Free A Rope and a Prayer by David Rohde, Kristen Mulvihill

ordered his men to fire a twenty-six-gun salute as he unfurled an American flag. “I unfurled my country’s banner to the breeze, under a salute of twenty-six guns, and the star-spangled banner gracefully waved amidst the icy peaks, seemingly sacred to the solitude of an undisturbed eternity,” he wrote grandiloquently.
    Months later, the British deposed Dost Muhammad and ousted the upstart American, who fancied himself heir to Alexander the Great. Harlan returned to the United States and published a memoir of his exploits, which years later became the basis for Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King .
    Poullada questioned the accuracy of Harlan’s memoirs and maintained that Harlan was the first in a long line of American writers who unfairly portrayed Afghans as savages. After driving from British-controlled India to Kabul in 1922, Lowell Thomas, the famed American journalist, wrote a travelogue called Beyond Khyber Pass: Into Forbidden Afghanistan . Thomas assailed the Pashtuns, who he said were “more elusive than the robber bands of Albania, more daring than the Moros of Mindanao, more cunning than the Yaquis of Sonora, even more savage than the Mongol bandits of Chinese Tibet.”
    In truth, Afghanistan’s ruling family, which was Pashtun, was desperate for help modernizing the country. Dismissed by British and American officials, Afghanistan’s royal family eventually turned to continental Europe for help. In 1929, King Nadir Shah had French and German advisers train a 40,000-soldier army. Palace guards sporting incongruous Prussian-style helmets patrolled Kabul’s streets. German-made aircraft supported military expeditions that punished rebellious tribes.
    In 1933, Nadir Shah was assassinated and his nineteen-year-old son, Zahir Shah, took the thrown. For the next forty years, he and his uncles would rule Afghanistan. Zahir Shah, who inherited a kingdom with only six miles of railway, all of them in Kabul, and few telegraph and phone lines, redoubled his father’s modernization efforts. He recruited Italian, Japanese, and German advisers to develop a new road and communications system. Japanese built Helmand’s first canals.
    The outbreak of World War II finally ignited serious American interest in Afghanistan. American officials saw that the country offered a land route Allied forces could use to supply Soviet troops. Following the war, the United States vied with the Soviet Union for influence in Afghanistan. While Soviet engineers built roads and factories in the country’s north, Americans built a highway linking Kabul and Kandahar, a sprawling new airport in Kandahar, and the massive Helmand project. Professors from the University of Nebraska taught agriculture at Kabul University and Pan American World Airways stewards trained employees of Afghanistan’s new national airline.
    The massive 1979 Soviet invasion followed the same pattern as past conquests. Soviet forces took control of major cities and faced primarily rural resistance. Thousands of Soviet advisers introduced atheism, a state-controlled economy, and a massive secret police system. Over time, brutal repression by Soviet forces and their Afghan allies—as well as billions in American aid—fueled a broad-based uprising led by religious conservatives.
    In 2001, the ease of the American victory should have come as no surprise, given the country’s history. A simple lesson should have been apparent to American policymakers: Afghans would welcome Americans, but only temporarily. At most, Washington had three to five years to demonstrate to Afghans that allying with the United States was to their benefit. Otherwise, Washington’s newfound allies would desert them.
     
     
    As our captivity enters its fifth day, Tahir, Asad, and I talk about trying to escape. Asad believes our captors will either kill us or hold us indefinitely. That afternoon, when Qari steps outside and leaves his Kalashnikov rifle behind, Asad grabs the weapon, loads