To Be Young and Afghan

A young man, bright, well-intentioned, nice — I’ve known him for a while and his ambition is apparent. Not ambition for power, but to be productive, to work, to create and develop something in and for Afghanistan and for himself. In his mid-20s, he’s already produced a small run of English textbooks for children in his Kabul neighborhood. He takes part in a number of programs for young professionals and has done some civic work on elections and such for an international NGO. He hopes one day to help build schools in his hometown in the Panjshir and he is trying to get a business off the ground. He’s good with people, fair-minded, generous with what he has, which isn’t much, and unfailingly courteous.

He also, at times, looks utterly miserable, wearing the mask worn by those who are trying to shake the feeling that the place in which they live is more powerful than they are, that it can outplay them, outflank them, and outfight them, and that virtue or intelligence has nothing to do with whether or not they attain their goals. This obviously doesn’t apply to everybody–there are people who have improved their circumstances immeasurably, some of them legally–but it is hardly uncommon to meet Afghans who seem unlucky to have developed dreams. This young man, for instance: He’d been invited to attend a conference in Europe, but he can’t get a passport. He has all the paperwork–he showed me when we last met–and he’s followed every rule as he should have. But the clerks won’t process it unless they receive a bribe. They just won’t. It’s not that it will take a little longer. It’s that he won’t get it at all. Their salaries are nothing. They need something extra for the family. And that’s just how it’s done. The price of doing business. No matter what it says on any piece of paper, no matter what the President or anyone else says–these are the laws of the land. The young man doesn’t want to pay, but his alternative, Afghanistan being what it is right now, is to keep carrying around his folder full of papers that no one will attend to and abandon his hopes of attending that conference.

The business he wants to start: He’s been told he needs to pay to get it registered, that he needs to pay to get clients, that he needs to pay to license the vehicle he needs for the work and for the necessary permits to move things around the country. He’s trying to avoid paying, he says, but you can see in his eyes that the choice is wearing on him, that he doesn’t know how else to do it, that he realizes it’s choice between coughing up some money and the nascent business dying after only a few fitful breaths.

Leave, his family tells him. Find a way to get out, to get to the west, to Europe or the US or Canada, and don’t come back. Drive a taxi, unload boxes for a while, do what you have to do, but get out of here.  You might be miserable for a while and your education won’t mean anything, but it’s better than this place. He knows that might be true, that he might be able to save a little money and take some night classes at some point and then maybe be the kind of professional he wants to be. But he doesn’t want to go. He wants to succeed here. He would be lonely somewhere else. And this is his home, and even in places that are wrecked and battered and unlikely to improve much any time soon, that matters a great deal.

It’s tearing him up. He’s a real person, this fellow, but he’s also a stand in for many, many others, the dreamers who bought into the promise of a changed society only to realize that the old rules still apply. And it’s not an isolated phenomenon that he’s dealing with, these day-in-and-day-out encounters with corruption and the corrupt. It works from the top down, where jobs–in the police, say, or in ministries–are commonly bought and sold rather than apportioned with anything resembling fair consideration for the best man, or woman, and where governance is a joke, something that no one believes in. It works from the bottom up, too, as people’s lives and hopes and their mobility are undermined,  limited and strangled, by the country’s dynamics of corruption, which have their own self-sustaining momentum.

This is an immense problem, and it infects everything. Karzai is not going to stop it. Among his deputies and ministers are a handful with decent reputations but more who are suspect (at best) and who have an interest in making sure things remain as they are. It’s terribly distressing because it allows enemies of the state a bountiful trove of recruiting material, and a bountiful supply of young men–in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or Mexico, or anywhere–who don’t see much of a future in the straight and narrow. Such people can be easy marks for someone peddling the notion that there’s a quick route to glory in the afterlife. And it’s just plain heartbreaking to see a young man, a good man, sitting there staring off out the window, wordlessly wondering how he is going to decide whether he goes or stays, and if he stays how much it will cost him.