Afghan experience counsels caution

Last week across my TV, the banner read, "U.S. troops fighting in Gardez." Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd ever see such an announcement. Gardez, Afghanistan, and this middle-aged Hoosier -- what's the connection, you ask?\nSome 34 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan, the director told me my assignment was Gardez. Another volunteer and I were to be the first PCVs sent to Gardez. We were primarily to teach English as a foreign language and just be paragons of American virtue generally.\nWhen first told I was to go to Gardez, I wondered why they would send me to a Mexican town. But an interpreter told me that it was a Pushtu word meaning place of dust. Being rather quick-minded at 22, I quickly saw a problem. They're sending us into a Pushtun area when they trained us in Farsi -- Pushtu and Farsi being the two major languages of Afghanistan. What was a Pushtun and what was Paktia, the province where we'd find this place of dust?\nThe next day we began to find out. Despite offering three times the going rate for a cook, it took us more than two days to hire a cook to go with us to Gardez. Most of the cooks we interviewed, upon hearing where we were going, laughed and said no way. \nNot only did the unemployed cooks of Kabul not want to go to Gardez, but our Afghan language and cultural instructors, with whom we became friends, didn't either. One of them put it succinctly to us when offering his condolences regarding our assignment: "Those people are crazy down there. Too violent."\nYet in nearly two years of working in Gardez, we seldom saw this side of the Paktian Pushtuns. We experienced instead a very hospitable and generous people, readily amused by the tall white and short black Americans who said undecipherable things in the area's backup language. Yes, every local, besides our teaching counterparts, had a rifle, bandoleer and a dagger. Yes, the same coal black eyes that twinkled with warmth one moment could blaze with hatred the next. Yes, there were lines not to be crossed.\nTherein lies the lesson for today's battles in the Gardez area: Be careful not to fire up the Paktian Pushtuns. Rounding up or killing al Qaeda would probably not rouse the local tribesmen. Doing the same to Afghan Taliban gets a bit trickier. Are they pure Taliban, orphaned students who lack tribal relations, or are they Pushtun tribesmen who affiliated with the Taliban and who have tribal protections? Killing the latter will touch off the Pushtunwali, the code by which Pushtuns live. It is a code that requires generosity, hospitality and revenge for harm done to members of one's clan.\nIf we are not careful about our targets in Paktia, then, like the Soviets, we may be left with either a willingness to commit genocide or an undignified exit.\nIn Gardez we know that the town elders and the elders from the surrounding villages reject the governor sent by Kabul. The situation will turn very bad if we confuse the hunt for al Qaeda members with forcing a Kabuli government upon the local tribesmen. I have been in a room with these mountain village chiefs and in a room (a large nightclub) with known made guys, and with all due respect to the Youngstown, Ohio, Mafia, the Paktian elders were far scarier.\nBe very careful in a place that other Afghans describe as "too violent"