Late on Sept. 11, 2001, Najib was at home with his family in Kabul listening to a radio bulletin on the Pashto language service of the BBC. There was no such thing as the internet in Afghanistan then, and with almost no other information sources apart from the Taliban's Voice of Sharia radio, the BBC's evening program became known as the "sixth prayer" of the day.
For three centuries, faraway empires have come to conquer Afghanistan -- the British in the 19th, the Soviets in the 20th and now the Americans in the 21st -- before retreating in humiliation. © Getty Images
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