The Foreign Service Journal, October 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2015 29 been worn by the Prophet Muhammad—and waved before a crowd of thousands by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar during his rise to power in the 1990s. Our efforts at outreach followed in the footsteps of those who preceded us. But now, more than a decade after we had helped Afghans overthrow the Taliban, our task had evolved to paving the way for our own pending departure while dispelling any sense of “abandonment.” We told our local contacts that it was now time for them to write their own narrative and achieve their nation’s destiny. America and its allies would continue to lend a helping hand where possible, but it was now up to Afghans to fight for themselves. As our own casualties declined, the butcher’s bill for the Afghan security forces increased. By early 2013, four out of every five soldiers killed on the battlefield were Afghan, not American, Australian or Romanian. Civilian casualties also reflected this grim trend that con- tinued long after I departed. Parvez Najib, Governor Wesa’s chief of staff, was killed in March 2014, barely six months after I left Kandahar—blown up by a suicide bomber at the Shah Wali shrine in Khakrez district, west of Kandahar. Eight months after that the deputy governor, an acclaimed 32-year-old poet named Qadim Patyal, was murdered in a Kandahar classroom, leaving small children behind. I had often met with him. His final Facebook post was a couplet against hate. w I still don’t know how I escaped a violent death during the Taliban attack in Zabul on April 6, 2013, surrounded as I was by death and violence at every turn. Five of us flew up early that morning to meet our civilian colleagues on the Zabul Provincial Reconstruction Team, discuss education issues with Governor Naseri and visit a local school. Two members of our group were from Kabul, three from Kandahar. I was the oldest. Anne Smedinghoff was only 25, young for an FSO who was Once, an imam who was sympathetic to the Taliban embraced me as I departed, saying, “I have no voice and no one listens to me.”