{"id":765,"date":"2005-09-12T13:14:00","date_gmt":"2005-09-12T20:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=765"},"modified":"2005-09-12T13:14:00","modified_gmt":"2005-09-12T20:14:00","slug":"bin-laden-knew-the-caves-as-well-as-farivar-and-khalis-did","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2005\/09\/12\/bin-laden-knew-the-caves-as-well-as-farivar-and-khalis-did\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Bin Laden knew the caves as well as Farivar and Khalis did.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/09\/11\/magazine\/11TORABORA.html?pagewanted=print\">NYT<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><i>One evening earlier this summer, I asked Masood Farivar, a former Khalis officer who had fought in Tora Bora during the jihad, to tell me why the caves were so important. &#8220;They&#8217;re rugged, formidable and isolated,&#8221; he said. &#8220;If you know them, you can come and go with ease. But if you don&#8217;t, they&#8217;re a labyrinth that you can&#8217;t penetrate. They rise in some places to 14,000 feet, and for 10 years the Soviets pummeled them with everything they had, but to absolutely no avail. Another reason they&#8217;re so important is their proximity to the border and to Pakistan&#8221; &#8211; less than 20 miles away.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I found this guy on Google about a year ago and we exchanged an email or two. He&#8217;s former mujahedeen and is currently a reporter for Dow Jones in NYC. I was sent this story by Arezou Farivar of Vancouver, another cousin of mine who found me on Google a few months ago and has been emailing me since then. Small world. Weird, yet cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NYT: One evening earlier this summer, I asked Masood Farivar, a former Khalis officer who had fought in Tora Bora during the jihad, to tell me why the caves were so important. &#8220;They&#8217;re rugged, formidable and isolated,&#8221; he said. &#8220;If you know them, you can come and go with ease. But if you don&#8217;t, they&#8217;re a labyrinth that you can&#8217;t penetrate. They rise in some places to 14,000 feet, and for 10 years the Soviets pummeled them with everything they&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-i-love-the-internet","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-cl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}