Sunday September 2, 2007
Power to enlighten
By RABIATU ABUBAKAR
An account of a troubled land, written by a teenager no less, has our reviewer wanting to head off on an adventure.
COME BACK TO AFGHANISTAN
My Journey from California to Kabul
By Said Hyder Akbar and Susan Burton
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 410 pages
(ISBN: 978-0747583660)
READING the first paragraph of Come Back to Afghanistan, I could immediately relate to Said Hyder Akbar’s description of Kabul International Airport. Having witnessed the civil war in Somalia, I am no stranger to airports that are falling apart.
According to Akbar, what you first notice is that the identifying letters on the roof look like they are about to fall off. Airplane parts, shredded metal and bullet-ridden walls are commonalities shared by airports in war-torn countries. They are testimony to the destruction humans are capable of.
Over the years, a plethora of books have been written about Afghanistan covering the 25 years of terrorist violence and political upheaval the country has experienced. Akbar himself refers to some of them. So, what makes his book different from these others?
Well, for one thing, the author is not a political pundit or history professor or journalist; he was, in fact, a high school teenager in 2002 when he began recording the wealth of details that went into this personal book.
The period in which Akbar collected his material is another difference, perhaps: unlike many of the other books, Come Back to Afghanistan had its gestation in those crucial years right after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.
The Afghans were trying to get back on their feet then, after the US-led war to drive the extremist Taliban government out had succeeded (well, sort of). The Northern Alliance and US Special Forces had the Herculean task of rebuilding a ravaged country. It was a tentative peace, though, one rife with political dissent, tribal discontent, insurgencies and escalating terrorist attacks.
It was at this time that Akbar made a life-changing decision to join his father, Said Fazel Akbar, in Afghanistan.
In 1979, Said Fazel fled with his family to Pakistan, where his son was born in 1985, and then to the United States, where the boy grew up on pizza and U2. After receiving a phone call from old friend Hamid Karzai – who had just been made Chairman of the Transitional Administration – Said Fazel returned to Afghanistan in 2001 and became Karzai’s spokesman; he was later appointed governor of Kunar, a rural province.
In 2002, high-schooler Akbar was eager to join his father. And what began as a rather-more-exotic-than-usual summer vacation for the 17-year-old turned into a search for identity in his father’s troubled homeland.
Coincidentally, just before Said Fazel left for Afghanistan, father and son were interviewed on Afghan matters by Susan Burton, an NPR (American public radio service) reporter. When she discovered Akbar was going to join his father, Barton asked the teen to record “slice-of-life” segments for the station’s This
American Life programme. Hence, Akbar travelled everywhere with a tape recorder, a practice that stood him in good stead when he later decided to write a book to elaborate on the broadcasts that aired on NPR. Barton co-authored the book with him.
The first few chapters of Come Back to Afghanistan, covering Akbar’s stay in Kabul, are a little slow, but once he joins his father in Kunar, “a barren tribal area with a lot of chaos”, the pace picks up.
Working with his father, Akbar mingled with top officials in informal settings, which led to unusual perspectives on some important figures in Afghanistan’s history.
Akbar shows us the genteel side of Karzai, who was elected president in October 2004. The teen’s experiences with Rashid Dostum, a notorious warlord said to have crushed prisoners with tanks, takes us closer to the realities of war. David Passaro, a CIA contractor and the first civilian to be charged with prisoner abuse – thanks to testimony from Akbar and his father – also features in the story. (An FBI website – http://charlotte.fbi.gov/%20dojpressrel/2007/ce021307.htm– reports that Passaro was recently sentenced to eight years jail.)
Amazingly, this young writer manages to capture the essence of each person.
There is, for instance, Rauf Mama, Akbar’s uncle, who is one of the book’s most intriguing characters. A former front-line commander of Kunar’s Wahhabi party, Mama – who has only one eye, remnants of bullets lodged in the back of his hand and pieces of shrapnel in his forehead – comes across as the epitome of courage. He lost his eye in a land mine explosion, writes Akbar, and when “he felt his eye ball dangling, he reached up and ripped it out”.
Despite the sober subject matter, the novel has some humorous moments. Akbar writes engagingly of his attempts in Dubai’s airport to buy an airplane ticket back to Afghanistan from the snack bar operator, and of his adventure on the luggage conveyer belt at Kabul airport during a frantic search for a friend.
Amid descriptions of guerrilla warfare, terrorist attacks and political meetings, Akbar’s vivid descriptions of Kunar, Bajaur, Asadabad and the spectacular landscape of Nuristan reads like a travel guide – but one packed with fascinating supplementary information. Of course, Tora Bora, Osama Bin Laden’s hideout that became world famous after numerous mentions on CNN, spices up the travelogue.
Akbar paints a picture of a patriarchal society, rarely mentioning the role of Afghan women in the community. This is, I feel, an unfortunate omission, as women’s liberation is a significant issue in Afghanistan.
But Come Back to Afghanistan still provides a real understanding of a country that has been shuffled to the periphery of the world’s vision. It is a timely reminder – the paperback was released recently – in today’s Iraq-obsessed world that Afghanistan still needs help desperately.
Having said that, I guess it sounds incredible when I have to add that, after finishing this book, I felt an urge to go jaunting off to this remote land. Such is the power of this enlightening book.
Akbar, now a senior at Yale University, founded a non-governmental organisation called Wadan Afghanistan to build schools and construct pipe systems in Kunar. He is now 22 – and still leading an interesting life: in April, he was arrested, along with two other students, for burning an American flag (New Haven Register, April 4).
A Nigerian born in Britain and a diplomat’s daughter, Rabiatu Abubakar has travelled the world and learnt, after witnessing Somalia’s tragic civil war, that wars never solve problems. She is currently living in Malaysia.
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