display unflinching bravery, loyalty, and trust in God.
    In rural villages, conservative Pashtun tribal elders tended to be devoutly religious, opposed to central government rule, and suspicious of foreigners. In the large cities and towns, an educated Pashtun elite generally supported modernization of the country.
    In “Little America” of the 1960s and 1970s, educated Pashtun moderates dominated. During Christmas and Ramadan in Lashkar Gah, Pashtuns and Americans invited one another to each other’s homes to celebrate their respective religious holidays. Americans who worked in Lashkar Gah at the time told me Pashtuns were shockingly poor and isolated, yet dignified, generous, and welcoming.
    David Champagne, a Peace Corps volunteer from Chicago, taught English at the high school in Lashkar Gah from 1968 to 1971. He recalled an experimental school where Afghan and American teachers worked together to train a new generation of Afghan leaders and technocrats. Champagne tried to infuse his students—particularly girls—with a sense that they could achieve anything through hard work. The school’s goal was to instill an ethos that Afghanistan could develop into a prosperous country through slow, painstaking education and government reform efforts over many years. “There was a certain amount of realism and optimism,” Champagne told me. “People thought they could help people with technology. Make the deserts bloom.”
    The grand American project, though, never achieved the agricultural production promised. It consumed vast amounts of American and Afghan finances and took three times longer to complete than planned. Arriving with Grader in 2004, I found that the American-built suburban tract homes still stood, but their Afghan occupants had built walls around them, a sign of the gulf between American and Afghan notions of privacy.
    I learned that “Little America” was one chapter in a century-long effort by the Pashtun elite to modernize the country, all with mixed results. In many ways, Afghan history followed a cycle of Kabul-based, elite-backed reform movements provoking violent opposition from the country’s conservative rural tribes.
    Yet whenever I began to write off the American Cold War project, other experiences gave me pause. Pashtun farmer after farmer told me “Americans built Helmand.” I met scores of Pashtuns who had attended the experimental American-funded high school in Lashkar Gah in the 1960s and 1970s. Thirty years later, they warmly recalled the names of David Champagne and their American teachers, often with tears in their eyes. Dozens had become senior government officials or doctors, engineers, and teachers.
    In particular, the sophistication and bravery of one man and one woman from the classes of 1972 and 1974 intrigued me. After the fall of the Taliban, Muhammad Hussein Andiwal became the provincial police chief and Fowzea Olomi became the head of women’s affairs in Helmand. They insisted that “Little America” was ripe for another American-backed renaissance.
    For my book, I planned to chronicle Fowzea’s and Andiwal’s efforts to modernize Helmand after 2001. On the day before we drove to our ill-fated Taliban interview, I had met in Kabul with Andiwal, who had been recently fired from his job as Helmand’s police chief. Despite the presence of 8,000 British and