Back the Afghans, diplomat urges
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
Ann Wright, retired Army Reserve colonel and 15-year member of the U.S. diplomatic corps, was assigned to Hawai'i last year as a government liaison for the Asian Development Bank meetings and the days that followed. Her time in paradise was short-lived.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
On Dec. 5 she learned she was needed in Afghanistan. Wright had developed a reputation for knowing how to handle the opening and closing embassies in hot spots, and the beleaguered embassy in Kabul needed reopening.
Ann Wright, a 15-year member of the U.S. diplomatic corps, shows state worker Al Lardizabal how an Afghan hat should be worn.
On Dec. 13, at 2:30 a.m. Afghan time, she stepped from a C-130 plane onto the frozen tarmac at the Kabul airport. A man's voice in the darkness told her to follow closely behind the light he carried and be careful not to step to the right or left.
Darkness was used to provide cover for all international flights arriving in Kabul, Wright said. Walking single-file behind an escort was necessary because of the potential threat of land mines.
After decades of Afghan warfare, they regularly percolate to the surface.
Wright found the U.S. Embassy to be dusty and bird-infested, but also a time capsule that still held the correspondence — personal and professional — of the diplomats who had left it more than 12 years before.
It marked a time when the Berlin Wall became rubble, Soviet forces went home and the world's attention shifted to the struggles for democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. It also marked the moment the Taliban was freed to plot its Afghan reign of terror.
"It was filthy," Wright said of the embassy. "But it was a fascinating filth."
Wright, who was in Honolulu this week to clear up some of her work with the Asian Development Bank, spoke yesterday to a gathering of state workers. She returns to Kabul next week for a 30-day stint and will become deputy head of mission to Mongolia this summer.
During her time in the diplomatic corps, Wright worked at an embassy in Somalia — which closed after Army Rangers and Delta Force troops were routed in Mogadishu and the United States lost its taste for diplomatic efforts there — and opened an embassy in Sierra Leone.
During the past week in Hawai'i, she gave Afghanistan briefings to the governor's staff, East-West Center audiences and other groups, showing photos of the Afghans rebuilding. She also passed around a mujaheddin hat and a burka, the head-to-toe garment that used to be mandatory for women to wear in public.
Most women still wear the burka, Wright said, not out of religious modesty but because they are still fearful and unwilling to trust a second round of Western protection. They are also suspicious of the Northern Alliance, a group that raped and pillaged its way through much of Afghanistan before fighting alongside U.S. troops, said Wright.
Wright said that although the new Afghan government already shows signs of unraveling, she thinks the American public is too well versed in the country's history and the breeding of terrorism there to allow elected officials to abandon the Afghans again.
"Please, everybody," she said. "Keep your fingers crossed that, no matter what happens, the United States will stick with the people of Afghanistan."
Despite their fears for the future, young Afghan women are taking advantage of educational opportunities offered by Western governments, Wright said. They crowd into cold, roofless school buildings, sit on the floor next to tiny girls, and learn the rudiments of literacy denied them by Taliban leaders.
Wright said the reopened embassy was prone to rocket attacks, so at first she and her fellow civilians stayed in a three-room bunker. The bunker's toilet and shower were so overused that the Marine in charge of security said his hard-bitten troops would leave those luxuries to the diplomats.
The civilians smiled to themselves when, late at night, the bunker's bathroom gate squeaked open and the Marines sneaked in.
Before the embassy reopened, the compound was protected and maintained by Afghans employed by the U.S. government, Wright said. One of them was recently released from a Taliban prison, where he served 10 years as an accused spy. During the U.S. bombing campaign, buildings occupied by local embassy workers were set afire by the Taliban. The workers were forced to flee to Pakistan.
Making sure that citations to the Afghan workers were properly displayed in the embassy was a priority for the reopening, Wright said.
Reach Karen Blakeman at kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8090.
