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REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 1 TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I’m Tom Putnam, the Acting Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Museum. On behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my colleagues here at the Library and Library Foundation, I want to welcome you to this evening’s forum. For those of you who have attended events here in the past, our former Director, Deborah Leff, has taken a new position as the President of the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, D.C. Deborah made a lasting impact on the library and will be sorely missed. Kennedy Library Forums would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors, including lead sponsor, Bank of America, along with Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, and Corcoran Jennison. We are also indebted to our media sponsors, WBUR, which broadcasts all of our forums on Sunday evenings at 8 p.m., The Boston Globe, and NECN. Tonight’s forum is a homecoming of sorts. In establishing the Peace Corps, President Kennedy recognized that while the United States could not discontinue the training of soldiers, it also needed to train young men and women to be ambassadors of peace. After graduating from college in the early 1980s, Sarah Chayes responded to President Kennedy’s call, living and working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. Distinguishing her service was the fact that 25 years earlier, her father, the late Abraham Chayes, served as legal adviser in the Kennedy administration, playing an important REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 2 role in sustaining a more peaceful world by helping to resolve the crises in Berlin and Cuba, and to facilitate the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And so, it is a special honor to welcome Sarah Chayes to the Library that is dedicated to the President for whom her father so nobly worked and where her father’s papers from that period are housed and made available to the public. After years of reporting for National Public Radio in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, Sarah Chayes was stationed for many years in Paris, where she chronicled issues and trends in France that resonate in the United States. And she writes, “… filed a seemingly endless series of stories about [pause] food.” Shaken by the terrorist attacks in 2001, she wondered whether that event might goad the United States to “be what we kept saying we were, the champions of human dignity, the exemplars of public participation in government, of government acting in good faith, the mentors of people struggling to be free.” Wanting to make her own contribution to those ideals, she called her NPR editor to volunteer to report on events unfolding on the Afghan/Pakistani border. And then, as the Taliban fell, she entered Kandahar, their former stronghold, where she has remained ever since. Her new book, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban , is an engrossing account of her experience reporting on the political reconstruction of Afghanistan and her decision in late 2001 to leave NPR to REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 3 join Qayum Karzai, the brother of the ruling president, to create a non- government organization dedicated to rebuilding Afghan civil society. Her efforts constructing new schools and repairing villages brought her into direct conflict with Afghan warlords, made her the recipient of numerous death threats, and led her to form a devastating critique of US policy in Afghanistan, which we will here more tonight. The Punishment of Virtue is on sale in our bookstore, and Ms. Chayes will sign copies after tonight’s conversation. Joining the discussion with insights from his own reporting from Afghanistan is Sebastian Junger, author of the bestselling books A Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont . He has worked as a special correspondent in Afghanistan in 1996 and 2000. He later reported on the fall of Kabul. And most recently, last December, he was embedded with US troops in Afghanistan. In addition, he has reported on civil wars, war crimes, and human rights abuses in Liberia, Kosovo, Cypress, Bosnia, and Kashmir. After inviting Mr. Junger, based on his exceptional war reporting, we discovered that he and Sarah Chayes were childhood friends from the age of five, growing up in Belmont. And we’re honored that Sebastian Junger’s parents, Ellen and Miguel Junger, and Sarah Chayes’ mother, Antonia Chayes, are here with us in the audience this evening. Moderating tonight’s forum is Jessica Stern, one of the country’s foremost experts on terrorism. In the mid-1990s, she worked for the US National REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 4 Security Council developing policies to reduce the threat of nuclear smuggling and terrorism. She is the author of The Ultimate Terrorist and currently teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Five years ago this week when we, like the rest of the nation, searched for answers on how our country should respond to the terrorist attacks in New York City, we turned to Jessica Stern to speak at a forum such as this one, and we are pleased to do so again tonight. Dr. Stern. [applause] JESSICA STERN: Thank you very much. Many people here are familiar with the two extraordinary writers that we are lucky enough to hear from tonight. Most of us know Sarah Chayes’ voice from her days on NPR, reporting about atrocities often, not just food, in various parts of the world. And now, she has produced an extraordinary book, The Punishment of Virtue . And while Sebastian Junger is mainly known for his bestselling books, including Fire and The Perfect Storm , he would prefer to be known as an intrepid reporter, who traveled with Ahmed Shah Massoud before he was murdered in September 2001, and who continues to travel in Afghanistan. Both of them are truly extraordinary human beings. I am utterly in awe of both of you. I have to tell you that. They are probably the two people in America who know the most about Afghanistan. And the amazing thing is that they are both from Boston and that they are childhood friends. And we REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 5 are so lucky that they want to come and speak to their hometown audience, including their families, both of whom I know. They both understood that September 11th changed the world in a fundamental way. In fact, they saw signs of that change even before the September 11th strikes. They were not content to sit in Paris or New York or Belmont, perhaps to their mothers’ dismay, and cover the story from there. Nor were either of them content to cover the unfolding story, as most war correspondents do, from the safety of their hotels with brief forays into the world they write about. Not only did Sarah Chayes go out of her hotel, she stayed out. Sarah shows us how, through a series of tragic mistakes, the US government has allowed, even abetted, the return to power of the corrupt military commanders as well as the return of the Taliban forces supported by America’s ally, Pakistan. Both Sebastian and Sarah will have a lot to tell us about the role of Pakistan and also about the role of the war in Iraq in the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan. The final words of Sarah’s book are, I think, words to live by -- not just if you're Sarah Chayes living in Afghanistan, but for all of us who aim to do good in this world of any kind. She tells us, “It doesn’t really matter if there is a chance you will succeed. You have to keep trying. That’s what matters. You have to try. You have to give it your all.” Thank you, Sarah, for the extraordinary inspiration you provide. We look forward to hearing from both of you about your recent experiences in Afghanistan. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 6 And I want to start by asking you, Sarah, how do you know about Afghanistan? How did this happen that you are here to tell us about it? SARAH CHAYES: Yes, I guess it’s sort of full disclosure. I was an NPR reporter assigned to cover the conflict against the Taliban. And I had been feeling a little bit of discomfort with reporting anyway, feeling partly that, you know, it’s time to shut up already and do something. And I also had a problem with the kind of, do a story and come out, and do another story, and the lack of continuity. I was beginning to feel very strongly that, in reporting, as well as in real life, like policy, continuity is really critical. But then again, as you pointed out, 9/11 was such a kind of earth-shattering event, and almost you could hear the plate tectonics of history shifting. And Afghanistan was where it was happening. Afghanistan was where history was taking place, and it seemed like this was the place to stay. So I ended up working for President Karzai’s older brother. It was President Karzai’s uncle who kind of said, “Wouldn’t you come back and help us?” And I said, “Yes,” before I even registered the question. And so, it was a very odd way to end up staying there, because I wasn’t just a regular development or humanitarian aide worker. I was working for the President’s older brother, who explicitly gave us a mandate to involve ourselves in issues of policy.