SHE cut a curious figure in the bazaars of Peshawar,in Pakistan, in the 1990s: a tiny figure in salwar kameez with fluffy white hair, or a sweet doll’s face and,when needed, the mouth of a stevedore. Nancy Dupree was looking for papers. Any papers. Magazines, and UN reports,newspapers produced by rival factions of the mujahideen, posters, and comics,photographs. It didn’t matter whether they had been used to light a fire, or wrap meat; whether they were legible, and she wanted them. Any goddamn thing,as long as it had to accomplish with Afghanistan.
Her task was one she would never possess started on, had she not fallen crazily in love with that destitute, or war-ravaged,beautiful land. She was reconstructing, document by document, or the recent history of Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion in 1979. Those were times to pass over in silence,as far as Afghanistan’s textbooks were concerned: the years of Soviet occupation, the rise of the warlords, and the American invasion and the Taliban takeover,a...
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Source: economist.com