Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager's Story

I first heard of this book’s young author on my favorite radio show, NPR’s This American Life. Seventeen year old Said Hyder Akbar had gone to join his father in Afghanistan in the summer of 2002 and he’d taken recording equipment to record a radio documentary of his trip. It was fascinating. The next summer he went back and recorded another documentary for This American Life. It was at the end of this second show that I first heard of Come Back to Afghanistan, co-written with radio producer Susan Burton, which details his visits to Afghanistan in the summers of ‘02, ‘03 and ‘04.

When I saw it in the library a couple of weeks ago, I could not pass it by and I was not disappointed. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who cares to know more about what Afghanistan was like after the US attacked and helped defeat the Taliban. Hyder’s father is a long time friend of Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai. They fought together in the resistance against the Soviets. After 9/11 and the fall of the Taliban, Said Fazel Akbar (Hamid’s father) returns to his native land to become first Karzai’s chief spokesman and then governor of Kunar Province, an outlying area bordering Pakistan.

Hyder spends his first summer in Afghanistan in Kabul where, because of his father’s position in the government, he is fortunate enough to be present at some pretty historic events, including the loya jirga where Karzai is first elected President. Hyder, at times, can’t believe himself that he is actually among such historic figures at such historic times. After all, he’s just a California teenager on his first trip to Afghanistan.

The second and third summers, he spends in Kunar Province where his dad, as governor, tries so hard to help make things work.

Young Hyder’s insights, as both American and Afghan, (“by paper, I was American....by instinct, I was Afghan” he writes as he tells of his stop in Dubai on the way home to the US, where the agents at the airport have one way of treating those with US and European passports and another of treating everyone else. When the agent sees him coming, looking scruffy and Afghan, he’s ready to rudely direct him to “the other” line...but then Hyder pulls out the US passport and the agent’s demeanor changes drastically, all deferential and apologetic.) really provide some interesting perspectives.

One definitely gets the sense that there are good, honest, brave Afghans who are desperately trying to bring Afghanistan out of the mess it’s been driven into over the last 25-30 years of war...Karzai and Fazel Akbar are two of them. One also gets the sense of just how hard it will be to succeed. It’s so sad because these people have suffered so much and deserve so much more.

Hyder writes of how tired the Afghans are of war. Some count back to the bloody Communist coup in 1978 as the beginning of the time of war in their country, others back further to the 1973 ouster of King Zahir Shah, but the really sad thing is that, whereas the Afghans used to count the years of war as from either one of these events up through the fall of the Taliban, now more and more are starting to extend the years of continuous war into the present. “Is what’s going on now war?” Hyder asks, “You can’t really call it peace.”

He also notes that Afghans feel that their country is being abandoned in favor of Iraq and some feel that the US is content to keep the status quo, the right amount of chaos to maintain a military base with easy access to Iran, Pakistan and China.

At one point, Hyder makes the observation that the outside world (the Soviets and then the US) was willing to pump money and resources into Afghanistan when the money and resources were being used to destroy Afghanistan but, now, when resources are needed to help rebuild, the world is not so eager to provide them.

It’s astounding to realize how truly poor this country is. At one point, Hyder refers to an Oxford Atlas of the World, where countries are color coded by GNP growth rates....Two countries are shaded gray for unknown....Afghanistan and Somalia. Later he mentions a study cited by Fareed Zakaria in his book The Future of Freedom which found that a democratic regime in a country with a per capita income of less than $1,500 had a “life expectancy” of just eight years and notes that Afghanistan’s per capita income is just $190...that’s right $190! These people need economic help if they’re going to pull through. They lack so many of the basic essentials...food, water, roads, electricity, shelter. Life expectancy for a person there is in the 40-something range. And, as they watched the US become involved with Iraq, they felt we were abandoning them and moving on. Sad.

At the end of his third summer in Afghanistan, Hyder goes to see Tora Bora with his cousin. He notes how Tora Bora has become a shrine for the Arabs who died fighting there. People bring their deaf and blind children to Tora Bora, to be healed or blessed or some such thing. Hyder’s cousin laughs at how the Americans couldn’t “go past a certain line” in the fighting at Tora Bora and made the Afghans do all of the work. The climb to the caves is excruciatingly difficult and, reading of the trouble these young men have climbing up the mountain, one gets a sense of how hard it is to fight in this country, on this terrain. No wonder those familiar with the country have such an advantage.

Hyder quotes a historian: “Afghan wars become serious only when they are over.” He notes that the Russians had control of every major city in Afghanistan in a week and still were stuck there for 10 years before retreating.

It’s not just the terrain and the poverty that will make any kind of real success in Afghanistan hard to achieve, though...

Another factor that will make success in Afghanistan so difficult, in spite of the best efforts of the best people, is how difficult it will be to get people to invest in Afghanistan as a country. So much loyalty is to tribes there. So much power is in the countryside. Men who had been offered positions in the central government, positions that were more important than the governorships they held, would only accept those positions if they could keep their governorships also, because they did not want to give up their regional bases.

In Kunar province, the Pashtuns feel more solidarity with their brother Pashtuns across the Pakistani border than they probably ever will with those of different tribes in their own country. The Durand Line, created in 1893, which separates the Afghan Pashtuns from the Pakistani Pashtuns has never been recognized by an Afghan government as a valid international boundary.

It’s touching to read, though, that even with these tribal loyalties, so many in Afghanistan put so much faith in their election. They just wanted to be able to vote, to have a voice. And it was so important to give as many as possible a voice in the election so they’d feel at least some investment in the central government. Yet it was hard to give everyone the chance because in some of these outlying areas, the security situation was so bad.

Another issue is the presence of ex-Communists in the government and it’s agencies. Hyder relates how the Communists ingratiate themselves with the US, taking advantage of the situation, allying themselves with the Americans in an act of self-preservation. Many of them, blamed for the events that started the whole long history of bloody warfare in the country, cannot safely go back to their villages. They are alienated from the their countrymen and Hyder fears that, by befriending them, the US is in danger of becoming alienated as well.

On page 140, in one of the saddest, most moving passages, of the book, Hyder visits the site of a terrible but little noted massacre of locals by the Communists. It’s a heartbreaking account that gives some insight into the hardships these people have suffered and why the ex-Communists are so reviled.

One of my favorite passages in the book is when Hyder goes with his uncle, Rauf Mama, to visit Rauf’s home in Pakistan. They travel over incredibly rough terrain through unbelievably steep mountain trails to get there. Once there and sitting around a campfire in this remote region of Pakistan, he is surprised to find that these wild looking tribesmen of his uncle’s have a deeper knowledge of world affairs than most Americans....They discuss everything from Senate intelligence committee hearings to the loss of America’’s credibility in the world to China’s growing power.

Hyder comments on the US’ role in building up the Taliban, explaining that, during the fight against the Soviets, the CIA used Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, to outfit the muhajedeen and let ISI control who the arms and money went to...so it provided for the jihadi leaders whose agendas it could control and direct, thereby creating the conditions in which the Taliban and Al Qaeda could flourish.

About the US and Pakistan, on page 160 he writes:

“The United States has made Pakistan an ally in the war on terror. But from where we sit, it seems as though Pakistan is more interested in harboring the insurgency than in tamping it down. (To take a singular but vivid example: Within months Time magazine will report that the United States has photographs that show Pakistani army vehicles picking up militants who’d just raced across the border after an attack.) America needs to choose: either keep Pakistan happy, or build a stable Afghanistan. It will be impossible to do both.”

He states that the US has a legitimacy in Afghanistan that they don’t have in Iraq because they did not invade the country but helped to overthrow an occupying force and many Afghans realize that, without the US there, the country would descend into even more chaos (and I fear it’s done just that even with us there since this book was written) but he notes how the Americans there have been retreating from interaction with the locals.

He comments on how, when the US soldiers come to his father’s governor’s compound, they are welcomed in with guns and all yet when his father goes, unarmed, to the US base, he is questioned and searched and not trusted and treated with arrogance by the guards. If this is how the governor is treated, he worries, how are the regular citizens of Kunar treated? The US conducts military maneuvers without informing his dad also, which makes it hard for his dad to govern as he can’t answer questions being asked by the local Afghans. He’s in the dark as much as they are.

Hyder also becomes involved in a prisoner abuse incident that is very very sad, especially when you hear him tell of it on the radio program. It involves one of the men at the nearby US base and one of the locals accused of firing rockets at night and is another of the most moving passages in the book.

Yet, there are US there who are really doing a good job and really trying to work with the Afghans, guys who treat them as equals and partners and those stories are heartwarming to read.

There are also so many neat little every day pieces of info about Afghanistan offered up here...like how they don’t use family names. Everyone is “someone, son of someone”. They don’t keep track of time the way we do and so they don’t know their exact ages. They’ll say something like, his beard started to grow about the time the Soviets invaded, in trying to answer a question about age.

It really was a marvelous book, an agonizing yet often funny account of the struggles of the Afghans as they try to piece their country back together. With Afghanistan and its troubles being featured more and more in the news (Witness our own General’s editorial about the situation there.) it really is a timely book to read. I felt, after reading it, a kinship of sorts with the Afghan people. We really can’t abandon them now. They deserve so much more than that.