Those of us who have not seen what decades of war and deprivation leave behind in a country probably can’t come close to imagining today’s Afghanistan.

RU alumnus and Afghan native Fahim Haider ’90 has seen it and lived it and is trying to help revive his devastated homeland, according to Washington Post Foreign Service reporter Kevin Sullivan.

Sullivan featured Haider in a Post article [January 2, 2002] on the return of Afghan exiles like Haider to their home country. Sullivan writes that “a growing number of Afghans who fled this country decades ago are coming home, providing the intellectual energy that Afghanistan’s fledgling government needs to solve the country’s enormous problems. Scholars, artists and innovators left in droves to avoid years of occupation, civil war and the repressive rule of the Taliban militia. Those who stayed know mainly how to fight.”

According to Sullivan’s article, Haider fled to the U.S. in 1979, at the age of 16, “after nine of his friends were executed by the Soviet Union for passing out anti-communist leaflets.” He later earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from RU and now lives in New Mexico with his wife, Fahima, also an Afghan native, and their two small daughters. Haider has returned to Afghanistan as a top adviser to the foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, who went to medical school with his brother.

Like others who have returned, writes Sullivan, Haider is torn between the two countries, the U.S., where his daughters have safety and opportunities, and Afghanistan, where he grew up and which his parents served, his father as justice minister and his mother as head of women’s programs in the education ministry. For now Haider’s wife and daughters remain in the U.S., although his wife would also like to return and be of help to the country.

Sullivan describes Haider’s childhood home “on what used to be a tree-lined street of diplomats’ homes” in Kabul. The house is now occupied by squatters; torn sheets of plastic are windows; trash is piled up outside. He describes Haider’s visit to his former high school and a chance meeting with a former teacher, whom he first mistakes for a caretaker. When each man finally realizes who the other is, writes Sullivan, they give each other a “long, warm embrace.”

As difficult as it is to be separated from his family and live in the primitive conditions of Kabul, Sullivan reports, Haider believes strongly in his reason for being there and urges other Afghan exiles to come. “At this point,” Sullivan quotes Haider, “I think it’s an obligation of all educated Afghan people who live abroad to at least come and see for themselves what has happened to their people and their country. They should see what they can do to solve this miserable situation.”

 — Kathie Dickenson