 | Correspondent, International for THE NEW YORK TIMES Auggust 6, 2021 |
Dear reader, |
About 7 a.m. one recent morning in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, my colleague Fatima Faizi and I were standing outside a visa agency trying to chat up the people waiting to enter the building. We were there to report on the mass exodus unfolding across Afghanistan, as the Taliban press on in their brutal military campaign and tens of thousands flee the country. |
But when one man we approached learned I was American, the conversation suddenly turned from his visa application to Turkey to an emotional speech about the American withdrawal. |
“Your country just betrayed us,” the man, Haji Sakhi, 68, said, emphasizing the words with his hands as he spoke. “They lost the war and just fled the country. Look at what they brought on us.” |
|
That feeling of betrayal has come up frequently in my reporting since I arrived in Kabul nearly a month ago. From shopkeepers and students to women’s rights activists and government officials, the sense that the United States has painfully wronged the Afghan people by ripping away the security blanket its troops provided runs deep. |
Some people have described that sense of betrayal angrily, raising their voices as if to ensure they are heard. But more often it seems wound up in a sense of loss as violence metastasizes across Afghanistan. In Kabul, it often feels like there is at once nostalgia for what the country was and mourning for what people fear it will become. |
Standing outside the Turkish visa office, Mr. Sakhi quickly clarified that he didn’t blame me — an American journalist — for my country’s actions over the last few months. But like many people in Kabul, Mr. Sakhi says American troops and airstrikes were like patches holding Afghanistan — with its deeply dysfunctional government and nascent military — together for the past two decades. |
ADVERTISEMENT
| ||
His family’s experience after the U.S. invasion is evidence of that, he explained. Mr. Sakhi and his family fled Kabul in the first few months of the Taliban’s rule in 1996 after he heard a high-pitched scream from his neighbor’s home one night. Stepping outside, he watched as two Taliban members dragged a young woman from the house, her shoulders locked in the crooks of their arms, and lashed her on the sidewalk. Mr. Sakhi described the moment to me vividly, as if that scene from 25 years ago was as clear as a movie playing on a television screen in front of him. |
|
Fearing for his own daughters, he crammed his family into a car and barreled down the winding dirt roads to Pakistan. They returned a year after the U.S. invasion — when he knew his daughters would be safe, Mr. Sakhi said. They found a new house, down the road from where they once lived, and he saved money from selling rugs hoping to send his three daughters to Kabul University. |
ADVERTISEMENT
| ||
But over the past three months, that sense of security Mr. Sakhi built for his family has been shattered. As the Taliban continue their advance, civilians have been killed in record numbers. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes. Now insurgents are pushing the front lines deep into several provincial capitals. Just this week, they claimed responsibility for a major attack in Kabul for the first time in nearly a year. |
Mr. Sakhi and his family are planning to leave the country once again. But in explaining his decision to flee, and trying to help me understand his country’s descent into violence, he kept returning to the United States. |
“It’s a betrayal, they betrayed us,” he said again. Then leaning in as if to make sure I heard the message that came next, he said: “History will not forget it and we will not forget it either.” |
— Christina |
Christina Goldbaum is a correspondent in the Kabul, Afghanistan, bureau. |
No comments:
Post a Comment