Monday, August 23, 2010

P.J. O'Rourke is the 72-Hour Expert: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Afgahnistan


Humorist P.J. O'Rourke wrote an amusing and insightful piece on Afghanistan for The Weekly Standard.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama. I called my wife. She said, no, she certainly is not vacationing at government expense in some jet-set hot spot with scads of her BFFs. Looks like I’m not President Obama. But I am a reporter, fresh from Kabul. What do you want to know about Afghanistan, past, present, or future? Ask me anything.

As all good reporters do, I prepared for my assignment with extensive research. I went to an Afghan restaurant in Prague. Getting a foretaste—as it were—of my subject, I asked the restaurant’s owner (an actual Afghan), “So what’s up with Afghanistan?”

You can read the rest of his piece via the below link:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/72-hour-expert

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