A wedding at Lake Qarga, Kabul, in The Black Tulip.

Afghanistan has no film industry, which makes a new movie called The Black Tulip, about good people seeking some kind of normal life in modern Kabul despite the constant threat of violence, destruction and despair, doubly dangerous to have made and inestimably valuable to watch. Filmed entirely in a country where women’s rights are still tested daily and cameras are so verboten that even a tourist’s throwaway Instamatic is an invitation to trouble—and produced, written and directed by a woman, no less!—this is a gripping experience as politically enlightening and emotionally involving as it is educational and beautiful to look at. 

Writer-director Sonia Nassery Cole is an Afghan-American activist and filmmaker whose family fled to the U.S. to escape the invasion of Soviet troops in 1979, when she was 14. Three years later, having experienced first-hand the repression by a radical government as a child, she began her mission to free her country from tyranny—from the Russians and from the Taliban—by enlisting the aid of President Ronald Reagan and the United Nations. Working throughout the 1980s to aid the Afghan resistance movement, she raised millions to rebuild the lives of Afghan refugees and established the nonprofit Afghanistan World Foundation to provide care for land-mine victims and build a women and children’s hospital. With the new resurgence of Taliban terrorism, Ms. Cole’s role as an activist has accelerated to such a degree that I have no idea how she found the time to make a feature-length movie. When the leading actress had her foot amputated prior to production—according to the director, though this claim has been contradicted by Latif Ahmadi, head of the Afghan Film as well as the movie’s local casting director—Ms. Cole took over the role herself, and she is wonderful in it. Somehow, despite constant death threats and a bomb blast at her Kabul hotel, she finished The Black Tulip. The result is a remarkable film that shows the cultural heritage and everyday values of a courageous people united in a quest for family, faith and freedom.

The movie begins in 2001 with the retreat of the Taliban after 30 years of war, five of them under their deadly rule. Kabul is liberated and ready to savor freedom at last. A vital, arresting portrait of a modern city emerges, replete with pollution and gridlock traffic, but leavened by the fact that it is a place where a child can still laugh while flying a kite. The Mansouri family, guided by a matriarchal force named Farishta (beautifully played by director Cole) and her strong, devoted husband Hadar, will do anything to keep their two children from ever going back to a refugee camp. During the Soviet occupation, Farishta watched as her father was murdered and his book store, The Poet’s Corner, a symbol of literature and learning, was torched. Now, in the spirit of their new happiness and hope, the family reopens the old shop as a restaurant with the same name. Serving good food on linen tablecloths with crystal wineglasses, with a miked stage for poets and artists to read poems and sing songs that have long been condemned, The Poet’s Corner take two is an overnight sensation. The Mansouris are soon catering meals for the American military base, while the artists, whose voices have been silenced for years, form lines outside the door—two facts that also attract the attention of dark Taliban forces that still exist in the shadows, waiting to pounce. In no time, mysterious government “inspectors” arrive, offering “protection” from hostile elements. There’s more sadness and death on the way.

But The Black Tulip is not a war picture. It’s about the resilience of admirable people in a changing world. Girls still gossip and flirt. Students still wear burkas but they also carry backpacks ordered on the internet. Boys still play the centuries-old game of Buzkashi on horseback like the ancient Afghan tribes, but they do it in tight blue jeans. In the Mansouri family, Farishta’s beautiful, 24-year-old sister Belkis may come from an old respected family, but she is intelligent and independent, with progressive ideas of her own, while Akram Zabuli, her handsome, contemporary fiancé, has a father so steeped in tradition that he pleads for his wife to wear the old-fashioned burka and cover her face. Akram’s father believes a woman’s place is in the home. Conversely, Belkis’s family fully understands and encourages her goal—to finish medical school and open her own clinic. While these differences are resolved, the traditions of an Afghan wedding in a mountain village overlooking the rugged scenery of the countryside—still beautiful even after years of war—unite everyone with hauntingly beautiful music and festive costumes. But heartbreak ensues when the ceremony is disrupted by terrorists, and peace-loving Hadar is then forced to compromise his own pacifist views to take a stand—to save his restaurant and his family’s future.

Despite the inevitable tragedies that befall the Mansouris, the movie ends with a surge of optimism. Both sides of every issue are examined—old loyalties vs. new compromises, Western ideas vs. Islamic principles, the resentment of American presence vs. the ensuing fear that if the American military leaves, chaos will follow. The narrative is fictional, but rooted in truths that are self-evident. From the leading characters to the tertiary roles of dedicated waiters and customers to evil Taliban insurgents, the actors are perfect, without a false move in sight. Like The Poet’s Corner restaurant, Sonia Nassery Cole’s screenplay is a megaphone for freedom of expression. The title The Black Tulip is a stretch. There are no tulips in sight, black or any other color, and if anyone explained it in passing, I missed the subtitles. Consulting the film’s publicist, a fount of information, I have learned that the black tulip, blooming under the harshest conditions in the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountain regions of Afghanistan, is a symbol for the nation’s spirit. Growing amid ice and stone, the flower, much like the people, is able to prosper and survive against all odds. These are qualities the unconquered citizens of the country have possessed for centuries. The film is a deeply heartfelt experience that addresses the struggles of everyday people in a strange land most of us know nothing about. You will not go away unmoved. See it, and learn something.

rreed@observer.com

THE BLACK TULIP

Running Time 116 minutes

Written by Sonia Nassery Cole and David Michael O’Neill

Directed by Sonia Nassery Cole

Starring Haji Gul Aser, Sonia Nassery Cole and Walid Amini

3/4

The long-forgotten Erie Canal. (The Atlantic)

Brooklyn architect David Grider had an interesting rebuttal to The Observer's story last week about the need for greater infrastructure investment in the country and the region, which challenges many assumptions about rail travel and even reminds us the Erie Canal was not the super success everyone likes to remember it as.

If Amtrak can barely manage to run conventional trains in the NE corridor how can we expect a high-speed rail network in the car-addicted hinterlands to be anything other than a pork-lined boondoggle?

And in that light, I was reminded of the Erie Canal, which must be remembered as two separate projects: the first, DeWitt Clinton's vital link, was unquestionably a triumph and in keeping with the grand spirit of Doing that we seem to be missing these days. However, there was a second phase, the widening of the Erie Canal, which was an absolute money pit, the worst form of government pork, done in the face of clear railroad dominance/superiority and in spite of the calls of leading civil engineers of the time.

My hunch is that high-speed rail falls into the latter category but, more to the point, I think the view of past "triumphs" is (as I'm sure you're aware) more nuanced than one often hears. We all know the stories of Moses' destructive paths thru the City and mass-transit resistant parkway bridges; how many of us hear about the failures (such as the widening of the Erie Canal) that stole just as much from the public weal if, albeit, in a less obvious manner?

Finally, your article left me thinking of a Moses-scaled project that the American people have funded over the past decade: how much infrastructure has been built/destroyed/built again with Yankee dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Talk about a stake in the ground....

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

"It creates a sense of urgency on behalf of the Afghan people to take security into their own hands. I think it's a political target date, I don't think it's a military target date," she said. She added that it would have similar effects in Pakistan.

"It also puts pressure on the Pakistan government to really root out these safe havens and understand that we're not there forever. If they care about their security that they have every interest in the world to make sure these operations are successful now."

She noted that having a withdrawal date strategy was also effective in Iraq.  And although she conceded that the Iraq War was in many ways different from Afghanistan, she said that the timetable caused local leaders in northern Iraq to become responsible for security on their own, thereby forcing out terrorists. "I support it because it's a good tactic," she said.

The date will also give Obama another chance to assess his partnership with Karzai's government and Pakistani leadership, she said. She stressed the importance of their cooperation in building functional, secure, drug trade- and corruption-free economies for the region.

Gillibrand was joined by Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman on the tour, which included meetings with Afghanistan President Karzai and Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani, in addition to General Petraeus and Ambassador Eikenberry.  McCain and Graham have both since advocated for a later withdrawal date.

Gillibrand said one of the trip's goals was to help President Karzai find ways to root out corruption. "Creating a fundamental rule of lawis one of the most important priorities we have," she said. Currently, people are too afraid to prosecute corrupt government and security officials because prosecutors and judges are often the targets of violence, according to Gillibrand.

According to Gillibrand, Prime Minister Gilani told the senators he is committed to preventing a new generation of terrorists from being bred across the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Gillibrand had a hopeful report of the Helmand province of Afghanistan, which has been peaceful for over a year. There she saw farmers distributing winter wheat to plant and visited a new school servicing 30-40 local boys.

"These areas are the birthplace of the Taliban and they have actually built markets and a school and have brought legitimate farming to the local economy," she said. "You could really see what the future of Afghanistan could be."

A “straightforward reported piece,” Time’s spokesman protested after an Observer investigation explored whether the shocking cover story constituted a questionable strain of advocacy journalism, compromised by bureau chief Aryn Baker's likely profits from NATO-enabled war contracts and ties to an Afghan minister's $100 million investment project. Last week Time's defense of its work as cooly objective seemed at odds with editor Richard Stengel's concession, in an Aug. 2 interview with CBS's Katie Couric, that the no-nose piece carried a “strong point of view.”

One team whose point of view will remain unshaken by the Bibi Aisha report are analysts for the CIA’s “Red Cell," an office created after 9/11 by the Director of Intelligence and charged with finding "outside-the-box" solutions to problems. The group's brainstorming sessions to shore up war support were exposed in last month's dump of 76,000 files by WikiLeaks hacker Julian Assange.

Aryn Baker, like a number of others in the embedded press corps, shrugged off the material in the leak. Writing in Time, she contrasted the WikiLeaks files with real war reporting, calling the secret memos unreliable. “The data are raw, unfiltered and unqualified,” she wrote in a Time piece exploring reports that the Pakistan intelligence service is working against NATO, and said that on this issue, “[t]aken as a whole, they are about as useful as Googling...”

Okay. But one item that Time has left you to Google for yourself — perhaps owing to its rawness — is the March 11, 2010 memorandum from the Red Cell problem-solving group. This time the issue at hand was faltering public support of the war and the solution was promoting women's horror stories. Subtitling their memo "Why Counting On Apathy Might Not Be Enough," the agents warned that sending more soldiers to Afghanistan threatened to outrage the French and German publics. “Indifference might turn into active hostility,” they wrote, especially if soldiers and civilians die. The fix? Instead of using generals in desert camo as the face of the NATO mission, use oppressed Afghan women. These victims could make “ideal messengers,” the analysts wrote, “in humanizing the ISAF [NATO International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory.” The report also urged that these stories be pitched to TV shows with large female audiences.

After the WikiLeaks dump, the Red Cell’s phone numbers given in the memo no longer worked and the Red Cell could not be reached for comment.

The CIA's past work with Time and other periodicals figured heavily in a 1977 Rolling Stone cover story by Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. During the Cold War, he reported, more than 400 journalists, including Time founder Henry Luce, had worked with the CIA. One senior CIA official, William B. Bader, had told senators visiting Langley in March 1976 that “there is quite an incredible spread of relationships...You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are Agency people at the management level.”

“From the Agency’s perspective,” Bernstein noted, “there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community.” Times have changed, of course (as has Time). But as Bernstein pointed out, when incoming CIA director George H.W. Bush pulled the plug on paid relationships with journalists, Bush noted that nothing was stopping reporters from volunteering free favors to the government — and that such aid would even be “welcome.”

Attention from Time helped Aisha win a trip from a Kabul women’s shelter last Thursday to Los Angeles, where she will undergo reconstructive surgery with help from the Grossman Burn Foundation. But Time’s “point of view” story, while perhaps the most strident in connecting her mutilation to NATO’s military enemies, was no scoop. Months earlier, Aisha had told her appalling story to The Daily Beast and ABC’s Diane Sawyer. While Taliban have refused credit for the young woman’s mutilation, it turns out the group’s spokesmen freely admit that their justice system includes other human rights abuses. Mullah Dahoud, a commander, made himself available to the U.K. Times to say of one woman, convicted of adultery, that the Taliban “whipped her in front of all the local people to show them an example. Then we shot her.”

But there was more than a question mark missing from the Time story, which stressed potentially disastrous consequences if the U.S. pursues negotiations with the Taliban. The piece lacked a crucial personal disclosure on Baker's part: Her husband, Tamim Samee, an Afghan-American IT entrepreneur, is a board member of an Afghan government minister's $100 million project advocating foreign investment in Afghanistan, and has run two companies, Digistan and Ora-Tech, that have solicited and won development contracts with the assistance of the international military, including private sector infrastructure projects favored by U.S.-backed leader Hamid Karzai.

In other words, the Time reporter who wrote a story bolstering the case for war appears to have benefited materially from the NATO invasion. Reached by The Observer, a Time spokesperson revealed that the magazine has just reassigned Baker to a new country as part of a normal rotation, though he declined to say where.

While Baker, traveling in Italy, did not respond to Observer.com's request for comment, Time defended its cover story as "neither in support of, nor in opposition to, the U.S. war effort" but rather a "straightforward reported piece." Time added that "Aryn Baker's husband has no connection to the U.S. military, has never solicited business from them and has no financial stake in the U.S. presence in Afghanistan whatsoever."

But two years before his wedding to the Time bureau chief, Samee told Radio Free Europe in 2006 that Digistan — apparently the local arm of an international IT operation, run from a villa in Kabul — was discovering for itself that the "opportunities are definitely here" in the telecom field, thanks to "quite a bit of involvement from ISAF [NATO's International Security Assistance Force, commanded until recently by Stanley Gen. McChrystal] and coalition forces." The same year, he told Entrepreneur: "You won't find another place that offers so many opportunities" and the AP that profits "have been higher than I expected." Three years later, Digistan was advertising for sales staff skilled in "Government and Military Procurement," reflecting the company's connection to the cloudy world of NATO-enabled civilian wartime contracts.

Baker announced her engagement to Samee in a September 24, 2008, e-mail to friends. "Stop the Presses!!" had become the subject line by the time I received the forward from a succession of mutual acquaintances (we were J-school classmates at Berkeley a decade ago). She said the two had been dating "since last July, when we went hiking on a trip together through the Afghan Pamirs," and invited recipients to an engagement party in Central Asia. "For those of you not in Kabul," she added, "we will be sorry to miss you, but we also understand that travel to a war zone may not be in your plans." Two months later, the ceremony itself was held in Baker's native L.A.

For her work in Central Asia, which has included surviving the 2007 attack on Islamabad's Red Mosque by the Pakistan army, Baker has been praised by her boss Rick Stengel, who gushed to Marketwatch last November, "If I were President Obama, I'd ask Aryn Baker what she thinks. She's dazzling."

When the war started, Samee, then working as a manager for a telecom firm in northern Virginia, had followed what investigative journalist Pratap Chatterjee, author of Halliburton's Army, calls a typical pattern for Beltway-area members of the Afghan diaspora, whose involvement was encouraged by the Pentagon. Nothing nefarious about it, Chatterjee says, but "there was a lot of money to be made."

A Time spokesman claims that Digistan has been defunct for 18 months and that Samee had entered the sandwich business. But online evidence suggests the company was in operation much longer and that Samee's stake in NATO involvement in the country goes deeper.

For instance, Digistan's sister company, Ora-Tech Systems, still lists an office in Kabul, and Digistan remains listed in the directory of the Peace Dividend Marketplace, an approved list of government contractors that an NGO founded in 2007 to identify trustworthy partners in a business environment where as much as $10 billion in the hands of Afghan officials has reportedly gone missing. Much of the work is for civilian agencies. According to the listing, Digistan's clients have included the IMF and GTZ, a Frankfurt consulting group that advises the Afghan government's Export Promotion Agency.

Business owners join the list in order to profit from an "Afghan First" policy issued by Gen. McChrystal a few months before his departure. According to the Peace Dividend's Kabul director, former Canadian army Col. Mike Capstick, the Peace Dividend Marketplace list is where officials in the U.S. Department of Defense contracting system turn when deciding where to spend $1 billion a year on Afghan businesses.

Scott Gilmore, the former U.N. national security diplomat who founded the Marketplace, praised Digistan's work — "Those guys are great," he said — and told Observer.com that any company on the list was "still kicking around" in the last six months, as his group works hard to keep their directory current.

Samee lists his chairmanship of Digistan on his LinkedIn profile and on a public Facebook profile, which cites his current place of business as Beruit and until this week showcased a photo of his wedding to Baker.

Before her marriage to Samee, Baker — who worked as a Paris pastry chef before entering journalism — was reporting for Time on "hardy strain of entrepreneurs" — including at least one Digistan client, bank founder Hayatullah Dayani. Though she never profiled Samee, she wrote about his acquaintances. One was Rory Stewart, a Scottish diplomat, author and former Iraq administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority who had once crossed Afghanistan on foot. She dubbed him, in a glowing 2007 profile, "S
tewart of Afghanistan."

Stewart, a dashing figure who wears lamb fleece hats like Hamid Karzai's and has inspired a Hollywood screenplay with Orlando Bloom attached to play him, is also founder of the $1.7 million arts charity Turquoise Mountain, of which Samee is a sponsor. The group hires engineers to restore Kabul's historic districts. The charity's activities have included an art contest that a U.N. press release issued in July claimed was "created through a brainchild of President Hamid Karzai and Britain's Prince Charles" (whose sons Stewart tutored).

Stewart later wrote a July 2008 cover story for Time, "How To Save Afghanistan," recommending, among other things, that the Karzai government be given the money it seeks for communications infrastructure.

Baker and Samee, courtesy Facebook

Even if Baker's husband has pulled up stakes in Kabul's IT market, as Time asserts, he's still listed as one of just six board members on a Karzai government minister's $100 million project to create, according to its mission statement,  a "flourishing investment environment" in Afghanistan.

Known as Harakat (or in English as AICF, the Afghanistan Investment Climate Facility), the group issues grants for lobbying projects to change laws and expand the availability of credit. It is run by U.K.-educated Suleman Fatimie, who has recently served in a number of Kabul government posts. Karzai's Ministry of Commerce still lists Fatimie as chief of the Ministry of Commerce's export promotion agency. Created with $50 million in British aid money, the group is actively seeking an extra $50 million in private funds.

While on the board of Harakat, Samee has been a featured guest at a number of business and aid forums in Kabul and beyond. One exclusive affair, highlighted by Foreign Policy as "the only [Afghanistan conference] you really want to go to...and sorry, you're not invited," was off-the-record and headed by Obama Afghanistan-Pakistan policy chief Richard Holbrooke.

Meanwhile, Digistan appears to have earned healthy profits. One of Samee's former employees, tech salesman Shah Afghan, boasts on a LinkedIn resume of bringing in $1.2 million for Digistan between 2006 and 2008. An "elite" portfolio of customers, Afghan notes, include Kabul Bank — whose reputation for lawlessness has fueled demands by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Karzai clean up corruption, and which embodies, according to the Washington Post, "a crony capitalism that enriches politically connected insiders and dismays the Afghan populace."

Put the Taliban back in charge, and many such contracts will likely begin to dry up.

The Aisha story marked a last hurrah for Baker's time in Afghanistan. On July 10 she and her husband reportedly held a going-away party, though the reporter's husband is still pursuing business opportunities in Afghanistan. Another bash, six days later, celebrated the launch of Samee's organic-branded sandwich business, Tazza, "the new tasty, healthy and safe catering kitchen in Kabul." A party invitation welcomed an elite guest list to their home in the city's central district, promising a "secured residence."

And what about Aisha, a new war emblem? While it's long been evident that women have suffered unimaginable horrors under customs practiced in Afghanistan, Aisha's brutal mutilation occurred in 2009, almost eight years into the American invasion.

Meanwhile, in a story light on specifics, there remains some question as to whether the unnamed Afghan judge who ordered Aisha's mutilation qualifies as a "Taliban commander" in any formal sense. And if Aisha's is the face of the notoriously cruel Taliban justice system, the Taliban aren't taking credit. A Taliban press release on August 7 condemned the maiming as "unislamic" and denied that the case was handled by any of its roving judges — to whom many Afghans are now turning, distrustful of Karzai officials.

In the long run, the NATO-backed president, Hamid Karzai, may not be the friend Aisha and other persecuted Afghan women so desperately need. Last August he signed the Shia Personal Status Law, allowing men to starve wives who withhold sex and to punish those who walk outdoors without permission. Under this law — passed by a parliament that is 25 percent female as mandated by the new Afghan consitution — Aisha's decision to leave home would have been considered a crime.

UPDATE: A Time spokesperson requested that we print their statement in full. Here it is: "These assertions are completely untrue; Aryn Baker's husband has no connection to the U.S. military, has never solicited business from them and has no financial stake in the U.S. presence in Afghanistan whatsoever. TIME fully stands by our recent cover story, and as is made clear in the editor's letter—and from the reading of the actual piece—the story is neither in support of, nor in opposition to, the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan; it is a straightforward reported piece about the women of that country."

"Progress is really being made," he told the show hosts, and, despite evidence to the contrary, Towns seemed to see the coalition forces growing in number:

When there is talk of some pulling out there is also some talking about  getting further involved. When you talk about one group pulling out, you have the Koreans talking about getting more involved. I think that that's something that is very very important. So you have some talking about pulling out and you have others talking about getting more involved, so I think that cancels itself out.

Today his primary opponent Kevin Powell is out with a release knocking Towns over these statements.

According to campaign manager Aaron Golembiewski:

Our allies are leaving in droves because they don't see any end to this fight or progress, and we're supposed to hold on because Korea, who has its own issues with North Korea and is possibly preparing for war, is coming to replace us?  The Congressman sits as an Ex-officio member on Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs due to his dubious presence as Chairman of Oversight and Government Reform Committee and he has one of Washington's most abysmal attendance records, but any reader of any publication anywhere should know that his idea is simply preposterous and shows a really limited understanding of world affairs.

Towns had previously been an opponent of the war in Afghanistan, voting last month against funding the effort over there, and against most foreign interventions in general. He has been known however to not exactly be on message. Continues Golembiewski:

I'm shocked that Congressman Towns, after years of admirably opposing war, has suddenly become a War Congressman who illogically votes against providing the troops the funding they need to protect themselves and then expects South Korea to save us.  That's not even simply trying to have it both ways. Towns just doesn't make any sense at all."

He appeared on The Takeaway on WNYC this morning and said that despite reports to the contrary, the Afghans want a U.S. presence there:

The attitude of the young people in Afghanistan--when they us saw us they immediately threw up their thumbs and they were like, "Welcome, thank you". And they were excited about our being there.

Last month Towns voted against funding the war effort. But on the radio this morning Towns said that a reason to stay was that the coalition forces were growing:

In comparing the Iraq situation with Afghanistan, how these various countries are involved with us, it's a coalition, really, a true coalition effort in Afghanistan, and I was encouraged by that. And of course the sophistication and the training that is going on with our troops is just something that I'm really really proud of. But I think the thing I really want to stress is how all these other countries are in there on the ground doing things and they are all working together.

That answer surprised the show's hosts, who noted that the Dutch have already left the country, and that other countries were vowing to do the same, and that the U.S could very soon be the only nation with troops still over there. Responded Towns:

When there is talk of some pulling out there is also some talking about  getting further involved. When you talk about one group pulling out, you have the Koreans talking about getting more involved. I think that that's something that is very very important. So you have some talking about pulling out and you have others talking about getting more involved, so I think that cancels itself out.

Towns also said that he thought the corruption that the Hamid Karzai government has been accused of was gradually getting under control. The hosts then asked Towns what he would say to his Brooklyn constituents who are facing serious budget cutbacks at home as the government sends more and more money to fund the war effort. Said Towns:

At this point in time, after looking and seeing what's happening, I think Obama is right, that we should stay the course. I think that Petraeus is the kind of person that has the ability to provide the leadership that we need. And I don't want to stay there forever, but I see based on the movement and based on what I saw that there is progress really being made.

Soliders, mainly seargeants, in the field in Afghanistan generated the documents, which detail everything from previously unreported instances of civilian casualty to mishaps involving drone aircrafts. Reports of this nature exist for use by desk officers in the Pentagon and soldiers in the field when preparing briefings. The freshest document in the leak was generated in December 2009, before President Obama announced his new strategy in Afghanistan.

The three news organizations agreed to publish simultaneously on Sunday evening, independently preparing their own analyses and framing of the documents. The news companies also did their best to verify the authenticity of the documents. 

The New York Times coordinated with the White House around the publication of the docments. In an editor's note, The Times wrote that it was working on behalf of the White House to make sure that WikiLeaks did not allow any potentially endangering information to be published in its archives online, and the paper's website will not link to the complete archive of the documents posted by WikiLeaks.

While White House National Securty adviser James Jones released a statement Sunday night condemning the leak, Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet told Michael Calderone that the White House has been very pleased with the way the paper has handled the materials. “I did in fact go the White House and lay out for them what we had,” Mr. Baquet told Mr. Calderone. “We did it to give them the opportunity to comment and react. They did. They also praised us for the way we handled it, for giving them a chance to discuss it, and for handling the information with care. And for being responsible.”

Critics questioned the news-worthiness and the timing of the story. For some, the article explained the American effort in Afghanistan too much, and the timing seemed strange.

"The Obama administration and the military know that a page-one, throat-clearing New York Times story will get instant worldwide attention," wrote The Atlantic's politics editor Marc Ambinder on Monday. "The story is accurate, but the news is not that new; let's think a bit harder about the context."

John Cook also questioned the timing of the piece.

From the Pentagon's perspective, recasting old information about the country's hard-to-access mineral reserves as a potentially game-changing bounty — and then handing it to the Times — could ward off slacking resolve in the American public and create a new argument for sticking with the war.

Mr. Risen spoke to Mr. Cook later in the week in what Mr. Cook called an "increasingly hostile interview."

"Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think," Mr. Risen said to Mr. Cook.

Mr. Risen shared a byline on The Times piece about NSA wiretapping in 2005. He called Mr. Cook shortly after their interview to defang some of his remarks.

"I was taken aback by some of the criticism, and didn't sleep well last night, and was upset about it," Mr. Risen said.

Mr. Cook's post was called "NYT reporter defends Afghani minerals piece, lashes out at critics."

The Times washington bureau chief Dean Baquet, who will soon be taking a turn as the paper's managing editor, also spoke up on behalf of the piece.

“The people involved in doing the survey said they were surprised by the extent of it," Mr. Baquet told Lloyd Grove. "Criticism from other journalists who claim it was ‘widely known’ is bullshit. Maybe they should have written about it.” 

Mr. Baquet added that Mr. Risen “is the last person the government would try to get to carry their water.”

A more level-headed Mr. Risen also spoke to Mr. Grove.

“It’s sort of an occupational hazard at The New York Times," he said. "Frankly, I get my bones jumped more than just about any reporter in town."

We'll just have to imagine what Clark Hoyt would say.

Those events began with the inexplicable decision by officials of the previous administration to allow Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other ranking leaders of Al Qaeda to escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. At the time, as a new Senate report on the battle of Tora Bora recalls, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, decided not to augment the tiny force of special operations troops on the ground with sufficient force to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden and his deputies. They later claimed to be worried that “too many American troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency,” a rationale that can only evoke bitter laughter now.

None of the reasons offered back then for inaction at Tora Bora made sense after the outrage of 9/11, when the entire world, including the Afghan people, were cheering the U.S. invasion. The pattern of deception that later led to war in Iraq began with expressions of doubt by both General Franks and Vice President Dick Cheney about Mr. bin Laden’s presence in Tora Bora—a doubt that none of the commanders on the ground shared and that always sounded more like an excuse than an explanation. If there was any chance that the perpetrators of 9/11 could be found in those mountains, then maximum force should have been deployed as rapidly as possible.

What we know now, of course, is that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, and President Bush himself were distracted from the vital necessity of victory in Afghanistan—which meant not only driving out the Taliban but installing a real government in their place—by their obsession with Iraq. Not only did the Al Qaeda leadership escape, but so did Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, who returned to mount a threatening insurgency two years later, just as the Bush White House and the Pentagon were declaring “mission accomplished” in Baghdad. The resulting neglect of Afghanistan—with all the corruption, disillusionment and anger that has ensued—had reached a critical stage when the Bush administration finally departed. Their own commanders were left behind to warn Mr. Obama that the enemy had gained the upper hand.

No further recrimination is necessary; history will render sterner judgments than any that can be written now. But after eight years of incompetence and arrogance, how can the United States salvage what has become of the “good war”?

Escalation appears to be as self-defeating as it is inevitable. If the secretary of defense worried in 2001 that a few thousand Americans in Tora Bora would enrage the Afghan population, how will that population react to the presence of nearly 200,000 foreign troops next year? The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan further inflames suspicions of American domination not only in that country but across the Muslim world—as the war in Iraq also did—and especially in strategically vulnerable Pakistan.

As investigative reporter Aram Roston recently revealed in a cover story for The Nation, the Afghan countryside is already so deeply permeated by the Taliban that contractors shipping logistical supplies to our troops routinely bribe the enemy to allow safe passage. Military sources estimated that the payoffs amounted to as much as 10 percent of the cash value of those shipments. So if we spend another $30 billion a year to send in additional troops, roughly $3 billion will end up in the coffers of the Taliban, far more than they need to buy the ammunition and explosives that kill our soldiers.

Even Mr. Obama seems to recognize the futility of the situation. Perhaps he is raising the ante in order to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, the same objective apparently shared by our allies in Europe and the discredited government in Afghanistan. Unsatisfactory as that would be, it is a legacy of the same politicians who now urge our troops to march resolutely into the deadly mess they made.

jconason@observer.com

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