Mir Tamim Ansary (born November 4, 1948, in Kabul, Afghanistan) is an Afghan-American author and public speaker. He is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York, a book published shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, among other books concerning Afghan and Muslim history, and is a columnist for the encyclopedia website Encarta. Ansary was born in Kabul and lived there until high school when he moved to the United States. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Ansary gained prominence in 2001 after he wrote a widely circulated e-mail that denounced the Taliban and warned that, although he believed that United States would need to be deployed in Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, that, in the Ansary's opinion, this could start a third world war. The e-mail was a response to a call to bomb Afghanistan "into the Stone Age". Ansary directs the San Francisco Writers Workshop.