Seeing the Afghan women in their burqas, it's easy to say, "Well, they're not as fully aware as I am, so why do I have to worry so much about their plight?" But that's a misunderstanding. They are brutally aware of their station.

When I would ask women to tell me landays, and they were comfortable enough to do so, they'd tell me ones that reflected the state of their own lives.

Poetry isn't as relevant in the Western world as it is in Afghanistan. And not many people make time for something that doesn't feel relevant.

One of the things about landays is that they thrive in a modern context. Early on I went to this incredible Pashtun novelist, Mustafa Salik, who is a bestselling novelist in Afghanistan and works for the BBC in Pashto. With the question of the sanctity of the poems in mind, I asked him, "Aren't you worried? They've been posted on Facebook and such." And he said, "Just the opposite. This is a folk form; they survive and thrive as people share them."

The power of the voice in rap is about the expression of truth, rather than the expression of some kind of artifice.

I can't imagine how Afghanistan's fall isn't going to be ten times faster than Iraq's.

We know what war means, and we know what poverty means. We need to develop a better model for reaching out to the world than we have.