Yes. When I worked for United Press International Afghanistan was one of the countries I reported from. When I worked for United Press International Afghanistan was one of the countries I reported from in that part of the world. I had been there three times before Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin overthrew Prime Minister Noor Mohammad Taraki in a bloody coup in September, 1979. On Christmas Eve of that same year the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, overthrew Hafizullah Amin, and installed Deputy Prime Minister Babrak Karmal as prime minister. Hafizullah Amin was killed. I reported on these bloody events and the ensuing civil war that began as American-backed Islamic fundamentalist rebels fought to drive out the Soviet Union. On my first few visits, Afghanistan was in a time of relative peace. The capital, Kabul, was a city filled with beautiful gardens, music, poetry, and the most hospitable people in the world. Many women wore their hair and their skirts fashionably short. On subsequent visits fear became ever more dominant as the main feature of life in Kabul. I left the region in 1982, and have been haunted by the plight of the Afghan people, the terrible suffering they have endured ever since.
In 1985 I returned to the refugee camps in Pakistan, where about 25 % of the population of Afghanistan had gone to escape wars that lasted 20 years. On my return in 1985 I worked on a contract arrangement with the US Agency for International Development doing research on women’s literacy. The suffering was even more intense among the Afghans, and their plight has steadily worsened. I hope that Hamid Karzai’s rule will turn the terror into peace, and the rubble into a rebuilt nation.