Author Discusses his Return to Afghanistan

JEFFREY BROWN:

In the summer of 2002, 17-year-old Said Hyder Akbar returned to a place he had never been: Afghanistan, the country his parents had fled during the Soviet invasion in 1979.

He had been raised in California — in many ways a typical American teen — but came to join his father, a long-time friend of Hamid Karzai and other prominent Afghans, who'd become the spokesman for the Karzai government that took over after the overthrow of the Taliban.

For three summers the young Hyder worked with a producer from the public radio program This American Life and made a series of radio documentaries, taking listeners behind the scenes of government intrigue and out into a country that Americans were hearing so much about but knew little of.

Now he's turned his experience interest a book "Come Back to Afghanistan." Akbar joined us for a talk on a recent snowy morning in Washington.

JEFFREY BROWN:

As a kid growing up in California, what was your idea of Afghanistan?

SAID HYDER AKBAR, Author, "Come Back to Afghanistan:" As an immigrant you can't help but sort of glorify your homeland and think of it as an ideal place so it's sort of this, you know, place that was larger than life in my mind, this place that my parents had come from that was a lot different than what I saw when I actually got there.

JEFFREY BROWN:

What first hit you that made you say, "This is not the place I had imagined"?

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

I remember at the border station going into Afghanistan that it really hit me when I saw the poverty, the beards and burqas, this was not the Afghanistan that I imagined. It hit me right away that the level of poverty and even just the level of chaos at this border station, that, you know, the idea and images in my mind were not going to be what I was going to see here.

JEFFREY BROWN:

So when this began, I'm curious, did you feel like an American in a strange exotic land, or did you feel like an Afghan who had, in fact, come home?

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

I felt like an Afghan who wanted to come home; I wanted to feel like an Afghan that came home; that's probably the better and more honest answer — I really wanted to feel a part of the country and I tried to convince myself as much as I could that this is, you know, where I belong. I tried to live just as they did. I tried to experience things the way most Afghans would. I tried to take on the security risks that they would do, the health risks that they would do.

JEFFREY BROWN:

So you had this very unusual perch in which to watch the attempt to form a new government and in fact a new country because of your father's position. What was that like, to be so inside, I guess?

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

When my father became spokesman for Karzai and I got to be in the palace for my first summer, it was just an amazing experience to finally see the sort of political games being played that you read about and the characters that you have known and have grown to sort of, you know, some you like, some you don't. And now you see them coming to you and you see them in meetings and you see them interact in person.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Can you give us an example of a moment where you realized how unusual all this was, a teenager, you're a teenager, you had grown up in America, and there you are witnessing history in a sense.

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

I would say one of my most not unusual but uncomfortable situations was a very – it was sort of a black day for Afghanistan. I would not say — what had happened was the vice president of Afghanistan had been killed. His name was Hadji Qadir. And he was also a friend of my father's. And I remember at that time my father got a call from President Karzai asking him to come to the palace right now.

And as I was going to the palace with my father he usually allowed me to go with him everywhere, but I remember inside the palace there was just such a heavy situation that they actually had brought in the driver that was with Hadji Qadir. I'm not sure if it was his driver or his bodyguard, but they were talking and they were explaining the situation. And I could hear from the walls and I could hear Karzai asking him what happened; how was he killed?

He was breaking into tears and sobbing. And it was just a very somber mood inside the palace at that point. I remember I just walked slowly over to the car and sat in the car because I did not feel comfortable in that situation.

JEFFREY BROWN:

One part of the culture shock that comes through in reading the book is the air of violence. There are assassinations. There's threats. There are guns — very different from the life you had grown up with, I guess.

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

Yeah. That is one thing I was really uncomfortable with was the level of dissonance in Afghanistan and the level of violence. I remember, you know, sitting and being in with meetings with people that killed before or people that were involved with much more than just the killing of a person but even in massacres. And that was something that was very difficult for me to handle but again that's one of the realities of Afghanistan's situation after 23 years of war — after two decades of war.

I remember the first time I was ambushed. I was ambushed with some Navy Seals in a mountainous area called Kangol in Kunar, Afghanistan. And I remember on my way back I was very excited to tell my father about this first ambush and being so, you know —

JEFFREY BROWN:

You were excited about the ambush.

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

I was excited about it — mostly because I also had my tape recorder with me, and I got some great audio for the documentary so I was coming home and my father was in a meeting, and I thought, you know, this is a legitimate reason to interrupt him.

And I said, you know, I really have to tell you about something. He said was is it? It's something important. Can we stand up for a minute and talk? He said, sure. You know, I said we just got ambushed. It was a twenty/thirty minute gun fight and there was rocket launchers, and we survived it. And he said, you know, did anybody get killed on your side? I said, no. He said, did you know of anybody injured? I said, no. Did you really ruin my meeting for that, Hayder? I was thinking but I got ambushed. What are you talking about? But he didn't seem to think it was a big deal.

But I think that that was sort of his way of trying to prepare me for the sort of things that I'm going to have to deal with in Afghan if I want to be politically involved. Of course these are just the realities of Afganistan.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Most people your age are doing video games with that kind of violence. You were right in the middle of it.

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've done video games also with that kind of violence. I'm still a young person and enjoy those kinds of things but, yeah, it is a little different to see it in person.

JEFFREY BROWN:

On our news program, you know, we look pretty regularly at what's going on in Afghanistan. But most of us don't get to see it the way you did, or we don't know exactly what we're seeing. What should Americans know about Afghanistan?

For example, when you came home and you're with your friends back in California, what was the one thing that you wanted them to know?

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

The one thing that I think people really need to understand about Afghanistan is that it is not quite yet a success story. Afghanistan has been presented here in the media as sort of the antithesis to Iraq, our success story of going into a country and helping it along. And I think that that is sort misleading because Afghanistan still definitely hangs in the balance. And I think most people really need to understand that they cannot forget Afghanistan again.

That is the one point I really want to come across because they did that after the Soviets pulled out and we saw the consequences of that.

JEFFREY BROWN:

And you see yourself going back to live there?

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

I do myself going back to live there.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Why?

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

Why? In part guilt —

JEFFREY BROWN:

Guilt?

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

Guilt, of course i think. I was born way too late to be involved in anything with the resistance against the Soviets. I was into, you know, part of that experience of Afghanistan. And I feel like I owe a little bit to the country of managing to escape that and also managing to get an education here and hopefully bring these skills that I've acquired here back to the country.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Well, Said Hyder Akbar, thank you for talking to us.

SAID HYDER AKBAR:

Thank you.