This photograph, from the cover of Hyder Akbar's book "Come Back to Afghanistan," shows the Yale junior during a visit to Kabul.

Trips to Afghanistan kindle student's
love of parents' homeland

Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hyder Akbar was living the life of a typical high school teenager: contemplating college, playing video games at his home in a San Francisco suburb, hanging out with friends and listening to music on his disc player -- especially to his extensive collection of U2 CDs.

Sept. 11 unleashed a series of events -- including the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent fall of the Taliban, the country's extremist ruling party -- that made it possible for Akbar, now a Yale College junior, to make his first trip to his parents' homeland. Until then, although he had heard a great deal about the country from family members, Afghanistan was a place that mainly existed in his imagination, he recalls in his new book "Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager's Story."

The book recounts Akbar's first trip there in the summer following the terrorist attacks and two subsequent trips over his summer vacations. Before his first visit, Susan Burton, a contributing editor for National Public Radio's (NPR) "This American Life," gave Akbar a tape recorder and encouraged him to record his impressions of Afghanistan. Edited versions of those recordings were aired in two documentaries for the NPR show, and later served as a basis for "Come Back to Afghanistan." Burton, who had met Akbar while interviewing his father for a newspaper article, is co-author of the book.

In "Come Back to Afghanistan," Akbar offers firsthand accounts of the devastation of the country after more than two decades of war as well as an insider's glimpse into the early attempts at rebuilding the nation. Because his father, Fazel Akbar, was serving as the spokesperson for Afghan president Hamid Karzai and later as the governor of the highly unstable Afghan province of Kunar, the younger Akbar was allowed to sit in on important conversations and meetings. These included the much-publicized loya jirga, the 2002 tribal grand council attended by Karzai and other officials (among them various warlords) at which the new government leader was elected.

Akbar's family spoke the native language of Pashto at home and held fast to many Afghan traditions (he wouldn't bring female friends home, for example), so his travels to Afghanistan were more an experience of identity-building than one of culture shock, says the Yale student.

Akbar was born in Pakistan, where his parents had settled after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Previously, Fazel Akbar was the head of Kabul Radio. When the younger Akbar was three, his father sent the rest of the family to the United States, while he stayed behind in Pakistan and helped in the resistance movement. The family reunited in 1992 in India, where Fazel Akbar then had a diplomatic post, but their time together was brief. When the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan, he sent his family back to the United States, and he later joined them in California, where he began his new life as the owner of a hip-hop clothing store.

Meanwhile, Hyder Akbar easily adapted to American life, but longed for the birthplace of his parents and older siblings.

"I felt I had a strong Afghan identity but I hadn't been on Afghan soil," he told the Yale Bulletin & Calendar in a recent interview. "As I say in the book, before going to Afghanistan I would think, 'I've never been able to go anywhere and say I'm on my land.'"

Yale junior Hyder Akbar says that, while he is encouraged by some of the changes he has seen in Afghanistan since he first visited there in the summer of 2002, he is concerned that the nation is now "second fiddle to Iraq" in U.S. priorities.

When he finally arrived in the country of his heritage, however, Hyder was surprised that he didn't suddenly feel he was home. "This moment has been the focus of so much longing," he writes in his book. "But now I was here, and there was no shivery sense of recognition."

Over that first summer and the two that followed, however, his sense of connection to Afghanistan became fierce. For all of its woes, he says, the country won his heart.

At the loya jirga, he writes, he saw various personalities that had long made news headlines, and he compares the experience to being at a Lollapalooza concert and seeing famous rock stars. But during his three summers, he faced events that forced him to grow up, Akbar says. He was there when his father had to identify the body of Afghan vice president Haji Qadir after he was assassinated, and, only a few days later, he walked outside of his hotel in Kabul seconds after 32 people were killed by a bomb in the marketplace. (See related story, this page.)

"I could see body parts -- hands and feet and blood everywhere," the Yale student remembers. "In my recording for NPR I said, 'I feel like I'm going to age five years in these two months.'"

Desperately bored at times without television or computer access, Akbar took pleasure in learning how to handle an AK-47, he recalls. He came under threat when, traveling with American soldiers in a Humvee, he was caught in an ambush by insurgents.

Soon after, he was asked to accompany a man named Abdul Wali to the American base to serve as his translator. U.S. military officials wanted to question Wali about his possible involvement in a rocket attack on the base. Wali, pleading his innocence, was terrified, and Akbar recalls he also grew uncomfortable about the angry questioning being conducted by a Central Intelligence Agency contractor named David Passaro. Eventually, Akbar insisted that a professional translator take over his role. He later learned that Wali, after being detained for three days, died in U.S. custody. At first he was told that Wali died of a heart attack, but later, members of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division came forward to testify that Passaro assaulted and beat Wali with a heavy flashlight. Passaro is now awaiting trial.

The incident continues to haunt Akbar, whose NPR broadcast brought it to international attention. "I feel a sense of personal responsibility," he says. "When I left Abdul Wali, he was petrified and I tried to comfort him by saying, 'If you tell the truth, nothing will happen.' Then I decided that I would come and check on him, only to learn that he had died." Akbar may be called to testify at Passaro's trial.

Akbar also visited Osama bin Laden's former compound in Tora Bora and helped to organize elections in the mountainous and traditionally disenfranchised Kunar. He notes that huge changes have taken place in his country since his first visit.

"During my first summer, the city of Kabul was like a ghost town and now it is becoming a bustling city," he says. "It's hard to get anywhere because of traffic jams, and a lot of businesses have opened in response to the influx of people connected with the United Nations and the various NGOs there. During my last trip, I saw a glass building being built, and thought 'Somebody must have a lot of confidence about Afghanistan's future to put up a building of glass.'"

For his own part, Akbar is less confident about the future of his parents' homeland.

"In the countryside, there are still a lot of problems, opium and the insurgency among them," he says. "There is no guarantee that what is happening in Kabul will happen in the countryside.

"After 9/11, when it became clear that Afghanistan -- the nesting ground for al Qaeda -- was important to international security, everybody seemed to be saying that the country would not be ignored ever again," he adds. "It is worrying to me to see that Afghanistan, as far as American interests go, is now second fiddle to Iraq. ... So contrary to those who are holding Afghanistan up as a success story -- I'm not sure that it can be written off as a success quite yet."

Akbar, who came to Yale this year after two years at a community college in California, is convinced that his own future involves living in Afghanistan, however. During his first year there, he co-founded an NGO to help rebuild schools and design pipe schemes to rebuild the country's infrastructure, among other concerns.

"A lot of people ask me if I want to be a journalist," he says, "but what interests me more is to have a hands-on approach to helping the country. I feel a sense of responsibility to Afghanistan that I will not ignore."

-- By Susan Gonzalez

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