I'm sorry, but the truth is...

What happens when an American reporter speaks some uncomfortable truth to a cloistered Afghan mullah? New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise has the answer in a blog today.

First, the scene: Mullah Shamsullah, 36, is being driven home to his village in a Times SUV. He rides in front, Tavernise and another woman in back. He has been dominating the conversation in a paternalistic fashion. Talk turns to the election, and Shamsullah claims that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an infamous and violent Afghan mujahid who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, would win if another vote were held.

"Do you know who Hekmatyar is?" he asked me, grinning.

I do not know what came over me. Perhaps it was pent up frustration at having absorbed hundreds of [the same] messages over six years. The proper answer in this situation would have been: Hekmatyar is a glorious mujahedeen hero! But on this day, I said what was on my mind.

"He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.," I said loudly over the hum of the car's engine.

Things don't go well from there. Shamsullah doesn't speak again, and when they drop him off, he ambles up the hillside with nary a wave.

Now, Tavernise is taking some flak from Times commenters, like "tewfic el-sawy," who tells her "you're foolish and reckless. had you been harmed or taken as a hostage, it would've been US soldiers who'd have to get you out and possibly some would've been killed in the process ... so keep your silly impulses where they belong and just report. that's what you're paid for."

Personally, she's my hero for having the guts to say this to the face of someone like Shamsullah. In terms of source cultivation, getting along with the locals and all that, it was probably a terrible move. But still, the right side of my brain is happy that, for once, someone exploded the incestuous worldview that too many madrasa-trained "mullahs" in Afghanistan and Pakistan have absorbed throughout their lives. Who am I, a privileged American who has never set foot in either country, to say such a thing? I don't know, but sometimes, be it in America's deep South, or liberal enclaves like San Francisco, or the mountains of Afghanistan, it feels good to know that someone's being told the truth.

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