Rosanne Klass, Advocate of the Afghan People, Dies at 86 - nytimes

Rosanne Klass, a writer and human rights advocate who presciently warned against Soviet aggression in Afghanistan in the 1980s and its potential to unify rebels under the banner of Islam, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 86.  The cause was cancer, said Stephen T. Marshall, her cousin and closest surviving relative.

After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, Ms. Klass became a leading advocate of American military support for Afghan insurgents, who sought to topple a Soviet-installed regime in Kabul. As the war dragged on, she repeatedly prodded the public not to forget the toll it was taking on civilians there — a million or more casualties by the time Soviet forces completed their withdrawal in 1989.

“Afghans are wonderfully hospitable to foreigners — but not to would-be conquerors, whom they will fight to the death,” she wrote in 1980 in an op-ed article in The New York Times. “Since Islam is the unifying factor among the various ethnic groups, they are fighting under its banner.”

In the early 1950s, Ms. Klass tought English in rural Afghan schools with her husband, William K. Archer, — she was one of the first Western women to do so. Later, she wrote an acclaimed travel memoir, “Land of the High Flags,” which was published in 1964 and reissued in 2007 with the subtitle “Afghanistan When the Going Was Good.”

“Here, sky and earth seemed enemies glaring bitterly at one another, locked in a dogged struggle,” she wrote, until finally at dusk “the air was softened, as though the heat itself lay panting with exhaustion.”

Reviewing the book in The New York Times in 1964, Harrison E. Salisbury wrote, “By what sorcery is a girl wafted from the fat corn-and-hog lands of Iowa, over the very roofs of the world into Kabul, capital of the land of the high flags, there by a species of alchemy to transmute her fresh, fragile sensations into poetic prose that captures the very essence of the brave, proud people of Afghanistan?”

In 1988 Ms. Klass edited “Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited,” a collection of essays that the historian Daniel Pipes described as “a work of clear vision and great importance.”

Rosanne Traxler Klass was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on March 29, 1929, to Raymond Klass, a lawyer, and the former Ann Traxler. Her brother, Philip, was a well-known debunker of U.F.O. sightings.

She received a bachelor’s degree in literature from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s from Hunter College in New York. Her marriage to Mr. Archer ended in divorce.

After working for The Times in the 1970s , she became director of the Afghanistan Information Center at Freedom House, a human rights watchdog group in New York, and a founder of the Afghanistan Relief Committee, formed after the Soviet invasion. - Read More at the Rosanne Klass

Rosanne Klass, Advocate of the Afghan People, Dies at 86