Qabali Pilau

The first time I tasted Afghan food, around 37 years ago, I doubt there were any restaurants in the U.S. that served it. In 1969, Afghanistan was in a rare period of political calm. Its long bloody history at the crossroads of empires in conflict was temporarily stalled by the Cold War face-off between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Yesterday, celebrating the launch of MyWire with several colleagues at an Afghan restaurant on the peninsula, I ordered the dish pictured above. The serving was more than I could eat; thus tonight's leftovers as dinner.

This dish is one of the signature meals of a country that for more than a quarter century has not known even a brief period of peace. The saddest thing about eating this food is remembering a moment in a country's history when there actually was hope of joining what locals called the "modern" world.

This is a place where empires from the east and the west have always met face-to-face, with unspeakably bloody consequences. Many of the legendary warriors in our collective memory swept through here. Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, Tamberlane, Babur, Alexander the Great, the Moguls, the Persians, the British Empire -- all of these and so many more scaled the mighty peaks of the Hindu Kush with its narrow passages, including the Khyber Pass, onto the central Asian steppe with its valleys rich with fruits of unparalleled genetic diversity and its ancient riches of gold, lapis, amethyst, and other minerals.

When I lived there, the hostile empires of the day -- the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. -- were facing off in an uneasy nuclear detente that kept both of them from seizing ancient Afghanistan. Left to their own devices, the Afghans sought to create a democracy, where education of both boys and girls was seen as a road to a better future, where conservative religious Mullahs faced openly rebellious challenges from youth, and where the competing propaganda broadcast by Radio Moscow and its American counterpart sounded equally ridiculous as they opened each night's program with either The International or The Star Spangled Banner, both of which echoed across Afghanistan's deserts with an emptiness that the nightly prayer call in its eloquent classic Arabic so easily surpassed when it came to securing hearts and minds.

But the peaceful moment we knew was shattered by the end of the next decade, as the Soviets blinked first, and destroyed their empire by attempting to conquer this unconquerable land -- the place where empires always seem to go to die.

Such were my thoughts as I ate lunch yesterday with my colleagues, most of whom are engineers. As I looked around our table, I marveled at the diversity on display -- women and men of Chinese, Indian, Taiwanese, and European extraction. None of us were more than first generation Americans, and here we were, enjoying the cuisine of a people so remote and exotic than none of our ethnic or family histories, however diverse, could reach.

Yet, once again, an arrogant superpower has chosen to engage in battle on the plains of Afghanistan, only to face the inevitable fate of all that have gone before -- failure.

It pains me to be an American and to know that our nation's story will be ending in that cruel place where dreams die and the knife in the back is the moment you finally realize you have trusted the wrong person. As the sun sets on the American empire, my comfort comes from knowing that a more diverse and a more global society will rise in our wake, hopefully one built on sustainable values and respecting each other's frailties.

Though I fear we may endure an awful transition before we collectively get there.

-30-

p.s. As my older children know, this ancient dish is what their mother and I settled on as their Christmas Eve dinner during their youth. I used to gather the ingredients from obscure Russian delis along Clement Street, and their Mom used an old cookbook from our Peace Corps days to make it all come together. I wonder whether any of them know how to cook it today?