Jack Shroder '61, a Regents Professor of Geology and Geography at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, was one of the most sought-after specialists in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. An expert on Afghanistan's caves, he was inundated by media inquiries.
A reporter asked Shroder if he could deduce Osama bin Laden's whereabouts from the geological clues in a CNN-aired video. Shroder zeroed in on the Tora Bora region, but he didn't want to divulge too much before briefing government officials. Not an hour after his media appearance, he was contacted by federal agents, and soon he was advising FBI and high-ranking government officials.
Although the media frenzy has abated, Shroder still gets appearance requests. In mid-February, he was interviewed by Dutch radio, and in May he will lecture on Afghanistan at the Los Angeles County Museum.
Shroder was a young boy in Vermont when he first developed an interest in rocks. When time came to choose a college, he decided on Union because of renowned geologist Edward Staples Cousins Smith. “Union gave me a classic geological education and developed an appetite for travel in me,” he says, since budding geologists soon learn that what they want to know is “out there somewhere in the world.”
Shroder wanted to be a petroleum exploration geologist, but after learning that such well-paid specialists are often traded mid-career for younger geologists, he became a geomorphologist–
a geologist who studies landforms
and can “read” the surface to tell what lies beneath.
Shroder and Afghanistan came together in the early 1970s, when he was helping a doctoral student conduct grant work in the country. When the student unexpectedly died, Shroder felt compelled to continue the project. The result was the National Atlas of Afghanistan–a geological survey of vast, untapped natural resources.
Later in the 1970s Shroder became head of Kabul University's Seismic Station. Calling himself a “naive” scholar, he says he did not realize that the U.S. was using the site to “[detect] Soviet and Chinese nuclear explosions north of the border.” In 1978, the Afghan Communists captured, then deported him. With his cook's help, he smuggled out all the maps he had made.
Today Shroder leads the Afghanistan Studies Center (ASC) at the University of Nebraska-Omaha–the only institution of its kind in the West. During the 1980s, when Afghanistan was fighting the Soviet Union, the ASC had some 500 employees in the country. Now the center has Shroder as its chief researcher and about ten adjunct researchers at other universities. Additional employees in Kabul are involved primarily in printing new school textbooks for children.
It is not uncommon for inhabitants of Afghanistan and surrounding countries to view with suspicion every Westerner. But Shroder says that until 9/11 he got along very well. He used to speak a little “kitchen and bazaar” (as he characterized his fluency) Dari, an Afghan-
Persian dialect, and very little Urdu. He moved about freely for the most part because, he says, “I was very open, friendly, and talked about everything in what I think is perceived as a rather naïve way. I have been called a spy, though, and now it has gotten very dangerous for me.”
After the Soviets' departure, Shroder and his ASC colleagues warned U.S. officials, “We need to look after Afghanistan. We're going to have trouble with this place.”
Now, Shroder feels that “it is up to us to help the Afghans develop their country by exploiting their own resources. Things in Afghanistan are going to be good if we can just figure out when and how to get it done right. The United States just has to get through the bureaucracy and work with people of good will. The future of the U.S. depends on this type of development.”
By and large, Afghans, especially the pre-Taliban generations, want American help in developing their country. “The Afghans could have a very good country in the middle of a very difficult place,” Shroder says. “The destruction of terrorism is key right there, and Afghanistan could be a model for what the U.S. does best, like what it did in Germany and Japan after World War II.”
But, in light of the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Iraq, Shroder envisions a worsening of circumstances in Afghanistan. He thinks the struggling country will be left out in the cold, which, he says, would be a major failure for the U.S. and a victory for al Qaeda. “Iraq must be subdued, but with more subtlety, by showing success in rebuilding and nation-building in Afghanistan, where we are seen as the good guys again and not as the cowboy empire-builders that I fear we are in the process of becoming.”