Studio Kabul
The New York Times Magazine: Advancing Women’s Rights
At the age of 27, after 14 years of marriage, with seven children and a husband 30 years older than she was, a husband who was addicted to opium, who once deprived her of food because she gave birth to a girl and not a boy, who beat her when she took too long to conceive, who pulled out her hair and knocked out her teeth to make her too ugly to remarry, who beat her again when he couldn’t find money for opium because he had spent it on phone cards for the mobile to call his lovers — after 14 years, Abada had had enough.
Read MoreHow’s Business: M.
Project manager, DynCorp International, Kandahar, Afghanistan
Ramrod is a small military base at the edge of the Red Desert in Kandahar. Not a village in sight, just sand to every horizon. M., a young project manager for DynCorp International, sat with me in her office and bunk, the inside of a small white shipping container. The base is expanding every day.
Read MoreKarzai in His Labyrinth
The New York Times Magazine
The Afghan President is isolated and distrusted, and even if he manages to be re-elected this month, that’s not likely to change…
Read MoreIn the Land of the Taliban
The New York Times Magazine
One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan…
Read MoreLand of the Seven Scarves
The Kuchi, Afghanistan’s nomads
Out of a dust squall in the parched, defeated land, a ribbon of Technicolor crests the desert hills. You’ll see these images all over the Afghan landscape — in crevices of the jagged mountains, on switch-back mountain roads, in the Kandahari desert caves. They may be clans on the move, with camels and goats and sheep and babies. Or just a gang of girls, in dazzling dresses of purple, yellow and red, speckled with sequins and mirrors to guarantee that the sun’s rays and all of us passers-by in our modern transportation won’t miss the spectacle, won’t forget the Kuchis (the Dari word for nomads).
Read MoreWomen’s Work
The New York Times Magazine
After bumping along five hours of potholes and rock-strewn mountain switchbacks on the main commercial artery from Kabul to Pakistan early last month, I was surprised as we entered the Jalalabad Valley to see an enormous campaign poster, the size of a Times Square billboard, featuring not the boyish face of Hazrat Ali -- Jalalabad's most famous ex-warlord and a parliamentary candidate -- but that of Safia Siddiqi.
Read MoreKabul Dispatch: Prep School
The New Republic
If you pick up a standard schoolbook in Kabul, whether from the mujahedin government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, or from the subsequent Taliban regime, these are the standard math problems you'll find…
Read More
