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Kandahar!
I have never visited you but I feel your pain. We are miles apart, but I hear you.
I called home immediately. What I heard back was pain wrapped in anger. I am not yet a mother, but I know what it means to love.People express pain through anger, especially when there is a place to direct that anger.
I write to speak to you, to maintain sanity. I write to you to speak of the stories that I read here, stories that share your anger but do not acknowledge your suffering. When six American advisors were killed by their Afghan colleagues inside the Ministry of Interior in Kabul, media asked, “Why are Afghans killing Americans?” Now when 16 civilians are killed by an American staff sergeant, they ask, “Should US soldiers leave now?” These questions look for easy answers, thinking it will solve all problems, and for someone to blame. They see the man who killed and the victims that died. They only see the “what.” They don’t probe the “why” and the “how” of preventing it in future. But they need to look deeper, where you and I are, where the hurt is, where the day begins for an Afghan family not knowing if they will meet again at night, where an uncertain future awaits us.
Kandahar, I know that anger is not your only response. This is not the first time you have suffered. The so called “Kill Team” was not long ago, when army specialist Jeremy Morlock’s pictures showed him smiling to the camera while holding up the head of a murdered Afghan boy by the hair. Yet you exercised restraint. But restraint is not always the best answer.
Standing up for all the lost lives is the least we should do. When will we stand up for the thousands of civilians killed by the Taliban and the warlords? When will we protest against the suicide bombing that took innocent lives on the Aashura day in Kabul, a sacred religious day of mourning? When will we stand against the numerous suicide bombings in the mosques all across Afghanistan that took lives and burned Quran? It is only when we make our voice heard as a nation that we can pass the test of justice and civility. We may cry a thousand tears for the children killed in Kandahar, but consider what fate might have awaited them had they survived? How many of those girls may have been raped, burned alive, stoned to death or sold away to men 5 times their age?
No more should we just externalize pain and blame others. I am also in pain and angry, but not only at the staff sergeant, I am also angry at my own people.
I wonder if we will ever open our eyes to our own social ills, especially now that our children may no longer read 40 years of our own history. History travels, and not just through text books. Memories of my childhood live in my mother’s stories of prison. That is how I know that part of her history, which my children will know through me. Tomorrow our text books may no longer speak of tragedies like Aashura or Kandahar, but we will remember and so will our children, who are all that we have as we transition to the future. But do we realize this? Do we truly value our youth? Can we be surprised by the Afghan Government’s reluctance to hear the young of its country when traditionally in Afghan families we reduce our young ones to the number of years they have lived and hardly allow them to speak their mind?
Our Government mirrors us. We are the source of the change we look for in our government.
Kandahar, you have come a long way, you are tired, I know. But giving up is not in our tradition. Persistence is a character of our culture that we must carry with us to the future. We must keep going for the millions who can go to school today, for the flawed yet unprecedented freedom of expression that we have, for the women who have a smile to return to after a long day of work, for the men who support them, for the music that you and I hear, for the laughter that doesn’t stop, for everything that we have today, though we have nothing. We have to keep going.