Nebraska school pulls in Afghanistan interest

OMAHA, Neb. -- Deep in the geology department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha lie unpublished, detailed maps of Afghanistan's cavernous terrain. The library guards one of the largest foreign-held collections of Afghan manuscripts, and the professors are among the top U.S. experts on the region.

Before Sept. 11, few people even knew the Center for Afghanistan Studies existed here.

But in the nine weeks since the terrorist attacks, hundreds of reporters and government researchers have descended upon on this college of 14,000 students in the heart of Nebraska's largest city.

They have immersed themselves in publications, from books about Afghan resistance groups to records of British envoys in Kabul. They also have called on the school's Afghanistan experts.

"It's been very stimulating seeing the interest after many years of people not even knowing where the heck Afghanistan was," said Tom Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies, the nation's only institute specifically focused on Afghan affairs.

Gouttierre has been interviewed more than 800 times by reporters from around the world since the attacks -- up from the 20 interviews the previous year.

The center's leaders have testified before Congress about U.S. policy on Afghanistan, and the Bush administration has been consulting with geology professor Jack Shroder about the caves and tunnels in Afghanistan.

Shroder studied and mapped the country's geology until 1978, when communists took power in Afghanistan.

Gouttierre first saw Afghanistan in 1964 as a Peace Corps volunteer and returned as a Fulbright Scholar after earning a master's degree in Islamic studies. As the center's director since 1974, he also returned in the mid-1990s as a special envoy for the United Nations to help determine whether bin Laden was hiding there.

"All of the sudden, there's been an amount of interest unlike any we've ever seen before," Gouttierre, 61, said while hurrying to the campus' television studio for a CNN interview.

The center's main role recently has been to analyze the Afghan people's reaction to U.S. government actions, Gouttierre said. He also expects it to play a role in Afghanistan's reconstruction.