And he hates that. Religious allegory, there's no getting away from it! He views religion, all religions, as "an illusion, an opiate," though he won't tell that to just anyone or how that conclusion grew during his youth in an Afghan madrassa and deepened across the years he endured the sectarian strife of his country and neighboring Pakistan. No, such candor doesn't fit with Naeem's current obligations, shepherding Afghanistan's brightest teenagers to America for an extraordinary experiment in cultural connection, in the possible. The mission: pluck forty kids from across the war-torn Islamic nation, teach them everything that can be learned about America in a month of orientation, find families in the United States to host them, and then manage a journey across a dozen time zones and several centuries to deposit each unwitting youngster into the living room of some volunteer family and the bustling halls of an American high school. In a year they'll return home--if they can survive that long.

"Pair off in twos!" he shouts above the airport din. "This is a buddy system. STAY WITH YOUR BUDDY!"

He glares as they hustle into a double helix, then two neat columns.

"Fine," he grumbles. "Now follow Mary."

Mary is a tiny gray-haired Indian lady, Bombay-born but now a German citizen, whose main job is to guide confused exchange students across the airport on behalf of several German travel agencies. She raises a minuscule fist and begins marching as, two by two, the train of dizzy, half-smiling teens lurches forward.

They are the cream of the select. Twenty-five hundred Afghan youngsters between ages fourteen and seventeen applied eight months ago to something called the American Councils for International education and took a test. Seven hundred of the top scorers then took another test and wrote an essay. Three hundred of those were asked to complete a long array of essays and sit for an interview. forty made it, winning a trip to the United States care of American Councils, a three-decades-old organization, funded by everything from the State Department to the World Bank to George Soros.

Naeem, hardened and pragmatic at thirty-two, winnowed through all the applications with his boss in America. That's where Naeem lives with his wife, deep in the Virginia hills, about two hours from D.C. in a barely affordable house that expands "exurb" to its theoretical limit. he knew these kids first through their photos and the reports from colleagues who interviewed them in Afghanistan, and then got to know them better during a month at an abandoned ski resort in Kyrgyzstan, where he assisted with their orientation and taught them the strange customs of America.

Today's group of twenty is the first shift--kids whose first days at their American high schools come later this month: august 2006. In a few weeks, when the September group will cross over, the twenty kids now snaking through Frankfurt will already be wandering across a landscape they have dreamed mightily about--dreams jammed with harebrained assumptions, ferocious yearning, and plenty of global economy product placement.

Mary halts the train in an airport lounge . . . and Naeem hears something to his left. The line stretches alongside a bar, a casino bar, with slot machines and a sixty-inch flat-screen TV.

Naeem motions to Mary--he points to his left--and begins to drift over.

The bar is crowded at 10:03 a.m., with people milling about. Naeem looks up at the big screen, at the blue studio backdrops of CNN International.

BREAKING NEWS . . . "The most significant plot since the 9/11 attacks was foiled this morning by British police . . . bombs on multiple aircraft due to explode over the continental United States . . . arrests early this morning in and around London . . . all liquids and gels are banned on flights in Europe and America . . ."