Afghanistan and the human experience

August 2021

I couldn’t sleep on Tuesday night. As I slipped into semi-wakefulness in the middle of the night, my mind was consumed by a terrifying nightmare. I was on the streets of Kabul, trying to help a friend and his family escape the merciless Taliban and make it onto an American plane out of the country.

It was perhaps the scariest nightmare I’ve ever had. The sheer anxiety and panic, ducking into alleys as a truck full of mujahideen drove by, screaming at the top of my lungs and waving my American passport over my head amidst a desperate thong of humanity at the north gate of the airport. Trying in vain to get the soldiers to relent and let my friends through the gates. Knowing that I was going to fail, that any second my friend’s skull would be crushed by the butt of an AK-47 or blown apart by a round from a stolen M4, his children’s cries the last sound ever to reach his ears. Horrifying.

What’s crazy is that I’ve never been to Kabul. I’ve only spoken to four Afghans in my life, most of them Lyft drivers in the Bay Area. My only experience of the chaos engulfing Afghanistan is the same videos everyone else has seen, maybe a few more tweets, a couple more news articles.

And yet, my nightmare felt eerily visceral--like I was actually there. It evoked many of the same emotions (in obviously a millionth the magnitude) likely coursing through the veins of the 80,000 Afghan allies and families that America has abandoned to their doom. The sober resignment of 38 million citizens, doomed from birth to grow up amongst fields sown with the blood of their ancestors.

It felt real, because I have pictures and videos and stories like these before.

The video of a little girl, pressed against the gate of the airport, her arms stretched through the bars and the barbed wire, wailing ‘Please, let us in, please, the Taliban are coming to behead us!’, while a squad of American soldiers stands impassively less than a meter away. That sounds eerily similar to the stories I’ve read about Srebrenica, where the Serbs murderered eight thousand desperate Bosniak civilians while a battalion of Dutch ‘peacekeepers’ stood by and did nothing to stop it.

The text messages and Twitter threads: The Taliban is going door-to-door through my neighborhood, looking for people who worked for the Americans. They are in my building. They are at my door. My children are crying and I am trying to calm them down but I do not know what to say. Good bye, brother. How different is that from the stories of millions in the Holocaust, Anne Frank’s perhaps the most famous of them?

The Taliban checkpoints, the random walks down the street, beating men with chains and rifle butts and dragging people out of their homes and executing them in front of their families. The female journalists in hiding, trying to flee to a rural village or a basement, knowing that the Taliban have marked them for execution, that one wrong word from a neighbor is enough to seal their fate. I am reminded of the tale of Emaculée Ilibagiza during the Rwandan genocide.

And the rape. Oh, Lord, the rape. Tens of thousands of women, doomed to the virulent anger of that dirty mob called the Taliban. Tears in their eyes, the image of a husband’s crumpled body seared into their brains as the man who shot him violates them from behind. Hoping for it to end soon, praying to Allah that somehow they will be left alive so they can care for their children. That is the story of every conflict in human history, from the dawn of time to the Crusades to the Syrian Civil War.

That I have seen and read enough in 26 privileged years to somewhat empathize with the plight of the Afghans tells me that these experiences are not anomalous but universal. War and violence are endemic to the human race; we have been torturing, raping, murdering each other since the emergence of homo sapiens. We will no doubt be doing so until our last day on this planet.

We, who have been fortunate to grow up in peaceful times and lands, often view conflict as something that only happens in sad faraway places, to unfortunate people different from ourselves in every regard. This reinforces the perception that we are somehow immune from that possibility, that those things could never happen to us, in our tiny safe bubbles.

In reality, peace is the anomaly - stability and normalcy are privileges that few throughout human history have been fortunate enough to take for granted. It is but the sheer fortune of our birthplace that separates us from the Afghans, Somalis, Timorese, and millions of others whose lives are indelibly shaped by violence.

Sadly, tragedy and suffering are threads indelibly woven into the fabric of the human experience. Too often we forget this.