I Love Afghanistan

 I Love Afghanistan

In a quiet suburb of Mission Viejo, California, stood a comfortable single-family home. It belonged to an Afghan-born American named Khwaja Sediq Sangarmal and his second wife, Amina. He had left Afghanistan in the early 1990s, not long after the government he had served collapsed and the men who replaced it began asking inconvenient questions about people like him.

For nearly three decades he had worked as an insurance salesman. Now retired, he spent his days collecting Social Security checks, exercising at the gym, and commenting passionately on Afghan politics from ten thousand miles away.

From his bedroom window, which overlooked a swimming pool and several shade trees he had planted years earlier, he glanced at his watch. It was 9:00 a.m.

Time for the gym.

Standing before the mirror, he carefully shaved his white beard and examined the wrinkles gathering around his eyes. In the kitchen, Amina was preparing breakfast. He loved paratha fried in sesame oil. As usual, he washed it down not with tea or coffee but with a cold bottle of beer — a habit he had quietly maintained for forty years, through every ideological season of his life.

The living room reflected the contradictions of a man who had survived by adapting. Family photographs lined one wall. On another hung a fading portrait of Noor Mohammad Taraki, partly obscured now by a houseplant Amina had placed in front of it. Few visitors noticed it. Fewer still knew that Sediq had once served as a mid-level security officer during the communist era — a fact he had carefully omitted from every immigration document he had ever signed.

Their two sons, Haroon and Mukhtar, were preparing to leave for college. Their daughter, Sarah, had just climbed out of the swimming pool and was hurrying upstairs. That evening she would perform an acrobatic routine at the local high school. On a shelf nearby stood several academic awards she had won over the years, arranged with the quiet pride of parents who understood exactly what they had come to America to build.

After breakfast, the phone rang.

The caller introduced himself as Jalil from Jame Hejran Television.

"We would be honored if you would appear on our program tomorrow evening and share your valuable thoughts on Afghanistan."

Sediq accepted without hesitation.

After hanging up, he patted his wife on the shoulder.

"Honey, tomorrow I am going to give these watan-foroshan what they deserve."

Amina looked up from the dishes. She knew the word well — lackeys of foreigners, stooges, men who had supposedly sold their loyalty to outside powers. She also knew her husband had spent the better part of his career serving a government funded entirely by Moscow, but she had learned long ago which observations were worth making aloud.

---

The next evening, there he was.

Dressed in an expensive Italian suit, his hair dyed a glossy black, he sat proudly beneath the studio lights. The host, a careful young man named Farhad who had learned that his job was not to ask questions so much as to provide occasions for answers, welcomed him warmly.

"Please introduce yourself to our viewers."

Sediq adjusted his tie.

"My name," he began, with the gravity of a man unveiling a monument, "is Ashiq-e-Watan. A lover of the homeland. Since the day I left Afghanistan, I have never known a single day of true happiness abroad. My heart has remained there, in the dust and mountains, among my people."

His voice caught with emotion that had taken him years to perfect.

"I suffer, every morning when I wake, because I am separated from my homeland."

Farhad nodded with professional sympathy. He had interviewed dozens of men like this. They all suffered magnificently, from very comfortable distances.

"We all feel that pain," he said.

"Indeed. And that is why it breaks my heart when I see certain people — these watan-foroshan, these stooges who take their orders from Kabul's enemies — criticizing the current authorities. Afghanistan is finally stable. Yes, there may be minor difficulties, but would these critics prefer the chaos of occupation? The civil war?"

He had the cadence of a man who had delivered this particular argument many times, which he had.

"And the Durand Line," he continued, leaning toward the microphone. "I hear some people are whispering about recognizing it, about surrendering our rightful territory to appease foreigners. These are the true watan-foroshan. We must resist them with everything we have. With our blood if necessary."

Farhad moved to his next prompt.

"What is your view on the hijab situation? Many people abroad are concerned."

"What is there to be concerned about?" Sediq replied pleasantly. "Modesty is a virtue. It protects women's dignity. It is our culture, our faith. These so-called concerns are imported anxieties, foreign interference dressed up as human rights."

Farhad glanced briefly at his notes. He had a gift for asking questions without quite asking them.

"And girls' education? That is another issue people raise."

Sediq smiled — the patient smile of a man explaining the obvious to people too impatient to understand it.

"People must learn to think for themselves rather than repeat Western talking points. The authorities are developing an Islamic curriculum suited to our values and our circumstances. These things cannot be rushed. A civilization is not rebuilt overnight."

"It has been several years," Farhad observed, in a tone that was not quite neutral.

Sediq paused for just a moment — a flicker, quickly smoothed.

"Great nations require patience. Sacrifices must be made. The generation that endures hardship plants the tree whose shade their children will enjoy."

It was at this point that his phone, set to silent on the table beside him, lit up with a message from Amina.

He glanced at the screen.

Honey — forget Pashtunistan, the hijab, and the Islamic curriculum. Sarah's acrobatic show starts in thirty minutes. And pick up a case of beer on the way home. The good kind this time.

Sediq looked at the message for a long moment.

On screen, in the corner of the frame, a small graphic displayed his name: Ashiq-e-Watan — Political Analyst & Patriot.

He put the phone face-down on the table.

"Where was I?" he asked.

"The sacrifices Afghan girls must make," Farhad said, "for the future of the nation."

There was something in the host's voice — not sarcasm exactly, not quite enough to be called out — but Sediq let it pass.

"Yes," he said, settling back into his chair with the ease of a man who has never personally been required to make the sacrifices he recommends. "Exactly. As I was saying."

And so Ashiq-e-Watan continued his passionate defense of a homeland he had not set foot in for thirty years, whose hardships he observed from a distance of ten thousand miles, and whose values he championed with great conviction every day except the ones that mattered.