One of the more surreal moments in my reading life occurred the other day when I read about a US air strike in Pakistan against the suspected #2 man in al Quaeda. As it turned out, he was not in the village that was hit (bad intelligence?) but 18 civilians were apparently killed and the Pakistani government had no clue that the airstrike was planned. (Not a big surprise there.) And....that was it. A mention in reuters for a couple of days and already today it was bumped out of the papers by news of the surprise wins on the football field yesterday and Bob Ney's push from the Chair of the House Administration Committee (no surprise there) and how much Abramoff screwed the American public (should we be surprised?)

The air strike is gone.

What blew my mind about it was that I just finished reading California teenager Said Hyder Akbar's amazing and wonderful book about going to his homeland for the first time, Come Back to Afghanistan. In the book, he goes into detail about how the Pashtun tribe was divided by the British with the Durand Line and how they don't recognize Pakistan and Afghanistan borders because there was no basis for the borders in the first place and anyway they divide the tribe in half and how there are American rumors that some of the Pashtun are hiding al Quaeda leaders but no one knows for sure and the area is so large and the population so huge and the terrain so rough that the whole idea of finding anyone there is nearly impossible.

And then we bombed them. And people died. And I wonder if Hyder knew any of the dead.

It really blew my mind.

We read these things on our news everyday, 10 dead here, 20 dead there, 2 US soldiers killed, 14 civilians killed, on and on and on. We accept with our silence that an air strike on a village is okay, that the chance that we might kill one man is worth the risk of so many others, that killing one man will fix everything, cure everything, that if he dies it will be worth it - everything, all the death - will be worth it.

The whole damn war maybe will be worth it?

Eighteen people sitting down to dinner, playing with their kids, doing their laundry, kissing hello. Eighteen dead bodies but we don't know them, we don't miss them, we don't mourn them.

We don't know a damn thing about them.

But maybe Said Hyder Akbar does. Maybe he will tell us about them someday soon - maybe he will remind us how wrong the whole world has become. Maybe if we took the time to read his book then we would actually know something about this place we have invaded, that we are occupying, that we don't seem to be so worried about saving anymore.

Come Back to Afghanistan, it's the book the whole country should be reading. It's a book that just might teach us all something if, that is - if we are the slightest bit interested in learning.