Opera

Characters

BOB: CIA agent from Worcester, Massachusetts [lyric baritone]

OSMANI: Taliban’s deputy commander [lyric tenor]

WOMAN: ghost of Afghanistan’s past and present [lyric soprano]

Setting

September 15, 2001 – a quiet hotel in Quetta, Pakistan

Description

We hold our breath. The mightiest nation is about to react to the deadliest attack on its soil. America is locked and loaded. Its target is a country fourteen times smaller, three million times poorer. But Afghanistan is no easy win. For two millennia and counting, it has been the final resting place of empires.

This is not going to end well, at least one person thinks. This person is a CIA agent. Bob runs America’s spy operations in the region. He believes a dialogue is worth a shot. He assigns himself the mission of meeting with the Taliban, who run Afghanistan while sheltering Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden – the mastermind of 9/11. Bob is in luck. He arranges a secret meeting in a quiet hotel in Quetta, Pakistan, with the Taliban’s deputy commander, Mullah Osmani.

The story is little-known, but the ending is familiar. America plunges into its longest war, the Taliban return with a vengeance. The world looks ever more dangerous. On to the next war. The Quetta dialogue on the eve of U.S. invasion of Afghanistan is a story that raises timely and timeless questions: What prevents people from making history? Are the decisive battles outside or inside us? If politics is a never-ending game with no outcome final, what is victory?

A cross-cultural collaboration of Afghan and American artists and musicians

Supported by the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies and Harvard University’s Davis Center

Podcast

How to Kill a Superpower: Lessons from the USSR

The Davis Center at Harvard University

Yelena Biberman & Zachary Troyanovsky

available at: Spotify | Soundcloud | Apple

A scientist, an Irish poet, and a man who slips between the raindrops walk into a hunting lodge in the Belavezha Forest in Soviet Belarus. They don’t know it yet, but they are about to kill a superpower. This five-part podcast tells the story of the mysterious weekend in December 1991 that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Watch:

• Atlantic Council Eurasia Center: Autopsy of an Empire: 30 Years on from the Fall of the USSR
• Davis Center Podcast Chat: The Story Behind ‘How to Kill a Superpower’
• 2022 ASN World Convention Special Panel with Alexander Cooley, Tatsiana Kulakevich, Julie A. George, Dmitry Gorenburg, Şener Aktürk, and Paul Goode

Read:

• “Reflections on How Stanislau Shushkevich Made (Forgotten) History,” Harvard University Davis Center Insights, June 13, 2022.
• “How to Kill a Superpower: Do You Remember the Belavezha Agreement?” Inkstick, December 8, 2021.
• Interview in “Old Men Helped Cause the Soviet Union’s Collapse. Historians Say It’s a Warning Sign for the United States,” Business Insider, January 1, 2023.