Word: americanization
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...Weekend in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 1978 We turn out from the American School's Little League game, straight into a line of tanks. "It's a parade!" says my mother gaily, hoping we children won't notice that the soldiers have their guns cocked. That night, as Soviet-made MiGs strafe the city, our gardener and cleaner Mir Ali patrols the garden with an ax and a plastic baseball bat. The next day, the radio proclaims the birth of the People's Republic of Afghanistan. Tanks are wreathed in flowers, "doubtless following the prescription of some revolutionary handbook," my father...
...Later, the two Presidents address the Egyptian assembly about the Camp David agreements they'd worked on with the Israeli Prime Minister, the basis for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty to be signed later that month. Carter assures them that the goal is "comprehensive peace." President Sadat says the American President has come on a mission, "to wipe out from the lands of prophets and religions all threats and evils of war, so that peace can prevail in the land of peace." My father is lecturing at Cairo University. In our apartment we tack up posters bought in the bazaar...
When ignored, history tends to repeat itself. Three decades after my father worked to build a codified Afghan legal system, a new generation of Americans are still trying to loosen the hold of pashtunwali, or tribal code, on Afghanistan's legal culture. The 2008 signing of a SOFA between Iraq and the U.S. had Iranian hard-liners once again warning against American imperialism. The treaty "does not allow the slightest grounds for the Iraq people's rule over their country and turns this country into a medieval colony for America," wrote Hossein Shariatmadari in the influential Iranian newspaper Kayhan. While...
Going home is not yet an option in Afghanistan, though voices in Washington and other capitals have begun to mutter about it. With 30,000 more American troops headed to fight insurgents on the ground, the U.S., rightly or wrongly, is going to be there for a while yet. As in so much of the region, they remain stuck, mired in the history of clumsy foreign interventions...
...still struggling for growth, it's almost business as usual in Doha, the capital. Just ask Kevin Lamb, assistant dean of Carnegie Mellon Qatar. Located in Education City, a gleaming new complex under construction on the outskirts of the capital, his school is one of six American universities that have set up shop in the country over the past few years. Thanks to the deep pockets of the Qatari government, Lamb has more space in the college's new building than he knows how to use. "It's an administrator's dream," he says. Or ask Oliver Watson, director...