KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – All politics is local. The American politician Tip O’Neill said this, but it was proved true in Afghanistan this weekend, as protests turned violent over the cartoons of Muhammad printed in Denmark and other European countries.

Marching from the northern Afghanistan city of Charikar to the American military base at Bagram, thousands of protesters shouted, “Death to America, Death to Denmark, Death to foreigners, Death to the West,” and burned shops, cars, and police checkpoints along the way.

Death to America? For cartoons that were not published by any major US newspapers, such protests might seem illogical. But they show the way Afghans equate the government of Hamid Karzai with America, and how frustrations with Mr. Karzai can quickly jump to frustrations with the West in general, and back again.

These protests may sputter out, as did the violence last year over reports that US military interrogators in Guantánamo had desecrated the Koran. But, while the grievance is less direct this time, the morale of Afghans has worsened in recent months, providing more dry timber for the latest spark over Islamic sensibilities.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the protests that rocked Afghanistan was where they were held. Down south, where American and coalition troops have been fighting against Taliban and other antigovernment forces in increasingly bloody battles, the cities were largely quiet. But up north, considered safer by foreign observers, the ranks of protesters grew into the thousands.

The crowds in Charikar, which swelled to 5,000 at one point Monday, called for the Danish Embassy to be closed. A smaller contingent of 2,000 marched the six miles or so to Bagram, where the US maintains its largest airbase in Afghanistan. The protesters torched some Turkish military buildings and then the first police checkpost at the entrance of the base. At this point, Afghan police opened fire.

At present, at least four protesters have been reported killed in Bagram, with another eight protesters and five policemen injured, according to Kabir Ahmed, the local government chief in Bagram. Deadly clashes also were reported in Laghman Province, just east of Kabul.

Religion alone does not explain the sudden ferocity of the event. If it did, there would have been more protests down south, in Taliban-affected cities like Kandahar, Qalat, and Khost. Instead, the protests emanated from an area where former mujahideen (or Islamic warrior) parties were at their strongest, the very parties that were once considered moderate Islamists and have now become a major political opposition movement to the Karzai government.

Yet the democratic changes here also channeled some of the discontent in more constructive directions.

Karzai, who had strongly condemned the cartoons last week, appealed to Muslims Sunday to practice forgiveness after protests in the Middle East turned violent.
On Saturday, I was in attendance as Afghanistan’s fledgling Parliament debated for about 20 minutes how exactly to protest the now four-month-old Danish cartoons.

At the end of a vigorous – yet civil – debate, during which everyone agreed the cartoons were deplorable, parliamentarians waved their green cards to call for a resolution to condemn the Danish government for allowing the cartoons to be printed. One lone parliamentarian waved a red card of dissent. “We should not condemn only Denmark, but also Norway and France and other European countries that have reprinted the cartoons.” The house muttered their agreement.

One member, a Dari speaker from western Herat Province, stood to take a minority view. “The government of Afghanistan should call for the death of the man who drew these cartoons,” he shouted. A flurry of murmurs indicated that most Afghan parliamentarians considered this a bit over the top.

Nuances were also considered. One delegate asked whether it was really fair to target whole nations, or merely the newspapers behind the affair. The notion didn’t take, however.

Few in Parliament had even seen the cartoons until Afghan journalists in the gallery passed around photocopies of the images, downloaded from the Internet. As the drawings made the rounds, it was clear that nearly everyone in the assembly found them offensive. Malalai Shinwari, a former journalist herself for the BBC’s Pashto service, can only shake her head at the images of Muhammad, his turban wrapped around a round hissing cannonball.

Behind every great leader, there’s a good husband.

That, at least, is the case in the home of parliament candidate Fatima Kazemian and her husband, Ibrahim Alemi. While Mrs. Kazemian scampers up mountainsides and drives to the most remote districts of her Afghan province of Bamiyan, her husband is behind her, arranging props and posters, setting up the next campaign visit by cellphone, and looking after their 6-year-old daughter, Chenika.

He is, in a word, devoted. Here are some other words too: modern, educated, brave, and a little worried.

“Sometimes, I get worried about her security,” he admitted, “because there will be a big competition in this election, with 68 people running for just four parliamentary seats. There might be some weapons used, so I’m a little bit worried.”

But overall, Alemi supports his wife’s decision to run in the first parliamentary election in his country in more than 30 years. “I think it’s good that she’s running,” he said, and mentioned how proud he was of her work on behalf of women and literacy over the past two years since they had returned from exile in Iran. But as for taking up domestic duties and being the perfect husband behind his politician wife, Alemi said that this comes naturally. “I also worked in the women’s development center in Bamiyan, so I’m always with women, and understand their problems.”

Ibrahim Alemi is by no means the typical Afghan male, and Afghanistan is not quickly turning into a bastion of liberalism. But with 27 percent of the nation’s new parliamentary seats set aside by law for women representatives, there is suddenly a large number of husbands who are finding themselves in charge of Daddy Day Care.

One of these is the husband of Bamiyan’s female governor, Habiba Sarabi, who goes for months at a time without seeing his wife at their home in Kabul.

“Do you believe, that when I’m at work, I completely forget my family,” says Governor Sarabi, with a guilty smile in her office in Bamiyan. “Otherwise I would not succeed in my work, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything for my people.”

It’s unfortunate, the governor says, that it’s impossible to blend a family life and a working life, but she says her family supports her. “My family has let me come. They say you have come here as a symbol for us. They respect me and this is a big start.”

At his wife’s campaign stop, in the remote Bamiyan village of Kharob-e Miyona, Alemi was playing the supportive spouse to Fatima Kazemian the candidate. As Mrs. Kazemian spoke of building new roads, of providing new schools and better health care, and abolishing forced marriages, Alemi tapped campaign posters into the village’s adobe walls, and kept their daughter Chenika out of mischief.

Afterward, my translator asked Alemi if he knew how much his life was going to change if his wife was elected to a five-year term as parliament member. “Yes,” he said with a smile, “but I think it’s the right thing for her to do.”

And Kazemian added her own brassy quip. “Besides, he doesn’t have a choice.”

Correspondent - Nachammai Raman

Editor's note: This blog dispatch was filed several days before Friday's assassination of Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar. Despite speculation that the Tamil Tigers are responsible, no one has yet claimed responsibility.

When Thamilvilly walked in to meet me, I wondered if she was some big cheese’s assistant coming to tell me my interview was canceled.  In neatly pinned-up pigtails, austere pants, and a belted baggy shirt, she looked more like an intern than the deputy head of the women’s wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers, is a secular separatist group that has fought a sometimes brutal war for independence against the Sri Lankan government for decades. They have used conventional, guerrilla, and terror tactics, including more than 200 suicide bombings.

But this Tamil Tigress looked less than ferocious.

Thamilvilly shared with me that her resolutions for the year were to be able to write essays in English and to speak English fluently. I asked her if it was to get a better position in the rebel movement. “If you build up your capacity, your positions will come,” she said.

From talking to her, I found out that the LTTE invested heavily in the education of its members. All new recruits were given a year’s basic training.  This included literacy skills for those who couldn’t read and write.  In addition to the physical component, there was a big chunk on the history of freedom struggles/wars, political science, and medicine. Depending on recruits’ interests and capabilities they were given advanced training for the jobs they would take up.  But all recruits were trained for combat and had to take up arms when called.

“Our leader [Prabhakaran] is very particular about giving both men and women the same opportunities,” Thamilvilly said. The LTTE started taking in women cadres in 1985 although its spokesperson wouldn’t share how many female members it currently had. 

Thamilvilly joined the LTTE some ten years ago when she was 17 or 18. Her studies were disrupted because of heavy fighting. She and a group of friends thought they were going to die anyway from the army’s bombing and shelling and decided to dedicate their lives to the LTTE’s “freedom struggle,” in which case, even if they died, they would die for a cause.

Even now, Thamilvilly and her peers have little to gain personally from their association with the LTTE. “If I die, what political power am I going to gain? We are sacrificing our lives for our people. 18,000 Tigers have died on the battlefield.”  Tigers get no salaries.  They are all volunteers.

Why was she so devoted to the LTTE then?  “The LTTE gave me dignity, a job, a purpose in life.  Otherwise, I would have had to go from place to place as a displaced person.”

Did she want to die? “All everybody wants is to study, be good in life …. Nobody wants to die. The basic human instinct is for self-preservation,” she said. “If somebody is willing to die, then, there must be a grievance that is stronger than the instinct for self-preservation.”

I couldn't help but wonder, then, what some of these Tigers could achieve if they didn't have a rebellion for which to fight and - if need be - die.

Simon Montlake - Correspondent

It was an invitation I couldn't pass up: A barbecued seafood dinner at the house of my driver in the southern Thai city of Narathiwat.

Madaree's four children were hushed at first when I arrived, looking somewhat disheveled after a long day of reporting on  the escalating violence in southern Thailand.

Most Thais are Buddhist, but Madaree and his family are Muslim, as are the majority of people in Thailand's three southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia.

Simmering ethnic tensions here have led to violence and harsh crackdowns by Thai security forces in recent months. Armed ethnic-Malay Muslim separatists, who draw on a pool of angry disaffected men, are increasingly terrorizing southern Buddhists – monks, teachers, farmers – causing some to flee or relocate to safer areas. (See recent story for more).

The Thai government has recently introduced sweeping emergency powers to combat separatist rebels fighting in Thailand's "Deep South." The emergency decree grants Prime Minister Thaksin Shinwatra the power to detain suspects without trial, monitor phone calls, ban public gatherings, and expel foreigners from trouble spots.

Fed up with the daily violence in the Muslim-dominated South, many Thais seem ready to see the authorities taking a tougher line.

Back in Madaree's house, the promise of grilled crab was a welcome respite from the day's reporting on the ethnic violence and a chance to savor the distinctive Malay cuisine.

The children soon warmed up to me. My gift of candies and Coca-Cola quickly got the youngest daughter on my side.

After introductions, Madaree steered me and my Thai assistant into the yard and sat me on a carpet spread under a hand-built wooden shelter. 

As the children swarmed around us, Madaree lit the coals on two small burners. He then connected two electric fans to the power cable snaking out of the house and pointed them at the coals.

Soon we had enough heat to begin cooking the vast pile of seafood we had bought earlier in the day at a border-town market.

As I squatted on the carpet, the food started to flow: crabs, shrimp, clams, and fish that I didn’t recognize but was happy to eat.

A local journalist and his girlfriend joined us, and still the food kept coming. I groaned as my host pushed more crab on my plate.

This is one of the great joys of working in this corner of the world. You can nearly always find some decent food when you’re out reporting. In fact, you often come away singing the praises of the local cuisine.

The delicious blend of flavors and styles testifies to the multiples of ethnicities, cultures, and races that call Southeast Asia home.

Of course, food can also be a divider, a marker of who stands where.

In southern Thailand, Muslims tend to eat at their own restaurants, not only because it’s prepared according to “halal” standards, but because they like this style of food, which is heavily influenced by Malay cooking.

Aom, my Thai assistant on this trip, a Buddhist from northern Thailand, is an enthusiastic convert to Malay-Muslim cuisine.

From the moment we touched down in Narathiwat, she was sizing up the food options and mapping out our mealtimes. Her local knowledge of curry houses and coffee shops was uncanny.

At one roadside stop, I sampled an unforgettable rice dish – the house specialty – that blended flakes of coconut, chili, and other herbs.

Aom explained that it was named for Her Majesty Queen Sirikit, who has a summer palace in southern Thailand. Apparently this Muslim-owned restaurant was the exclusive palace caterer for this dish.

After all the grim stories of religious tensions and fraying bonds, this was something to cheer. A Buddhist monarch requesting Malay-Muslim food is a small start, but in food-obsessed Thailand, it’s not a bad one.

Simon Montlake - Correspondent

In Thailand's Muslim-dominated ‘Deep South’, as Thais call it (it’s humid, yes, but the similarities to the US Deep South end there), I’ve discovered that sometimes the closer you get to a story, the less you see.

Let me explain.

This was my third attempt since January 2004 to make sense of what lies behind the frequent bombings, shootings and arson attacks (see story).

Each time, I’ve run into the same brick wall: many locals aren’t convinced there is an insurgency, let alone one directed by Muslim separatists.

From afar, the pattern seems clear. Soldiers, police, and government officials are shot. Schools, banks, and utilities are bombed. Muslims suspected of snitching to the authorities are silenced.

That’s exactly what you’re supposed to think, a Thai army officer told me.  The criminals are using the separatists as cover for their normal activities.

Normal? Yes, he continued, as we barreled down the highway, swerving past army checkpoints. One had red-and-white irrigation pipes spliced into a X-shaped barrier; someone had jammed hairy coconut husks into the pipe ends.   

According to the officer, only 30% of the violence consisted of terrorist acts committed by the separatists. Criminals who thrived on mayhem were responsible for 50%. The rest was political or personal. 

So who are the terrorists? Analysts and government officials can reel off names, organizations, and networks.

But ask a Muslim villager and he might tell you that it’s all a smokescreen for corrupt officials involved in border smuggling rackets. This theory conveniently unites the criminal and political, and leaves out the terrorists (who appear to be homegrown, at this stage).

On the second day of my latest trip, I met Masakrit, a burly man with a graying crewcut who seemed to have a foot in several camps.

The scion of a prominent Muslim family, he had been accused of trafficking drugs, then linked to last year’s deadly raid on an army camp that ignited the current insurgency.

After fleeing to neighboring Malaysia, he returned in February and met with some government heavy-hitters in Bangkok who decided he was innocent of all charges. Now he’s a peace envoy of sorts.

We drove into the countryside to visit his village where, he assured me, I would see his modest house and realize what a modest man he was.

“They said I’m a drug dealer. But look at my house? Is this the house of a wealthy man?” he grumbled. 

Indeed, it was a modest house, as was his wife’s noodle stall in the front yard. Ducking into the shade, Masakrit began offering his insights on the insurgency, saying that Thai drug dealers were behind it.

And the separatists? Only 4% of the Muslim population wanted to break away and form an independent state, he said. (That’s about 50,000 people, by the way.)

He seemed most aggrieved at his family’s treatment at the hands of the Thai government, which had relieved him of his old job of village chief. 

When I’d heard enough of his martyrdom, he brightened up and suggested trying his wife’s excellent noodle soup.

Keen to talk to other locals, I agreed. The first one I met puffed out his chest and said he was the village chief.

“Yes”, cried Masakrit. “Meet my brother!”

Clearly the government’s persecution of his family was of a limited nature.

Later that day, I visited a family-run Islamic boarding school that had been shut down after an Army raid recovered training videos and weapons.

I’d visited several Islamic schools in southern Thailand with a similar layout of dilapidated wooden huts in a sandy clearing of coconut palms, plus a family house.

The school’s name gave me pause for thought. The hand-painted sign read, ‘Jihad Wittaya school’, in Thai and English. Here, according to the Thai Army, was a recruiting and training center for the insurgency.

I asked the laconic son of the school’s director, who had been arrested and released on bail, about the white crosses painted on the huts and the school’s row of classrooms.

“We don’t know how they got there,” he said. Apparently a truck was heard during the night, and in the morning the crosses were there.

Unfortunately, sitting down to a proper chat with this man, a crucial source for the story I was writing, was difficult.

The reason was that we weren’t the first on the scene. Two Muslim men from a Thai Senate fact-finding team were already there to interview him.

This seemed fortuitous for my story, since they were presumably also trying to throw some light on this shadowy conflict.

Once introduced, the team leader told me he was willing to share his theory on what was really going on in the ‘Deep South’.

Apparently the masterminds behind all the violence were – wait for it – the CIA. Naturally, they had a motive, he continued. “America wants to control the sea lanes.”

He then questioned my credentials and warned that local people would all assume I was CIA, too.

(Later that evening, when I ran into his team at my hotel, I asked if he really believed I was CIA. He did. So I sat him down at the PC in the lobby and Googled my name and the Monitor. I don’t think it swayed him.)

When I asked if there were any other competing theories, he nodded sagely.

China was also involved in the plot, together with Thailand’s biggest chicken producer that was run by ethnic-Chinese investors.

Their motive was to wrest control of the fertile coastal plain and force Muslims to work for a pittance to produce cheap produce.

Finally, the arch conspirator slunk off to continue his research, leaving me to my interview.

Afterwards, we drove to the nearest town Pattani where we would spend the night. In the center of town, I noticed hundreds of people gathering by the river and a sea of fluorescent-lit food stalls.

"What’s going on?" I asked my assistant. "Oh, this? It’s the Annual Pattani Chicken Festival," she explained.

Chicken Festival? Maybe there is a conspiracy, after all. A poultry one.

Ben Arnoldy - Correspondent

The boundary between Central Asia and South Asia is a matter of opinion, but in my mind I crossed over it just on the outskirts of the Afghan city of Jalalabad. That was where I eyed the first autorikshaw, or as I like to think of them, weed-whackers on wheels.

Whizzing and tooting, the little yellow mopeds dart in, out, and through traffic across India and Pakistan, but generally not Afghanistan. It may have to do with the harsh Central Asian landscape. Or, for the burly Afghans, it may simply be impossible to preserve personal dignity riding on one.

From Jalalabad I was heading east for the Khyber Pass and a ride along the Grand Trunk Road, one of the most storied thoroughfares in the world.

In 1901, Rudyard Kipling depicted the Grand Trunk as the great unifier of British India. “It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles - such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.”

His vision would last less than half a century before the road was spliced by the partition of India and the birth of Pakistan. Now, we have two “grand truncated roads.”

You can learn a few things about a place even from behind the window of a car, and that was especially true with the Pakistani portion of the G.T. – or “jittee” in the local accent.

Sometimes signs told whole stories. For example, not far from Peshawar I passed the “Decent Public High School.” The thoroughly modern gas stations advertise “24-hour mosque” beneath mentions of a convenience store and full-service.

But it’s the military that dominates the landscape. Just to travel through the Khyber Pass – a gradual
mountain route historically used by conquerors, smugglers, and thieves -- foreigners must accept a soldier for protection. Actually, three of them. Different tribal forces have different jurisdictions,
meaning we twice had to drop one guy off and pick up another.

Many of the nicest buildings along the G.T. belong to the military. In Peshawar alone, I spotted the School of Mechanized Warfare, the Artillery School, and the Frontier Corps Headquarters. Stickers on cars tout the Pakistani Army, and F-16 fighter jets are a common decal on the brightly painted trucks.

Miniature Ghauri and Shaheen missiles – Pakistan’s delivery vehicles for any attack on India – were proudly displayed in a roundabout near the town of Gujrat. “Power,” my driver said, pointing at them. I asked him how he felt about Pakistan getting the nuclear bomb. “We need food,” he said, making a butter-not-guns argument.

Pakistan’s portion of the G.T. no longer seems to be the melting pot of cultures that it was during Kipling’s day. A few reminders of a wider heritage remain: a handful of churches left by the British, a small Hindu temple at the confluences of rivers.

At a roadside restaurant between Islamabad and Lahore, I drew a few stares. One man asked my driver where I was from, and he responded, “Englistan. London.” The depressing reality in many parts of the world is that it has become dangerous to admit you are from the United States. I later told the driver, “Good you did not say – ”

“I never do,” he said, explaining how yesterday he had introduced my American colleague as a Bosnian.

Though the road has become a reasonably modern two-lane separated highway, there’s still a little of the old sense that people from all walks of life make their way together. Especially in the agricultural areas of the Punjab, where grain is piled into pyramids three stories high, horse-drawn carts loaded with bricks or cow manure jostle with autorikshaws and trucks with curtains of jingling chains along their undersides.

In a few years, the “jittee” may stop being the main East-West route. A new three-lane, limited-access toll road stretches from Lahore to just short of Peshawar. Complete with nighttime reflectors on the pavement and moralizing signs like “observe lane discipline” and “frequently use vehicle mirrors,” it feels like any US interstate highway.

Many locals still prefer to take the G.T. The tolls are one reason: “Money is important. Time is not so important,” my driver explained. But he also said there is a sense of unease about the road’s isolation and tedium. “I don’t go at night because it’s empty and boring. You can fall asleep.”

Nachammai Raman - Correspondent

Virginia Woolf said every woman must have money and a room with a view, but had she been alive, I wonder what she would have said about women and Indian hotel rooms.

Finding accomodation on the road is one of the hassles of being a single female reporter in India.

You would think that all a hotel manager would need is a decent assurance that I will be able to pay for the room. But, typically, they are more concerned with my status – unaccompanied and unmarried.

“You came alone?” they ask.

I hold myself back from saying, “Well, do you see anyone with me?” I answer yes politely, adding that I am there to cover a particular story.

Then they ask me how come I speak Tamil (a language and ethnic group in southern India) if I write for an American paper.

“My parents are both Tamils and we’ve always spoken Tamil at home,” I say.

This prompts the killer question. “If both your parents are Tamils, aren’t they concerned about letting their daughter travel alone like this?” And suddenly even my parents become bad parents.

When I came to Nagapattinam to cover the tsunami five months ago, I didn’t stay overnight. This time, I planned out a two-night stay, but arriving in Nagapattinam, I found that no half-decent hotel had a room for me.

They said they were booked up because of Clinton’s visit. I wasn’t willing to believe it until they tried to help me get a hotel room in a neighboring town. But since the commute took too much time, I begged one of the hotels in Nagapattinam to give me whatever they could for the next night at least. So, they obliged.

This supposedly top hotel in Nagapattinam, I found, had no Internet facility, no air-conditioning (at least in my room), and no in-house restaurant. So, to file my story, I invaded a good-natured person’s office and to fuel my body, I drank tea and ate dry snack foods in packets. Now I don’t know what they’ll say when I go back so late.

Once in Cochin, Kerala, a schoolmarmish female hotel manager told me she wouldn’t let me into my room if I didn not come back by 7:00 p.m.

“But I have to meet a source at seven,” I expostulated. “Then you can’t come back here,” she said. Fate was kind to me that day because my source called and rescheduled for the next morning because he had something else to do.

But the hotel experience that tops my list is in a hill region called Yercaud. I was the only woman staying at that particular hotel. And this was the only hotel that would give me a room, although no hotel there was booked up.

One of the male guests in the hotel rang my room in the middle of the night and said coyly that he wanted to chat with me. Galvanized by fear, I shut the door on him as quickly as I could and moved all the furniture in the room to barricade the door in case he tried to force it. Luckily, nothing like that happened, but I was scared to death the whole night. I didn’t sleep a wink because my mind was incessantly planning escape strategies in case something happened. The next morning, I fled Yercaud to the nearest city where I stayed with a family my father knew.

So, Virginia Woolf, would you throw me a few lapidary insights about surviving single in Victorian India?

Ben Arnoldy - Correspondent

Road mishaps are a common part of reporting in Afghanistan. In two weeks I’ve already been in two collisions and had two flat tires.

No one was hurt in the minor “bumps,” though a motorcyclist who hit our car did fall over onto the pavement. I quickly decided to ignore my translator who explained that if you wear a seatbelt in Afghanistan you are seen as a coward.

When the tire on our little Toyota Corolla blew out on an unpaved construction detour between Kabul to Sarowbi, I was a bit concerned about our remote location. Luckily we soon came across a small roadside shop selling soda, candy, and tire patching.

My translator knew that I was looking for local opinion about the construction project being carried out by Chinese workers (see story). He suggested that while the tire was getting fixed we talk to the group of men lounging in the shop. We did and we got an earful about the lack of jobs and the struggles the men had just to feed their families.

The other flat tire taught me why my colleagues often hire both a driver and a translator. I simply had a translator who also drove me around Kabul to the various interviews. One interview was at the Ministry of Education, and the guards at the gate would not let us park the car in the ministry lot. Parking on many streets of Kabul is forbidden, though there are no signs to tell you where you can and cannot park. Locals just know.

Najib, my translator, parked the car some distance away from the ministry and we did our interviews. When we were finished, Najib started to chuckle and said, "I hope the car is okay."

What do you mean, I asked?

"Well, they sometimes come and flatten the tire or take your license plate." They, meaning the police.

Sure enough, when we got to the car, one of the back tires was flat. I guess it is Afghanistan's low-tech version of the boot.

After a grueling 10-hour drive from Kabul to Islamabad, I met a diplomat friend in the lobby of my hotel. I was tired, covered in dust, and looking forward to a hot shower.

My friend asked a seemingly innocent question: “What’s it like in Kabul?”

Me: “Fine, great stories, the weather’s fantastic, the city seems pretty safe.”

Him: “But did you hear about the bomb blast at the Internet café? Two dead, five injured.”

Me: “No.”

I ran upstairs, turned on the BBC, and gaped at video images of shattered glass and Afghan policemen standing in the rain. The Internet café, Park Net Café in the busy upscale Shahre-Naw district of Kabul, was the very place I had gone the day before to read my email and file my stories to Boston. Now it was a crime scene.

Beyond the expected sense of horror and relief – horror that the blast had claimed lives, relief that I wasn’t one of them – this was a lesson in how quickly perceptions of safety can change in times of asymmetrical warfare.

For two weeks, fellow Monitor journalist Ben Arnoldy and I had walked and driven around a country where we generally felt safe. True, there were attacks in far-flung districts, and there were a few cases of kidnapping attempts on foreigners. One enterprising American, kidnapped by three uniformed Afghans in a ritzy district of Kabul, managed to extract himself from the trunk of a moving car with a tire-iron. But our own experience was a place that was slowly, impatiently returning to normalcy.

Afghans told us again and again that the country was safe, safe enough for foreigners to come out into the countryside to dig wells, rebuild schools, create hospitals -- and strangely, the foreigners weren’t coming.

We absorbed their confidence. We drove out into the countryside and talked with ordinary people and tribal elders and security chiefs, something that many Western diplomats and policymakers don’t have the luxury, or the permission, to do.

We had seen the country with our own eyes. And things seem to be improved. Were we wrong?

Details from the news are sketchy, but it appears that a suicide bomber walked into the cafe at 6 p.m. on Saturday and blew up himself and several others. One of those killed was Burmese, the others appear to be Afghans, including members of the Internet cafe staff.

Perhaps reporters are not the best people to ask about safety. When gunfire erupts, we run to see what happened, while more sensible people run away. We take vacations in beautiful places that have turned into military camps, places like Kashmir and Nepal and Sri Lanka. Our parents scratch their heads wondering why we didn’t become accountants. Our spouses remind us that no story is worth our lives.

We tell ourselves that, statistically speaking, there are more murders in New York City or Washington, D.C. than in a war-zone like Kabul. As long as you don’t do something stupid, you’re probably going to go home in one piece.

But with a single terrorist attack, that confidence can evaporate. A bombing at an Internet cafe in Kabul will always get more attention than a murder in, say, New York’s Central Park. One is a symbolic attack on The West; the other is just a senseless death.

With this attack, Kabul will change. Humanitarian workers will take more precautions and stay away from public areas. UN officials and diplomats will issue new safety guidelines, and staff members will follow them. The gossipy social fabric of Kabul will be torn, as yet another meeting place becomes too dangerous or spooky to visit.

When an event like this happens, it’s easier to understand why the international community must take extra precautions in their development work. But if the work slows, it won’t be the West but Afghans who suffer. Can’t these people ever get a break?

Ben Arnoldy - Correspondent

Afghanistan has a biblical landscape. Mud-walled homes appear like ancient forts on rocky hills. Thin rivers dwindle to nothing in desert washes. Bells clank in the dusty air as Kuchi nomads drive herds of sheep.

Even urban Kabulis have a mind set shaped by the pastoral texture of this country. For example, at some point or another during a discussion, many Afghans will start to say, “We have a proverb ....”
 
Whenever I hear this phrase, I smile and prepare to spend a few moments lost in translation.

I was sipping green tea with the former dean of the faculty of journalism at Kabul University recently, discussing whether one of the more risqué Afghan television stations had broken too many cultural taboos. “There is a saying that whatever you throw down a salt mine, it will become salt,” he said. As I mulled over whether salt was metaphorically good or bad, I heard him drop the phrase “class society.”

Mixing Marx and minerals? I knew I was doomed.

After the interview, my interpreter suggested that the proverb meant: “The only thing you’ll ever get out of a salt mine is salt.”

I blinked a couple times back at him.

So whatever you have in your mind, it will come out,” he explained.

Sort of how “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” can lead to “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” I guess.

Afghans usually launch into a proverb midway through an interesting line of thinking or a juicy quote that I’m furiously scribbling. The proverb inevitably spoils things, leaving a tantalizing but useless half-statement in my notebook. But the best setup for a proverb goes to Engineer Amir Shah Karger.
 
In explaining what he thought of a fellow politician, Mr. Karger said, “We have a kind of friendship, but I don’t like him.” He went on to explain, “We have a proverb. Keep your friendships, but don’t touch the problems of your friends.”

Even the Taliban dish out folk wisdom. “The sun cannot be covered by two fingers,” said a Taliban commander who had recently reconciled with the government. In other words, you cannot hide what is obvious. He continued, “Everybody knows those who attack Afghanistan are not Taliban. The world knows better than us who they are.” In this case, maybe there are more than a couple of fingers being raised.

I’ve been treated to some theological proverbs as well. Shahab Temori, a 19-year-old decked out in jeans and an enormous Harley Davidson belt buckle, explained to me that dressing in Western clothes doesn’t detract from being a good Muslim. “We have a proverb: Jesus Christ is in his own religion. Moses is in his own religion. No one can touch a man’s religion.”

And some Pashtuns consider themselves to be a lost tribe of Israel. But if Job had been an Afghan, Yahweh would not have been pleased with the following proverb offered by a police chief in Khost dealing with smugglers.  “There was a shepherd, and suddenly there was a very strong rain and a flood came and all the sheep drowned,” he said. “It was a time of fasting. The shepherd said to God, you killed all my sheep so I will break your fast now.”

The chief connected his proverb to local events. Last year, he said, the government sprayed some of the opium crops in the nearby Zadran Valley. The farmers then had no way to make money and feed their families, so they went out and chopped down forests to sell the wood. He was sympathetic to the Zadrans despite their opium and timber smuggling: “No one can take a bite of food from them. If they are stopped in one way, they should do something else to feed themselves.”

That’s as clear, I thought, as the waters of Panjshir after a storm.