Registan.net

I had the pleasure of attending a dinner tonight at the Afghan Embassy here in Washington DC. Ambassador Jawad and his wife were quite gracious hosts, and I had the distinct pleasure of conversing with S. Frederick Starr—yes, that S. Frederick Starr, who turned out to have a terrific sense of humor. While we were talking, I managed to clumsily throw my glass of lime-flavored water onto the brick portico overlooking the garden, where it promptly shattered into several intimidating shards of glass. Not embarrassing in the slightest.

The occasion is the publication of Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good by Rosanne Klass. Barely out of her teens when she showed up in Kabul in the 1950s and unlike the Afghan women never wearing a veil, she proceeded to teach English at an all-boys school, including several who wound up as notable and internationally well-regarded Afghans. She is probably most famous for her book on the Afghan-Soviet War, Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited, which is, as far as I can tell having never read it, a fairly definitive book on the conflict.

Ms. Klass is a vivid storyteller, and I barely noticed nearly an hour passing as she recounted hilarious stories of the boys at her school getting into fistfights over whether or not she was a CIA agent, or an ambassador having a wardrobe malfunction of epic proportions. I was especially amused by the tale of how Louis Dupree, upon arriving in Kabul, promptly swapped wives with another expat. Before it was saddled with reliably electricity, she said you not only could hear a dog barking on the other side of the city at night, but the stars were so clear and close you felt like you could touch them from your backyard. It sounded magical, like a Hosseini novel only not melodramatic or over-sentimental.

Ms. Klass has many such stories, all offering a flavor of Afghanistan before the Taliban (”the crazies,” she called them at one point, referencing one of the several reasons she won’t return any time soon). I cannot wait to dig into her book.

On a side note, this was arranged through the embassy’s media relations director. Combined with Ambassador Jawad’s Q&A at the Huffington Post, I feel comfortable saying the embassy here has one of the most sophisticated media outreach efforts around. With the exception of Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha, I’m not aware of any other Ambassador in town actively reaching out to the blogging community, which is a shame—blogs offer a tremendous way to make an end-run around both an unresponsive and borderline illiterate America press corps (Friday I had the misfortune of watching some tartlet on CNN barely pretend to interview Pakistani Ambassador Munir Akram about the Bhutto bombing), and to drum up interest in the larger blogging community beyond foreign policy nerds. Kudos to the embassy staff for being so forward thinking and creative in their outreach.

* A delicious Afghan custard with crushed pistachios on top. I strongly recommend it.

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