And on a Brighter Note

Nick Kristof profiles Susan Retik, a 9-11 widow who turned her grief into something better than resentment:

This weekend, a Jewish woman who lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks is planning to speak at a mosque in Boston. She will be trying to recruit members of the mosque to join her battle against poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan.

We are a strange and diverse species, capable of producing Osama bin Laden and Dick Cheney, but also thousands of people like Susan Retik who only want to help.

As Kristof notes, the organization Retik co-founded may not have changed Afghanistan very much, but

All the work that Beyond the 11th has done in Afghanistan over nine years has cost less than keeping a single American soldier in Afghanistan for eight months.

One of the craziest things about the Afghan War is that the amount we are spending on it is several times as much as the GDP of Afghanistan. Why don't we try pulling all of our troops out and just hand the money out to Afghans who would rather start businesses than fight?