On September 11, 2001 Megan K. Stack, the 25-year-old Houston bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, was in Paris visiting her sister. After the terrorist attacks on that day, the Times asked if she would be willing to go to Afghanistan. For the next six years, before becoming the paper’s Moscow bureau chief, she reported on Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel and the West Bank. Her new book, Every Man in this Village is a Liar, describes all these places with a unique comparative perspective and moral engagement. n+1 spoke to her over Skype from Moscow.
"There is always soil in the air; flashlights reveal this at night in shaking gold cones as one meanders over powder-fine stuff called moondust to a portajohn thick with the smell of ammonia, so acrid you can taste its bitterness in your sinuses and on the back of your tongue. You taste it as you try not to bite down and disturb the dirt that has settled on your teeth in just that brief walk from your bed late on a chilly low-illume night."
"Quarter moon, low illume, means you can hardly see anything without a flashlight, and flashlights draw all sorts of attention. Full moon, high illume, gives enough light for bad guys to do their bad stuff at night, for the most part without being caught. I think these are something like fundamental concepts in the strategy and practice of war. I just hadn’t given them much thought before this summer."
"In practicing with my weapon and becoming quite good at it again, I began feeling the relentless urge to buy an assault rifle when I return to the States. I knew right off that it would be awkward at best trying to find a place for it in the home I share with my wife. And yet I wanted it anyway, had to have it. After a week, that spell and its wash of brain chemicals wore off forgettably. I consider it today and laugh."
![NOTE: The attached is largely the result of no electricity and no internet.
Location: a firebase somewhere in southern Afghanistan [precise location undisclosable]
2215h, Thursday (I think it was when I first experienced this)
Read the rest of Jonathan Watson’s “In the Heart of the Taliban, Fortified Soundly”](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/nplusonemag/1423876916/1/tumblr_lb097ezvtt1qatgne)
NOTE: The attached is largely the result of no electricity and no internet.
Location: a firebase somewhere in southern Afghanistan [precise location undisclosable]
2215h, Thursday (I think it was when I first experienced this)
Read the rest of Jonathan Watson’s “In the Heart of the Taliban, Fortified Soundly”
