Kushner appropriated one of her books for the heart of his play "Homebody/Kabul." Bin Laden tried and failed to use her connections to get bulldozers across the Pakistan border, apparently to build cave complexes in the Afghan mountains.

It's no surprise that the al- Qaeda mastermind turned to Dupree, 77. Everyone does when it comes to Afghanistan. Aid groups, the United Nations, journalists and Afghan ministers all seek her insight.

During four decades in and out of the country, Dupree has guided innumerable relief efforts, comforted refugees, and written five travel guides and more than 200 articles on history, archaeology, women and libraries. She is recognized as the world's leading authority on Afghan cultural heritage.

Thousands of Afghans know her, from President Hamid Karzai to Kabul street kids who sell counterfeit copies of her books. But they can't quite describe the scope of Dupree's role in their affairs.

Some simply call her the grandmother of Afghanistan.

In an interview last week, Dupree offered her own suggestion: "busybody."

Dupree and her husband, Louis Dupree, then the world's premier Afghanistan scholar, spent time teaching at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill before his death of lung cancer in 1989. Now Dupree lives in Peshawar, Pakistan, but commutes to Kabul every couple of weeks to oversee her projects.

"She's an incredible networker," said Paul Barker, Afghanistan country director for the aid agency CARE, who has known Dupree since 1995. "She's very well known and well regarded by people in senior levels of government."

Dupree works with a consortium of aid agencies known as the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief. She consults for others. She helped found a group that preserves the nation's cultural heritage, in part by buying looted artifacts. After the victory of the mujahedeen Islamist fighters who booted out the Russians in 1992 the United Nations sent her to assess cultural sites, and she helped write a recent massive U.N. report on the state of the Afghan people.

Tending the archive

For nearly two decades, her goal and driving force has been to bring to Kabul a 36,000-volume archive she has been baby-sitting in Pakistan. This collection of research and reports from aid agencies and the U.N. amounts to a modern history of development in Afghanistan. It's a crucial tool for aid groups and government agencies.

"The importance of it is that we don't forget what we should have learned," Barker said. "She knows what Afghanistan has been at different points in time."

On Tuesday, Dupree appeared at a ceremony at Kabul University -- she wedged it in between appointments at the city's museum and with aid groups. The U.S. ambassador attended the event, which marked the university's commitment to give Dupree's archive a temporary home. The U.S. embassy has agreed to cover the cost of the move.

Dupree has kept the collection in Peshawar for years, waiting for Kabul to become safe enough. After all, she said, one bomb or inflamed radical could destroy it.

She was pleased to have the embassy's backing, but she must still raise $3 million for a permanent home for the collection. In any event, the archive won't be coming back until after she assesses results of the parliamentary elections in September.

She regards partisan politics, whether in Afghanistan or the United States, as she does organized religion: with disdain.

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