On September 12, 2001, Encarta.com columnist Tamim Ansary sent an e-mail to a couple dozen friends. In it, he made a case against the United States reacting to the terrorist attacks by bombing Afghanistan "back to the Stone Age," as he'd just heard advocated on a local San Francisco radio talk show.

Ansary, an Afghan American, wrote, "Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done...." Ansary's plea for restraint detailed the suffering of Afghans under Taliban rule, whom he compared to concentration camp victims under a Hitler-like Osama bin Laden.

Some of Ansary's friends asked for permission to forward the e-mail. Three days later, he was forced to unplug his phone to escape its nonstop ringing and his e-mail inbox filled with hundreds, then thousands of responses to his message. Appearance requests came from Oprah, the Charlie Rose Show, and 60 Minutes, and the shy, self-effacing Ansary found himself thrust firmly into the limelight.

"I still don't know how many people got the mail," says Ansary. "Nobody can ever know. The response that came welling up like that ... I didn't know where it was going. I just had to give in to it."

Ansary, born in Kabul in 1948 to an Afghan father and an American mother, had been working for years on a book that incorporated material about his early life, originally conceived as a novel. Part of the work would focus on the changing political climate in and around his homeland. "In 1980, just as the Soviets were invading Afghanistan and the Iranians were taking the American diplomats hostage, I went traveling through North Africa and Turkey, intending to write about what was going on at the ground level in Islamic countries," says Ansary. "I never got around to it then, in part because I knew I needed to ponder what I'd learned. I went on pondering for 20 years."

Ansary spent those two decades on the West Coast as a journalist, textbook editor, and writer of children's books. With the September 11 attacks, his most personal writing project took on a new and more immediate framework and focus. The resulting memoir, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Reflects on Islam and the West, explores the author's life in two distinctly different worlds.

"I decided to write about the two parts of my life," says Ansary, "how they were different, and how they were the same." The book describes Ansary's childhood as part of the close-knit "tribe" in a Kabul compound and his early education under Islamic religious teachers. Ansary recounts his relocation to the United States at age 16 and the subsequent trip back to the vicinity of his homeland during which he experienced firsthand the roots of Islamic fundamentalism as practiced by the Taliban. Understated yet chilling, Ansary's story is instructive and insightful, told straightforwardly, yet is light on overt judgments.

Ansary made two trips back to Afghanistan during 2002; his first, in the spring, ended up taking him only as far as the Pakistani border. The blankets that the Quaker group he traveled with had intended to distribute to Afghan refugees were held for ransom by Pakistani officials until Ansary's visa finally expired. His second trip, last July, was more successful; Ansary visited his hometown of Kabul for the first time in 36 years and reconnected with friends and relatives.

"It was incredibly intense, in so many ways," says Ansary. One surprise was the instant familiarity he felt with the people and the landscape of his childhood. "I got off the plane and saw those mountains ... and the people are just exactly the way I remember them. There isn't any feeling of being in despair, no bitterness, they're cracking jokes. It's really quite amazing."

One year after the horrific events of September 11, Ansary compares the terror that drove his e-mail to the reality of what happened when the United States invaded his home country. "Even though America 'bombed Afghanistan,' they didn't do the thing I warned against in my e-mail," says Ansary. "They didn't launch a war of annihilation against Afghanistan and they didn't bomb civilians. I have no idea if anyone in a policymaking position read my e-mail or if it affected them in any way, but I'd say the American role in Afghanistan has so far been positive."

That's not to say that Afghanistan is by any means in great shape. "The destruction--not from American bombing but all the war that went before--is really just staggering," says Ansary. "I hadn't seen anything like it, even in movies."

Ansary says that the Afghans he spoke to in Kabul "do not feel invaded. America is on the scene, but it's not imposing on the lives of individual people, and Americans are largely invisible in Kabul," says Ansary. But he cautions that this situation could change if the United States tries to manipulate the situation too heavy-handedly.

"America has to hang in there as a peacemaker and rebuilder to capitalize on its gains. And it has to find a way to give Afghanistan sovereignty. If Afghans start to feel invaded and occupied and if they start to feel like they're being reshaped and told what to do--despite the fact that everything in the country is so broken--they'll be fighting again."