From Act III, Chapter 3
Late that afternoon, Tom Koenigs is puttering around the UN residence, thinking of loose ends. He's retiring in a few days and returning to his wife in Frankfurt. "It's my second wife," he says wryly, "And I've been divorced once. I don't want it to be twice."
Koenigs walks to the kitchen to get a bottle of sweet wine from the industrial refrigerator. The Afghan servants are gone, and all that remains is the security detail. The house is cold and filled with echoes, like an empty hotel. Koenigs says he's "given to reflection" in these few days before his departure. He thinks often "of what we bring to this place, what we'll leave behind," because, he says, "it helps me consider what we're really here for."
The long table where he sits and pours the wine is the closest thing anyone will find to common ground these days in the country. More than anything else, more than the various services and peacekeeping efforts of the mission, "this may be the most important thing" the UN offers, he says, "this table, where people from all the different factions can meet to dine or talk once in a while." That includes him and McNeill--"though we are quite different in every way"--government officials, foreign visitors, and even representatives from the Taliban, whom Koenigs has long advocated engaging in a dialogue. "You lose absolutely nothing sitting down with them, if they are willing to come," he says. "Talking is always better than killing, always, even if you profoundly disagree. What do you lose, exactly?"
One strange twist to those gatherings, Koenigs notes, involves the longtime chief steward of the UN residence, a man named Ahmed. He's been in the job for decades, serving visitors and guests in this room. "But he also is a rather important tribal leader," Koenigs says. "People who know who he is look up startled and say, 'But I should be serving you, sir.'
"Ahmed just smiles. he serves us, but who is serving whom? We come, we think we are in charge. But there are those who have the patience to wait us out. They know that soon enough, in the long history of this country, we will all be gone--the Americans, the British, the Germans." . . .
Tom Koenigs served as the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and as the UN secretary-general's special representative for Afghanistan from 2005 through 2007. In The Way of the World, Koenigs's shares hard truths and humbling lessons from his time in Afghanistan, and speaks to the challenges, realities and prospects facing an impoverished and war-torn country.
