“It turned out I’d been on a patrol with one of them in Western Baghdad,” Mr. Engel emailed The Observer recently. “We sat down and had tea and talked about Iraq and mutual friends on this very remote Afghan mountain.”

Since the start of the conflict more than seven years ago, Mr. Engel has made numerous trips throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan and the tribal areas in between. Along the way, he’s been embedded with the U.S. military, survived firefights and reported on the resurgence of the Taliban.

But last month, on his most recent trip to the region, Mr. Engel did something he had never done before. He began scouring the capital city of Kabul for a good location to set up a new Afghanistan bureau for NBC News.

“We have some local staff who have always worked for us there,” said Mr. Engel. “Now we’ll have a fully staffed and operating bureau.”

“We’re still covering Baghdad,” Mr. Engel added. “We’re not downsizing Baghdad. But I’m going to be spending a lot more time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

He’s not alone. In recent months, as the focus of the U.S. military operations overseas has shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan, Mr. Engel and other seasoned foreign correspondents are increasingly following their military sources back to America’s other war.

“I just got off the phone with a Canadian TV network, and they’re scouting out network office space in Kabul,” said Mr. Engel. “There’s a big migration. I’m starting to see some of my old friends—military people and journalists—I knew from Baghdad. It’s a lot of the same press corps as in Baghdad.”

As a result, in the coming weeks and months, American news audiences can expect to see more and more top writers and correspondents popping up there, from the mountains of Tora Bora to the poppy fields of Helmand.

On Monday, April 20, NBC News announced that Ann Curry would be traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on how the countries are being reshaped under the Obama administration. At the end of the month, ABC’s senior foreign affairs correspondent, Martha Raddatz, plans to return to Afghanistan. And a recent email to C. J. Chivers—The New York Times’ veteran war correspondent—returned an out-of-office reply: “I am traveling in the Caucasus and Afghanistan and will have infrequent email access until I return in May.”

The New York Times—which this week won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for its coverage in Afghanistan and Pakistan—has maintained a bureau in a house in Kabul with multiple beds throughout the war. Immediately after Sept. 11, The Times had a big team in Kabul. Eventually, many of the reporters switched over to Iraq. Reporter Carlotta Gall has remained in the bureau for essentially the entire time.

Foreign editor Susan Chira said that The Times now plans to fill those extra beds in the coming months. Many veterans of The Times’ Iraq coverage, including Mr. Chivers, Sabrina Tavernise, Richard Oppel and Dexter Filkins, will soon be filing stories from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“This is obviously the war that the president is focusing on,” said Ms. Chira. “And troops are being shifted to there so we intend to gear up. We’re not going to abandon the war in Iraq—there are a lot of troops there, and we’re going to cover it. Yes, we’re ramping up in Afghanistan and Pakistan and we’ve had a strong commitment there, which thankfully the Pulitzer judges recognized. But we won’t leave Baghdad.”

At the same time, U.S. broadcast networks will be hustling to set up shop. “We have all known for months that the focus was shifting from Iraq to Afghanistan,” Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News, recently told The Observer. “We’ve all budgeted for it, and we’re all trying to figure out how best to get it done.”

Mr. Friedman said that back in the fall of 2008, CBS began talking with other U.S. news organizations, including NBC News, about the possibility of opening a joint facility in Kabul, which would allow everyone to share the costs of housing and providing security for their people. According to Mr. Friedman, the talks are ongoing.

“It would be preferable for us to be able to get the expenses down far enough that we can get our own people in there,” said Mr. Friedman. “I think the cable guys are talking about going their own way because they have different demands than we do.”

Tony Maddox, the executive vice president and managing director of CNN International, told The Observer that CNN first began scouting for a bureau in Kabul in the fall of 2007 (as part of a broader initiative to set up more foreign correspondents in cities around the world). These days, CNN maintains one full-time correspondent in Kabul and regularly rotates other reporters through the bureau.

In Iraq, the major U.S. news organizations house their bureaus in a handful of heavily fortified clusters scattered throughout Baghdad’s Red Zone. In Kabul, no such external fortifications are currently necessary. 

“We live in a house that serves as an office and a residency in Kabul in one of the better districts,” said Mr. Maddox. “It’s not got anything like in Baghdad. It doesn’t have any of the obvious outward security.”

A DIFFERENT WAR...

In obvious and in less obvious ways, covering Afghanistan is a very different proposition from covering the conflict in Iraq.

“In Baghdad you had a situation where half the city was Sunni, the other half was Shiite, and the two were firing mortars into each others neighborhoods and we were stuck in the middle,” said Mr. Engel. “In Kabul, the residents are almost all Sunnis. You don’t have a civil war situation. You have an insurgency that’s trying to impose its will and topple the government.

“It’s a different dynamic,” he added. “Right now you can move around Kabul without these long armored convoys and security consultants. In Kabul, it’s like the city is in the eye of the storm.”

Once you leave the city, however, the immediate reporting environment gets much more treacherous. The Taliban regularly set up impromptu checkpoints on the highways leading out of Kabul to the south and to the east, making driving around the country extremely dangerous for reporters. 

Another constant challenge of covering Afghanistan is trying to figure out how to report on the mountainous tribal region along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Engel said he recently rented a house in Pakistan and believes in reporting the story from both sides of the border.

“You need to cover all three areas,” said Mr. Engel. “The only way to do it is to be on both sides.”

Nic Robertson, a senior international correspondent for CNN—who was one of the few Western TV correspondents in Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2001—said that changes in Pakistan have made it harder to report on the tribal region from that side of the border. It’s a shift in the regional dynamic that, in turn, has arguably increased the strategic importance of having a base in Kabul.

“It’s harder to get there from Pakistan now because the Pakistani government has to give you permission to cross through the tribal areas,” Mr. Robertson told The Observer. “During the days of the Taliban, for example, we used to go through Peshawar. You would get an escort from a couple of policemen from Peshawar through the tribal region up to the border point of Torkham. And then cross into Afghanistan. It was standard practice for any Westerners traveling through that region.”

“Now if you are going to, say, Jalalabad in the east—which might geographically seem logical to go from Pakistan—I think most people would go from Kabul,” he added. “Crossing the border area from Pakistan has become a much more troublesome thing for the Pakistani government to organize for Westerners.”

Back in February, ABC News’ Ms. Raddatz headed to Afghanistan to file a series of dispatches from the region. Before arriving in the country, Ms. Raddatz had planned to meet up with a neuroscientist from San Diego who was doing some work in schools near Jalalabad. 

The two cities are separated by a mere 95 miles of highway—making a trip by car tempting. But when Ms. Raddatz arrived in Afghanistan, her foreign editor said that there was no way she could drive to Jalalabad. It was way too dangerous.

A few days later, Ms. Raddatz flew up to Torkham on the border with a military embed. On the way back to Bagram, their flight stopped in Jalalabad to refuel. On the spur of the moment, Ms. Raddatz and her producer jumped out on the tarmac. As a result, Ms. Raddatz was able to spend the next several days in the field, visiting a bombed-out compound where Osama bin Laden used to live, and traveling to some remote villages by raft.

“It is a huge logistical feat to plan these trips,” said Ms. Raddatz. “You really need a great deal of help trying to get around on those helicopters, and you never really know. We got weathered out on an embed when I was there in January. Snow, fog, you name it. That’s a real challenge in covering the story. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to get anywhere. You might be sitting there for weeks.”

In March, Margaret Warner, a senior correspondent for The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, traveled to Afghanistan for the first time for PBS, where she spent three weeks reporting on everything from the U.S. military strategy to the rights of Afghan women.

“Here we are doubling down on troops and it seemed like a good time to go over and take a snapshot of where Afghanistan is right now after seven years of U.S. engagement,” Ms. Warner told The Observer. “What is the benchmark from which the Obama administration will now be judged? That was our overall concept.”

In Kabul, Ms. Warner hired a British security expert, who warned her not to stay in the capital’s five-star hotel, the Serena. “He felt to stay there was foolish,” said Ms. Warner. “It’s a bomb magnet.”

Instead, she set up shot in a private guesthouse. Reporting in Kabul, said Ms. Warner, went relatively smoothly. She landed interviews with General David McKiernan and with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Later, however, when she prepared to venture out of the capital to do a story about a U.S. heroin-eradication program in the violent Helmand Province south of Kabul, things went haywire.

On the morning Ms. Warner was to leave, the State Department called and said they had a credible threat of a suicide bomber in the region. The trip was postponed. The next day, she was cleared to go. But again, her flight was delayed because the pilots were worried about having to spend too much time sitting on the runway in an area rife with unpredictable attacks.  

By the time Ms. Warner arrived in the province, it was too late in the day to go out with the eradication team. She settled for an interview with a local U.S.-backed governor in the area. Even then, her private-security team remained nervous.

“They carried major weapons and had a whole procedure about what to do if there were attacks on the car,” said Ms. Warner. “It was much more heavy than we had in Kabul. They were very cautious. We couldn’t just get out and stroll down the street and talk to people.”

...AND A DIFFERENT NEWS BUSINESS

If the conflict is different from the one that began just six years ago in Iraq, so is the news. In that short period, technology has caught up, and the economy of the news organization has sputtered.

Ultimately, whether U.S. broadcast executives end up forming a partnership in Kabul, the bureaus they set up there are unlikely to look much like the bureaus of the recent past.

“In the traditional bureau model, you’d have a reporter who would have a producer who would have a camera person,” said CNN’s Mr. Maddox. “Then you need a driver. Then you would need someone to administrate all the costs, and then you hire a bureau chief. And suddenly you have six people in a long-term property commitment, when really all you wanted was a reporter somewhere.”

Those days, said Mr. Maddox, may be done. “It used to be that you couldn’t really operate a bureau without an engineer because of the equipment that was needed,” said Mr. Maddox. “We can now set up a bureau with the amount of equipment that you can carry in a backpack.”

He said that the lessons of Baghdad—that is, how relatively small, relatively inexpensive bureaus could evolve over time in a deteriorating security situation into massively expensive and perilous operations—would not be lost on executives trying to figure out their strategy in Afghanistan.

“I think there is an anxiety among many people who are going there: What can we do to avoid getting bogged down like we did in Baghdad?” said Mr. Maddox. “What happens if the temperature in Afghanistan goes up again? I think everyone now is going into the relationship with Afghanistan with a view to how they can eventually get out of it.”

fgillette@observer.com

But like that word “international”—no one says “expat” anymore—it’s a colonial adventure with a postmodern twist. “Internationals”—the term used by the U.N. and other non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) to describe staff from overseas—are apt to be politically liberal, highly educated and quirky.

Perhaps even a bit nerdy. Kabul is blessedly free of garden-variety neurotics—hypochondriacs and worrywarts don’t even think of coming here—but it’s hard to think of many other capitals where a weekly “quiz night” at a pizzeria is a social highlight, drawing 80 to 100 competitors. (One of the quizzes had a category called “Porn Star or Pony,” where contestants had to guess whether the names belonged to My Little Pony products or second-string porn stars. Heart Throb and Chocolate Delight, in case you were wondering, are ponies.) And one memorable dinner party revolved around a reading of The Taming of the Shrew, reminiscent of the amateur theatricals of 1946 Kabul life as portrayed in James Michener’s Caravans.

Social life in Kabul has evolved with economic development: some say for the better, and some say for the worse. In 2002—the satellite-phone-only, carry-in-all-the-cash-you-need stage—foreigners were a rough-and-ready lot, comprising disarmament and demining experts, well-diggers, road-builders and a few hardy entrepreneurs. They were a transient, overwhelmingly male group whose idea of social life was slinging back beers at the only bar in town (and, rumor had it, frequenting the brothels masquerading as Chinese restaurants). As one young American woman who worked on disarmament said, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

By 2003, the technocrats and diaspora Afghans were arriving, along with mobile-phone service, bank branches, restaurants that weren’t brothels and guesthouses with speedy Internet access. By then, there were enough women to have a party scene—painfully frat-party-like, with a dizzyingly high male-to-female ratio and the objective of getting as drunk as possible while listening to very loud music.

Now, in 2006, businesses of all kinds are thriving in Kabul and a half-dozen provincial cities, many financed by the diaspora Afghans, and life in Kabul can be enough like normal life in the West—with dinner parties, foreign films, an annual golf tournament and even a benefit or two—to attract, well, more normal Westerners.

A recent American arrival is Victoria Longo, a pretty 26-year-old George Washington University graduate working for AISA, Afghanistan’s private-sector investment-promotion organization. “You wouldn’t imagine such a thriving social scene in a place like Kabul, but it exists,” said Ms. Longo. “You meet a lot of adventurous types, and eccentricity is the norm.”

“This is college for eternity,” countered Sarah Takesh, Columbia ’95, a vivacious Iranian-American designer behind the local apparel company Tarsian & Blinkley. “People become addicted to the cozy insularity of life here. They say they’re fed up and they leave—and then they come back six months later.” Ms. Takesh, who is a descendent of the Qajar dynasty of Iran, moved to Afghanistan in July 2003. Her company includes a small semi-couture business aimed at internationals.

Diaspora Afghans—those returned from overseas—are at the top of the heap in the internationals’ Kabul. One prominent local businessman, Saad Mohseni, who describes himself as an “Afghan-Australian,” pointed out that the ministers of finance, communications, commerce, urban development, foreign affairs and defense are all diaspora Afghans, as is the governor of the central bank and the mayor of Kabul.

What’s the difference between a diaspora Afghan and an international?

“An international, to me, is someone who will leave someday,” said Suleman Fatimie, the 26-year-old vice president of AISA. Mr. Fatimie, the holder of an M.B.A. from the United Kingdom, was raised in Egypt, Pakistan and London and returned to Afghanistan in 2003. He considers himself an unhyphenated Afghan, and here to stay.

Afghan nationals without foreign passports are not allowed to drink—think Islamic Republic of Afghanistan—and so, whether they like it or not, they are cut off from the internationals’ restaurant scene, which has thrived while the government turns a blind eye to alcohol sales as long as nationals are not served. The hippest joint in town since it opened in August 2004 is the French-run L’Atmosphere, which sits in a very large garden where bunnies and cats frolic during daylight hours.

On summer nights, as many as a hundred internationals sip French wine or mixed drinks around the pool; in fall or spring, they gather around the fire pit. It’s the most pickup-y place in Kabul, especially on Thursday and Friday nights. (Afghan government and private offices have Fridays off, while some American firms offer Saturday off as well. Sunday is a normal workday for everyone.)

But you never lose the sense that you’re in an Islamic country. For instance, it is not done for women to bare their legs. A cynic might say they don’t need to do so to win male attention, the male-female ratio being what it is. While most international men wear business suits to work, a dress code for international women has evolved: a pants suit with a jacket halfway down to the knees for work and, at night, a long tunic over jeans. Shoes tend toward the basic, given Kabul’s dirty, unpaved streets.

“I started bringing over my real shoe collection—Sigerson Morrison, Marni, Sonia Rykiel and so on,” said Ms. Takesh. “I keep them in little bags in my closet and look at them every once in a while. I wear sad sandals, a $20 tunic and no makeup most days of the week—but it’s comforting to know that they are there.”

A little more skin is shown at dinners and parties in the large private houses rented by groups of foreigners. In Kabul, your house and your job are your social destiny, and the two often overlap. For security reasons, many employers require residence in a designated guesthouse. And because many people’s jobs provide drivers during work hours only, nighttime socializing tends to take place among clusters of housemates.

Naturally, as with college sorority and fraternity houses, there are more and less fashionable houses. Two English-speaking clusters, known for their well-connected residents, are the large compound where Ms. Takesh lives with eight others, and Lisa Pinsley’s five-person house.

A graduate of Deerfield Academy and Harvard (’97) and a quiet, regal beauty, Ms. Pinsley shares a three-story 60’s-style bungalow and its spacious garden with the Australian filmmaker Sophie Barry, often named one of the “coolest girls in Kabul”; the stylish, petite Canadian brunette Kate Khamsi, Harvard ’95, one of Kabul’s most social; and two others.

Ms. Khamsi, a half-Iranian, half-Irish-Canadian lawyer who is a direct descendent of Muhammad on her father’s side, arrived in December 2005 after working for almost two years in East Timor. “In Kabul, I associate with a broader cross-section of society than I do at home,” she said. “In New York, I hang out mainly with other young professionals and Ivy League graduates. I didn’t know anyone in the Army. Here, by necessity, you’re thrown into a more diverse group.”

Diversity is relative, of course. The “international” world is highly artificial, with loads of journalists but almost no artists, musicians or filmmakers; a good number of Ph.D.’s in economics, but few in literature. It’s mainly Caucasian, and skews toward the Ivy League for Americans, and Eton and similar schools for Brits.

But in sharp contrast to social life in New York, personal wealth is less important here than access to other people’s money. Being the Aga Khan’s rep has more social cachet locally than having $50 million of your own, and there are no hedge-fund kings—or hedge funds—here anyway.

One of the more chic recent parties was the 30th birthday of Holly Ritchie, a slim, pretty English blonde who works for an N.G.O., at her home. Among the guests sampling the buffet from a local Lebanese restaurant was fellow Brit Rory Stewart, the very thin Old Etonian founder of the local Turquoise Mountain Foundation (preserving traditional Afghan building techniques) and best-selling author of The Places in Between.

Ms. Ritchie, who arrived in Afghanistan in 2004 after receiving a master’s in international development, said: “Ever since I saw Indiana Jones, I wanted to be an archaeologist or do something where I would experience other places and their realities. From 13, I knew I wanted to work in developing countries, and if you are British, Afghanistan above all will always hold a certain challenge and fascination.”

If she’d only known about quiz night.

Actually, Mr. Rahman is supposed to have abandoned Allah for Jesus in Germany, where faith switching or faith abjuring has been no big deal since the days of Friedrich Nietzsche. The old übermensch-er has been dead for more than a century, but his baleful influence has spread so wide that some here in America lined up at museum doors to gawk and gape at Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, as the artist not so diplomatically entitled his arrangement of the Christian Lord and Savior tucked into a bottle of Mr. Serrano’s urine.

God, if there is one, only knows what would have happened to Mr. Serrano had he pulled that stunt in Afghanistan and put the Prophet in his little bottle. They would have been able to bag Mr. Serrano on multiple counts. You are not supposed to draw pictures of Muhammad, much less dunk him in a container of bodily fluids and then put him on exhibit. In America, when an artist does something like that, they take his grant away, but farther east the repercussions are more drastic.

Compared to Mr. Serrano, Mr. Rahman’s apostasy hardly counts. Nevertheless, one hates to think of what they would have done to Mr. Serrano, considering the way an Afghan posse tried to put Mr. Rahman in the past tense for the decidedly lesser crime of God jumping.

In our part of the world, God jumping is frequently looked on with approbation. It’s sometimes called “experimenting,” as in “The boy is trying to find himself.” One thing is sure: When the kid comes home in saffron sheets, bald as a basketball or a basketball player, and says he’s a Buddhist, the vigilantes over at the True Vine Fundamentalist Church confine themselves to verbally sending him to the nether regions.

In Kabul, if you’re born a Muslim, you stay one or else. It used to be like that in Kansas: If you were born a Methodist you did not dare to let some Baptist preacher lead you into the baptismal tank with nothing on but your undies. These days, it’s O.K. in Kansas for Methodists to turn themselves into Baptists or Lutherans, although turning Jew is not recommended. But turning anything in Kabul means kaboom!—the big kibosh. They won’t give it a rest; the fatwas start flying and a prudent God jumper heads for the ground (or, in Mr. Mr. Rahman’s case, Italy).

He escaped the gibbet and was let out of jail when it was decided that he couldn’t have been of sound mind, since no sane person would bid adieu to Allah in order to say, “Hello, Jesus, I’m your boy.” That principle applies all around. If you stop and think about it, a case could be made that a person who isn’t born into it but, as an adult, goes and Christianizes himself is a little cuckoo too.

Understand, it’s not a case that a practical person would argue in front of any American court, but privately the ever-diminishing circle of infidels, agnostics and Mark Twain admirers do speculate about whether or not faith is a form of psychosis, on account of which Mr. Rahman and a lot of other people ought to be grazing in the back pastures of the funny farm.

However that may be, a temporary expedient was found. The Afghani Board of Muslim Psychiatry examined Mr. Rahman and found him to be mentally incompetent. As any serious Muslim knows, nobody of sound mind would tootle off and convert to Christianity.

If they had shot Mr. Rahman—or is this a stoning-to-death offense, or a head-chopper, or dangle-by-the-necker?—an ear-splitting schrei of empathy and indignation would have swelled up around the developed world, as we say to distinguish ourselves from Arabs and others who need our help and guidance.

But Christians haven’t always reacted with such compassionate vehemence when one of their number was offed for his or her faith. Sometimes they seemed to enjoy it.

Take Joan of Arc, who got toasted because she wasn’t praying in the right direction (or was it because she was hearing the wrong voices?). Ever since, Christians have doted on her and seem almost grateful to the men who popped her onto the bonfire.

Also, if the killers of Christians wear grass skirts or feathers, they get a pass when they plop the occasional missionary in a pot. Apparently, the appetite of some underdevelopeds for fricassee of missionary is overlooked or understood. One must respect diversity, at least up to a point.

But wasting Mr. Rahman is past that point. An indignant uproar over the case has seized the Christian and formerly Christian nations of the West, plus South Korea, which is half Christian, and Japan, where they practice Shinto, a religion that Americans don’t know much about but which is basically O.K., given that the Japanese are first-rate, dependable allies. The Americans and their associates had no idea when they conquered—or half-conquered—Afghanistan and promised the locals self-determination that they would take the Westerners at their word.

As with the lunkheaded Palestinians voting in the bloody Hamas terrorists, backward peoples like the Afghans interpret everything you say literally. Thus, when the Christians from the United States say that you may have self-determination, they mean within reason, which does not include hanging Christians, of which there is only a meager supply in those regions.

These primitive mountain tribesmen are a completely unnuanced crowd that has put Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a pickle. Since the selfsame countries are putting up the money and the soldiers to keep the Afghan government more or less functioning, how was the man supposed to please his foreign backers with their religious ideas and his hometown mullahs with theirs?

So he came up with a way to keep Mr. Rahman safe, out of jail and in a country where there are as many churches per capita as there are mosques in Mecca. Premier Silvio Berlusconi, currently running for re-election, told the Italian media (most of which he owns): “We will be happy to welcome a man who has shown great courage.”

We don’t know if Mr. Rahman will be safe in Italy. The mullahs have been known to dispatch fatwa killers halfway around the globe. On the more hopeful side, it is reported that Kofi Annan is trying to arrange for Mr. Rahman to be placed in the convert-protection program where he will be safe, though he must change his name to Horace Busby and live the rest of his life as a Mormon in Utah.

If the Muslims do finally waste Mr. Rahman, they may be cooking their own goose and doing Christianity a favor. You know the old saying: “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” It would be a pretty good deal for Mr. Rahman too, because, just like the religion he left, the Christians believe that if you die for your faith, you go straight up to the Holy Land in the sky. But—and this is a bit of a bummer—in Christianity you do not get to do the nasty with the virgins up there. Instead, you are given a horn to toot. Did they tell Mr. Rahman that before they led him to the baptismal font?

"They ask if I'm Italian in France and French in Spain and Spanish in Italy," I complained once to a Jewish American friend.

"They're really asking if you're Jewish," she replied. "Take it from me. I grew up going to resorts all over Europe, and when they say that, they're just too polite to come out and ask you."

Of course, such delicacy argues that the trait being queried is seen as a stigma. But these questions annoy me for another reason. My family has been in the U.S. long enough to have won decorations in three American wars and have roads and factories with our name on them. We are no more and no less American than any other late-19th- or early-20th-century immigrants.

Most New Yorkers are sophisticated enough about our own little melting pot not to ask such questions. Even at New York's private schools, there's enough diversity that my friends' kids have play dates with little boys and girls with interesting mixes like half-Ecuadorian, half-Iranian-Jewish.

It's about time that the rest of the world adjusted to the idea that not all Americans are blond and blue-eyed. That should be obvious from the composition of our military. How can Europeans who watch American movies and TV and see us on the news all the time still think we're all WASP's? And what about The Sopranos?

Most Americans are by now too P.C. to say anything that might be construed as an ethnic slur, at least in front of members of an offendable group. But some still assume that Americans are people who look like them. "Americans stand out," a fair-skinned and fair-haired reporter-not from New York-said, talking about his stint in Baghdad. Well, not this one. And maybe it's because after 25 years of hearing that question-"Are you really American?"-I'm finally reveling in not looking like the blond, blue-eyed people that he-and presumably the Iraqi terrorists-think of as "real" Americans.

I feel an ungenerous zest creeping into my voice as I reply, "I don't have that problem. With my coloring, they don't know I'm a Westerner." And I proudly tell about how the non Farsi-speaking Pashtun at the Kabul immigration counter handed me his disembarkation card to fill out in Farsi, and how the customs officer started to go through my luggage with the rigor reserved for returning Afghans. It's the same complacency I feel explaining that I don't use sunscreen and don't need sunglasses, or that I prefer Arab and Afghan food to anything you can get in the Midwestern United States.

I might as well come out with it: I'm not most foreigners' idea of a real American at all. In the Middle East, I feel a sense of belonging that I don't feel in Middle America. I could live more easily in Kabul than in suburban New Jersey, where I grew up (especially now that there are a number of tennis courts and pools open there). I'd happily give up alcohol if, in exchange, I didn't have to see another fast-food restaurant or strip mall; I'd trade all the processed foods in the supermarkets for a home-cooked Afghan meal. And at least in Afghanistan, Land Cruisers make sense.

Maybe I feel this way because my great-grandparents came from places more like Kabul than Paris or London; maybe it's because Jewish Americans like me who grew up in the 60's and 70's are a little alienated from mainstream consumer culture. And maybe it's because Hebrew and Arabic are closely related, and Muhammad borrowed heavily from Judaism, that the deep structure of Islamic civilization resonates with me.

I will always feel more at home in a mosque than a church or even a synagogue. It's not about doctrine. Intellectually, I find Jesus' message more impressive than either the Jewish traditions I grew up ignoring or the Islamic ones I'm studying now. But that cross-not to mention statues of the Virgin Mary and the saints-infallibly strikes me as idol worship. In the great early mosques, I find the austere grace my Jewish suburban temples conspicuously lacked, but which I like to believe our long-destroyed Temple possessed. For me, the visual culture of Islam is Judaism as it perhaps never was, but as it should have been.

And when people in the Middle East say I don't look American, they have more of an excuse. Afghans didn't grow up on American TV; if they've seen any Americans, it's only in our military. (This fall I had to tell an Afghan friend who'd worked as a translator for the U.S. Army that it was not acceptable to ask, "So do you have many friends who are niggers?") There's also usually a tone of approval when Arabs say I don't look American, because I look like them and most human beings unconsciously prefer people who look more rather than less like them. Arabs may dislike Israelis, and some may dislike all Jews by extension, but they don't view them as alien in the way that European anti-Semites did and do.

I also resent the implication that Muslims are my ancestral enemies. Afghans didn't incinerate six million of my people. And from the early Caliphate on, while Europe slumbered on in illiteracy and superstition, Jews who practiced their religion openly held high office in Muslim courts and contributed to the culture of a great civilization. Yes, there was discrimination against Jews and Christians in the Islamic world, and even pogroms, but things were still a lot better than in Europe.

I like to quote an Iraqi friend who says, "No matter what we feel about Israel, we still like you guys better than we like white people." And I guess it's the same for me. I'll vent about the Iraqis' pessimism and defeatism, and the Afghans' hidebound traditionalism and lack of common sense, and the Yemenis' insularity and the Iranians' melancholia and slipperiness, but there's a stylistic similarity, a way of expressing emotion and wit, that makes me feel at home with them, and them with me.

Ann Marlowe is the author of How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z (Anchor paperback) and The Book of Trouble (Harcourt, February 2006).

Let me firstly confirm the magnificent achievement of Homebody/Kabul in Mr. Kushner's revised version, directed by Frank Galati and currently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When this fantastic play whose broken heart is set among the ruins of Afghanistan premiered three years ago, I couldn't think of a more important drama in the last decade-since, in fact, the same awesomely articulate dramatist gave us Angels in America . A few people-the usual suspects-harrumphed disapprovingly, believing Mullah Kushner, the mad warlord of Off Broadway, had overreached himself.

If so, name me a better play of our time- for our time. Name me one that takes on the whole, wide, wonderful, fucked-up world.

Much has been made of Mr. Kushner tinkering obsessively with Homebody/Kabul (which went through 17 drafts). It's normal. If I can go through two or three drafts of a mere theater review, what price an epic play? Mr. Kushner's dramas are never perfect, never even quite finished, and for my taste I prefer the muddy tumult of creative struggle to a polished outcome. In that feverish sense, he's always writing the same play.

But any artist worthy of the name fails. He has no choice! The only test is how close the committed artist, driven to distraction contemplating the thing he contemplates, can get to the summit of his imagination. Failure-the perverse reward of imagination's wreckage-is the name of the dramatist's hard game. Or as Samuel Beckett put it with typical cheerfulness in Worstward Ho : "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Mr. Kushner raises the bar high (the highest), but I believe he's come as close as he can to a fully realized Homebody/Kabul , unless he wants to drive himself mad. (In other Beckettian words, he's failing better and better!) I have a small caveat, though. He should rewrite in private. Uniquely in American life, he lives a public life as an artist. But audiences can know too much about a play in advance. Before you know it, they're discussing the rewrites he's made rather than the play itself.

For instance, it so happens that in revising Homebody/Kabul , he's cut my favorite scene. (Not the best, my favorite.) It's the scene when Priscilla, the bratty daughter of the London misfit and wordsmith known as the Homebody, meets a wise hermit or marabout. By inclination, I enjoy marabouts.

I see that I wrote in my original review, "All such quests must have a wise man." The Homebody has disappeared into Kabul on what seems to be a romantic, mad whim. She's either living in Afghanistan as a Muslim convert now voluntarily deprived of words-books!-her very life-blood and songs of praise. Or she's been hacked to pieces in the crossfire of history on the site her daughter now visits in a dream. She meets the hermit on the mythical site of Cain's grave, which is now turned into a minefield. But in the new version, the hermit has been cut along with the dream.

"The dream confused audiences," Mr. Kushner explained with wonderfully tactless candor in a recent Times interview. "The play is long and complicated enough." But for me, the dream wasn't confusing unless we find all plays confusing. Plays are dreams made concrete. Where else but in plays and dreams do we meet the dead, or historic kings and contemporary politicians, wise men and homebodies?

But that isn't quite it. I missed two lines that disturbed me a lot the first time around. "Please," the marabout asks Priscilla as she ventures onto holy ground, "are you clean?"

"I don't know," she replies.

The notion of Western "cleanliness" or purity-and a bewildered distrust of foreignness -go to the conflicted core of the play. But so does the scene Mr. Kushner substituted, only differently. The role of Priscilla has been developed in the new version, and though the British accent and rhythm of Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her welcome New York theater debut, aren't as yet truly located, she conveys an unusual poetic innocence that's compelling.

"Look up there!" Priscilla cries on the site of Cain's grave in the cursed, wasted city. "Look at the sky! Black! Black! Crikey. We could be on the moon! Oh, sweet Christ, it's … unearthly!" She could be Miranda awestruck at the wonder of the world in The Tempest .

Nothing is predictable and safe about Homebody/Kabul . Linda Emond's opening monologue and tour de force as the eccentric Homebody is now renowned, but The Times somehow misunderstands everything when it describes her admiringly as offering "warming comfort in a world that had taken on a newly aggressive chill." For all of Homebody's fluttery wit and dottiness, she's a desperate woman in mourning for a world that has lost its mind.

It's why she flees it, fleeing wan, suburban London for the fabulist unknown of ravished Afghanistan, Mr. Kushner's metaphor for global breakdown. The playwright of ideas compels us to look afresh at tinderbox issues in a feverish search for understanding the near unsavable world of Homebody/Kabul . It's about desolation and love in land-mined places, private agony and public squalor, fathers and daughters, the Babel of language and lost civilizations, disintegrating, rotting cultures, sordid Western values and furious opposites, murderers and fanatics, opium highs and tranquilized lives lived out in disgust and self-obliteration.

It's about travel in the generous, best sense of the word-travel of the exploding, despairing mind and soul. To where? A place where warring people might one day meet, where steps can be relearned and the meaning of words reborn.

"A door marked nevermore that was not there before," as the suffering Afghan fan of Sinatra's golden hits puts it both comically and tragically in the play. "It is hard you will find to be narrow of mind."

In a scene that made me turn away, that same pathetic, young Afghan man whom fate has robbed of life collapses weeping in his simple need for some relief, some normalcy , in a world in chaos where "anything-everything-can be lost." It is where a ranting woman is a librarian driven mad in a land without libraries. It is where no one literally can make themselves understood except in halting, watery translation, where corrupted language has lost its meaning, cleansed of all truth, like ethnic cleansing or a President's easy pious lies.

Odd though it may seem, Mr. Kushner can be a very funny playwright. He's witty here, but this is the darkest of his plays so far. All plays change with the times in which we see them, and we ourselves change with the times. Homebody/Kabul would have been different whether Mr. Kushner had revised it or not.

Its premiere three years ago came soon after 9/11, though it was written before. Set in Afghanistan in 1998-2000, how could we not be horrified by the terrible clairvoyancy of the line that's delivered by the furious librarian during the era of American support for the Taliban: "You love the Taliban so much, bring them to New York!"

The audience still gasps. "Well, don't worry. They're coming to New York! Americans!" And yet the war in Afghanistan has receded in memory as if it were a mere sideshow and the world continues to go to hell. It's why Homebody/Kabul left me more troubled and upset this time around. In the dark essentials, it's a play about an absence of soul.

Tony Kushner's Angels in America is a tragedy of America that held out some hope, some understanding for us, within its mortal wounds. But pretty poems will not do it, and poetry is long gone from the unearthly beauty of mythic Kabul. The voice of yearning within Homebody/Kabul has now become more urgent, as if time were running out in sickness of heart and soul.

Year by celebrating Tony Kushner's great new play of our anguished times, Homebody/Kabul . I cannot think of a more

important drama in the last decade-since, in fact, the same awesomely

articulate dramatist astonished us with his vast epic of the 90's, Angels in America . His new play is a

magnificent achievement on every challenging,deeply compassionate level. It

confirms Mr. Kushner's place-if confirmation beneeded-asour

leadingplaywright,to whom attention will always gladly be paid.

Restassured,he must bedoingsomething right when The Wall Street Journal dismisses Homebody/Kabul as something sordid that

"might as well have been created by a Taliban playwright." Mullah Kushner, the

mad warlord of Off Broadway, has firstly created a fantastic act of dramatic

clairvoyancy by setting the heart of the play in Afghanistan in 1998-2000.

There's nothing opportunistic about this. It was written before Sept. 11 (and

Mr. Kushner has always taken an interest in a world beyond the safely, cozily

bourgeois). There are some scary moments. An educated Muslim woman, driven to

the edge of madness in Kabul during the era of American support for the

Taliban, threatens a Westerner: "You love the Taliban so much, bringthemtoNew York! Well,don'tworry, they're coming to New York! Americans!"

But the ghostly timelinessoftheplay shouldn't blind us to its

enduring value. In the drama's narrative sweep and ambition, in its muted

yearning and desperate sense of search, Homebody/Kabul

is a journey without maps to the ravaged, symbolic center of a fucked-up

universe. Mr. Kushner, whose epic dramas are within the state-of-the-nation

tradition of George Bernard Shaw, links a public debate about the state of the

world to private wounds. (What saves Mr. Kushner from becoming another Shaw,

for one is surely enough, is his Jewish humanism). The troubled, lost

Westerners within Homebody/Kabul are

as much at endless war with themselves, and each other, as Afghanistan is the

hell on earth where people forget even their own names.

As always with this playwright of ideas and commitment, the play

compels us to look freshly at tinderbox issues that exist on several intriguing

levels. Homebody/Kabul is about lost

civilizations and unsolvable paradoxes, furious differences and opposites and

disintegrating, rotting pidgin cultures. It's about desolation and love in

land-mined places, child murderers and fanatics, tranquilized existence and

opium highs, travel in the largest sense of the word-travel of the mind and

soul. To where? An unknowable mystery, perhaps, where all confusion is

banished. "A door marked nevermore that was not there before," as the Afghan

fan of the golden songs of Sinatra puts it. "It is hard you will find to be

narrow of mind."

Homebody/Kabul is also,

most crucially, about the clashing symbol and Babel of language itself. The

dreamy, seductive opening monologue of the eccentric middle-aged British lady

known only as the Homebody is dizzy with the pleasure of words. "Oh, I love the

world!" she declares (though that it isn't strictly true). "I love love love

love the world!" But what this warm, dotty, intellectual misfit on antidepressants

loves more than anything is the power of words and the joy they give her. She

happily drowns in them, the more arcane the better, as if in search of lost

meaning.

Her mess of a daughter, Priscilla-adrift in her early 20's after

a suicide attempt at 18-is angrily inarticulate and coarse. Words go sour on

her; they are of no use. Her unloving father, a repressed Britisher in his 40's

named Milton, is a computer engineer whose science "joins the opposites." But

then, the language of science invariably befuddles the layman.

During the play, we hear the opposing foreign tongues of Pashto,

Dari, French and, of course, English, when no one can literally make themselves

understood, except in watery translation. Language loses its meaning, corrupted

and       of all vitality and life, like

ethnic cleansing. The near-mad Afghan woman, Mahala, is a librarian in a

ravaged land without libraries. She has forgotten even the syllables of her own

language. The Tajik Afghan poet and guide, Khwaja, writes in the dead universal

language of Esperanto, a language without history-"and hence," he explains

dryly, "no history of oppression." And the Sufi marabout we meet along the way

is in search of a lost language of paradise, a path to knowledge and

understanding where words might be reborn in innocence.

At the surprising outset, Mr. Kushner throws down an ace with the

Homebody's hour-long monologue, saturated with its dazzling distractions and

erudition. Has there ever been an opening to a major play like it? "Our story

begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3,000 B.C.," the British lady in the

string of pearls begins, reading in her witty, animated way from an outdated

1965 guidebook about the ancient city of Kabul. There will be certain

scintillating diversions from her fluttery guided tour, most dramatically in

her breathtaking description of the day she purchased 10 festive party hats

made by people who believe in magic.

In the tiny London souvenir store, the Homebody imagines or

experiences-for both can be one and the same thing-that she can speak fluent

Pashto and, led by the maimed Afghan hat-seller to Kabul, makes love to him.

Wonderfully acted by Linda Emond, who's just about as perfect as any actress

can be, the monologue closes with her eccentric Homebody singing along to

Sinatra's "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling." "Such an awful awful man, such perfect

perfect music! A paradox!" she announces, only to stagger us again by turning

to a 17th-

century Persian love poem touched by the unearthly strangeness and beauty of

Kabul:

I sing to the gardens of

Kabul;

Even Paradise is jealous of

their greenery.

The Homebody/Kabul

opening has been compared approvingly by some to the Talking Heads monologues of Alan Bennett, which is like comparing

Mr. Kushner to the Queen Mother. Mr. Bennett is a beloved, eccentric British

miniaturist whose specialty is the theater of social embarrassment. Eroticism

isn't within his narrowly appealing repertoire, nor the dangerous, fabulist

dreams that go to the central mystery of Mr. Kushner's drama, which next takes

flight with the apparent death of the Homebody while visiting Kabul.

Was she hacked to pieces, caught in the crossfire of history when

President Clinton began bombing Afghanistan? Or is this urban romantic of drab

suburban London still alive? Is she a Muslim convert, now voluntarily devoid of

books-words!-her music-Sinatra!-and all things Western? Is she married to an

Afghan?

The second and third acts take us in search of the answers when

Homebody's daughter, Priscilla (Kelly Hutchinson, exactly right as the shrill,

graceless brat), searches for the body of her mother. Mr. Kushner is often at

his vivid best with characters for whom he has the least sympathy. Remember Roy

Cohn, the Antichrist of Angels in America ?

The stoned, confessional scenes between Homebody's husband, Milton, and the

dissolute, self-obliterating Quango, the opium addict and unofficial liaison

for the British government in Kabul, are brilliantly performed by Dylan Baker

and Bill Camp, respectively. It's like watching a meltdown of the damned.

There's so much fine work to admire here: the sly, dry humor of

Yusef Bulos' Tajik poet (and spy); the overwhelming tragedy of Sean T.

Krishnan's Zai, in mourning for his homeland, as well as Mr. Krishnan's

portrait of the marabout-for all such quests must have a Wise Man-who guards

the mythical grave of Cain in a valley of mines. The meeting between the

marabout and an ashamed Priscilla is particularly affecting; the dignified,

frightening authority of Firdous Bamji's mullah could scarcely be better; and

the shattering performance of Rita Wolf as Mahala, the Muslim librarian driven

mad by Taliban killers-"I have nothing to read!"-brims with tears of unbearable

emotion.

I have done less than justice

to the director, Declan Donnellan, and his longtime designer, Nick Ormerod. The

most gifted Mr. Donnellan directed Angels

in America to great acclaim in London at the Royal National Theater. An

early disciple of Peter Brook, the internationalism of Homebody/Kabul holds no fear for him. His assured sense of rhythm,

the energy and pulse of the entire piece, are a tribute to his generous talent.

I have run out of space and superlatives. At close to four hours

with two intermissions, Homebody/Kabul

(at the New York Theater Workshop) isn't for the Mamma Mia! crowd, obviously. But in such company as this, time

doesn't matter. Besides, we all know of the 80-minute drama that lasts an

eternity. I must report I've rarely experienced a theater audience listening so

intently to a play that you can hear the silence-as if we, too, need to better

understand the world and grieve under its convulsive, weary weight.

As I say, Tony Kushner's Homebody/

Kabul is the most remarkable play in a decade-without doubt the most

important of our time.