A workshop-like discussion for writing students of the differences, similarities, and interrelationships between writing fiction and writing memoir, with a focus on strategies for discovering the story arc in real experiences and for tapping techniques of narrative fiction to bring memoir to life; but also on the issues and strategies involved in tapping real life experience to feed fiction.

A look at oil and resource issues—their role in recent, current, and likely future wars, followed by the prospects, problems, and implications of moving toward a sustainable society.

In Western schools, the standard world history traces a development from Mesopotamia and Egypt, through Greece and Rome, and then to the Dark Ages, which is followed by the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modern democratic nations. Ansary contrasts this to the alternate narrative he learned growing up: world history as seen from the perspective of the Islamic world, a perspective that places Islam at the center of history, regards the Dark Ages as one of the brighter ages, and sees the Crusades as one of history’s pivotal turning points. This lecture explores the relativity of historical narratives and proposes a world historical story from a global perspective.

Beginning with a look at the historical unfolding of Islam in its first millenium, Ansary moves on to explore the reformist currents of the last two centuries and the challenge Islamic thinkers face in trying to formulate a theology relevant to industrial modernism. A discussion of intellectual currents in the Islamic world is analyzed in the context of the Muslim experience with imperialism and its own growing political impotence.

Ansary discusses what it was like to grow up in Afghanistan, but with one foot already in America, contrasting life in a highly conservative Islamic society to that in post-modern United States and exploring, along the way, such thorny topics as the burqa and the position of women in Islamic society. Stories from a bi-cultural childhood illuminate how and why the worldview of Afghans typically differ from those of Americans.

Ansary moves from a long view of Afghanistan in the context of world history to his own experiences in Afghanistan after the events of September 11. He zooms in from the demise of the Silk Road through the Cold War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the rise of the Taliban. After exploring the origins of this group and its ties to Al Qaeda, he zeros in on Afghanistan today, discussing the direction of the social turmoil there, the factions and interests competing for power, and the implications of events in this country for Pakistan, Iran, the former Soviet Republics, the broader region, and, most importantly, people in the United States.

(Written in January 2002 for Salon.com)

Some of the language I hear in conversations about women’s roles in post-Taliban Afghanistan makes me nervous. I believe misconceptions may have crept into public perceptions on this issue.

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Terrorism is more like crime than it is like war. Attacking terrorism by making war on other countries is like attacking crime by bombing New York, Detroit, and other high crime cities.

Gulmamadak the Great 
An Afghan folktale retold: Gulmamad is a grown man, but everyone in the village–even his wife–insists on calling him Gulmamadak, which means “Little Gulmamad the Cute.” So Gulmamadak leave the village to do great deeds and gain some respect. Reading level: 4th to 5th grade.

Holiday Histories: The Complete Set This 12-book series, written at the first-grade level, uses various political holidays as windows for presenting relevant topics in history. For example, Labor Day provides a frame for telling the story of the Industrial REvolution and the labor movement–all in 26 pages with no more than 25 words per page.

Native Americans (Set) This ten-book set, written at the second grade level, covers the various Native American cultures of North America, with a description of the environment of each region, the cultures that flourished there before the advent of the Europeans, the consequences of their encounters with Europeans, and what is happening with the Native Americans of that region today. Each book draws strong connection between the environment and native culture of each region, but emphasizes that Native Americans are modern people existing today. For example: Arctic Peoples looks at the people of the far north, the Inuit and the Aleuts.

Cool Collections: Insects is part of a series for first graders that uses various types of collections–stamps, dolls, natural objects, and so on–as a tool for introducing children to critical thinking skills such as cassifying and categorizing.

Alien Alert is part of a series of educational comic books called Adventures Plus. Each page tells a story but also has an embedded activity. To move from one page to the next, readers need to complete the activity. The stories are written at the 5th grade level, and the skills are coded to those in the Texas and national curriculum standards for that grade level. Alien Alert, for example, focuses on vocabulary skills such as prefixes and antonyms. The Case of the Missing Millie, by contrast, emphasizes real-life and study skills such as reading maps and bus schedules and tracking expenses.

Grammar Handbook Is there such a thing as a grammer handbook that makes you laugh? There’s one. This one. Goes with Adventures Plus.

Science All Around Us: Matter presents basic concepts about matter with simple experiements first-graders can perform to comprehend such concepts in physics as weight, denisty, volume, and precipitation.

The Lost Boy and Spiders from Outer Space are high-interest low-readability novels for students of high school age reading at a third-grade level or below.

Around 2006, in the race between Chaos and Order,  Chaos began to win the day.   Since then, the situation in Afghanistan has taken a turn for the oh-so-much-worse. Suicide bombing has skyrocketed in the cities. Civilian authority has tattered in the countryside. Drug lords and warlords are growing ever stronger. Economically, a majority of the people are actually worse off now than they were in the days of the Taliban. The United Nations’ recently published annual list of worst places to live puts Afghniastan second from the bottom.  It’s the first time the country has made the bottom-ten list since 1996, which means it is worse off now than it was at the peak of Taliban rule, in 2000. 

I’m always amazed that people who argue for more and more troops represent their view as hard-headed realism. In 2003, the United States had about 13,000 troops in the country, all concentrated along the border with Pakistan, their mission quite dogmatically defined as being to hunt down terrorists and kill them.  At that time, the violence in Afghansitan was mostly concentrated along the border. The rest of the country looked poised for a normalization of life and for economic recovery.  

In the years that followed, the troop level rose to 18,000, then 25,000, and then 40,000. Now it stand as 68,000. Meanwhile,  people working in Afghanistan for private WEstern military countractors, in tandem with U.S. forces, has grown to about 70,000, bringing the total to nearly 140,000. Add another 30,000 or so NATO troops from other countries and you find that foreign troops in Afghanistan now exceed the number the Soviet Union had there at its peak, and they are operating in much the same way as the Soviets did, from garrisons surrounded by rural insurgents and from cities that are increasingly like garrisons.

How is this strategy working? Well–beheadings are up; suicide bombings are up; insurgent activity, which had spread to nearly three-quarters of the country’s province by 2007, now infects 90% of Afghan territory.  All the foreign troop increases in Afghanistan have resulted in more and more people joining regressive movements (usually referred to by the umbrella term “Taliban”) that vow to take Afghanistan back to the social norms of a thousand years ago, movements that have a glamor to them in Afghanistan because they purport to fight foreign occupation.

It’s time for U.S. policymakers (and the U.S. public) to stop asking: “How many troops” and start asking “What should the troops be doing in Afghanistan?”

Here are some of my recent commentaries on Afghanistan. 

Social Fabric:  President Obama is huddling with his advisors to discuss whether more troops will win the war in Afghanistan, but looking at Afghanistan as a war to be won may be an error. Rather, this is a socially and psychologically damaged society and the question is really: How to restore social fabric of this wounded society. An op-ed at CNN.com.

Eight Years Later:  In 2001, the US launched a war to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan and eliminate al Qaeda bases there. What has been achieved and what military strategy should be adopted now? Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan discusses the issue with retired Brigadier General Mark Kimmit and me. Go to Youtube1 and Youtube 2.

Quagmire? Is America wading into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan? If so, should the Obama administration pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan? If not, what should the administration do instead?  An op-ed at SF Gate.

Afghan Star. A new movie documents the competition in Kabul among Afghan musicians to win a coveted prize on the television show Afghan Star,  modeled after Britian’s Pop Idol and America’s  American Idol. What does Afghan Star tell us about Afghan society today? A conversation with Jeremy Hatch at the Rumpus Room.

History Lesson: A thousand years of Afghan history in 30 minutes—this is video of a speech I gave in the spring of 2009 at the Veteran’s for Peace conference in Seattle. A video at peppersprayproductions

• Afghan Friends Network, 68 Ramona Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94103 . (A group of Afghans and Americans working together on small-scale projects. Currently, they are training teachers and purchasing science supplies for schools in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province.)
• IFDC P.O. Box 2040, Muscle Shoals, Alabama 35662 This 30-year-old non-profit works in the world’s poorest countries to promote sustainable agricultural productivity through environmentally sound technology. It’s a terrific outfit with many success stories to its credit, and it’s intensively active in Afghanistan.
• Help the Afghan Children, 8603 Westwood Center Drive, Suite 230, Vienna, Virginia 22182. (Founded and operated by Afghans, active for many years, has proven itself with deeds. Check them out at www.HelpTheAfghanChildren.org)

By Todd Leopold, CNN
June 27, 2002
“He sent the note to a few friends. The next thing he knew, he was hearing from people halfway across the world. Strangers called his house. The networks got in touch. Ansary, a columnist for Encarta, had struck a nerve.”

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http://www.afghanistannews.net
Up to the minute headline news about Afghanistan.

http://www.afgha.com/ Lnks to pictures of personalities, maps, new stories, Afghan community forums, and other interesting stuff.

http://www.afghana.com/Education/News.htm Streaming audio, news in Dari and Pushto as well as English, cartoons, magazine articles about Afghanistan published in other countries, links to sites such as AlterNet and more.

http://www.afghanmagazine.com
Website of Lemaar-Aftaab, a now-defunct online magazine published by Afghan-Americans in Fremont, California (but previous issues are archived here).