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In theGraveyardof Empires
By Seth G. Jones
I spent the morning of September 8, 2006, with several Afghan friends in a
guesthouse in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, sipping a warm cup of sher chai, atraditional Afghan drink prepared using black tea, cardamom, and milk. Tehouse was constructed of concrete, with whitewashed walls and a small leafycourtyard. Tere was a meticulously craed assortment of red and pink roses
around the perimeter, and a small vineyard with green grapes on one end. Likemuch of the capital city, this house had been rebuilt aer the overthrow of the
aliban regime in 2001. Just ve years aer the American invasion, Kabul was
a vastly dierent city, awash in electronics equipment and sprinkled with newInternet cafés. Te streets were clogged with bright yellow taxicabs, watermeloncarts, bicycles, and cars imported from Europe and Asia. Young boys and girls
shued to school along the congested sidewalks. Construction projects dot-ted the city. Several new banks and an upscale indoor shopping mall named
Kabul City Center were going up downtown. Economic growth was up 8.6
 percent that year alone.But there were ominous signs that the new order was teetering. At 10:20
a.m., a piercing noise shattered the morning lull. A suicide bomber had driven
a dark oyota Surf into a convoy of U.S. soldiers. I was in the vicinity of theattack, which occurred near Massoud Square, bordering the main gate of the
U.S. Embassy. Te square had been named for Ahmed Shah Massoud, mili-tary leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (orNorthern Alliance), who was assassinated by al Qa’ida suicide bombers two
days before September 11, 2001.
Introduction
1
 
Te attack wounded twenty-nine people and killed sixteen. wo of the dead
 were American soldiers. One was Sta Sergeant Robert Paul, an Army reservist
from Te Dalles, Oregon, who was part of the 364th Civil Aairs Brigade. In
an obituary, his grieving family wrote, “He never turned down an opportunitybecause he always wanted to make a dierence in everything he did.” Te other
American killed was Sergeant 1st Class Merideth Howard, an Army reservist
from Waukesha, Wisconsin, whose husband mourned her death by blasting 
her remains skyward in two reworks displays. A few months earlier, an Army
crew lming a segment on U.S. reconstruction eorts in Afghanistan showedSergeant Howard handing out hundreds of backpacks. “Most of the kids arein school, even if it’s just a few hours a day,” she said. “And that’s what we’retrying to do, is just help them out as much as we can.”
Te rest of the dead were Afghan civilians unfortunate enough to be in the
blast zone. One was an elderly man selling used clothing from a dilapidated,rusty pushcart. Among the others were a half-dozen municipal street sweep-
ers nishing their morning cleaning, and two gangly boys selling water. At the
bomb site, I could see thick black smoke curling up the charred trees nearby.Te blast had torn a six-foot-wide crater in the road and le scattered over a
 wide area a gruesome and disquieting collection of items: Muslim prayer caps,
khaki-colored military hats, shoes, and body parts. Te explosion, which alsohad ripped apart an armored Humvee, was the largest suicide bombing in the
capital up to that point. I tried not to be discouraged, but the trends suggested
a growing insurgency.wo days later, on September 10, another suicide bomber assassinated Ha-kim aniwal, governor of Paktia Province. I had been scheduled to visit himlater that week. He was a genteel, bespectacled sociology professor who had
ed from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 1980, moved to Australia in 1997, and
then returned home to Afghanistan in 2002 to help rebuild his shattered
country. Afghan President Hamid Karzai had asked his close friend aniwal
to come to Paktia, a rugged province in the foothills of the Hindu Kush moun-tains in eastern Afghanistan, which had become a hotbed of insurgent activity.
Australia’s minister of foreign aairs, Alexander Downer, who knew aniwal,
described him as a scholarly, so-spoken man of integrity, and “a good man,
 with a reputation as a highly capable administrator.”aniwal’s family had begged him not to return to Afghanistan, but he felt
an overwhelming sense of patriotism and couldn’t miss the opportunity to helprebuild his homeland. Ghulam Gul, the suicide bomber, crept up to aniwal’s
car and blew himself up as the car pulled away from the governor’s oce in
Gardez. Te next day, nearly a thousand mourners attended aniwal’s funeral,
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