Bay Area Afghans hear homeland's call Families, jobs
left behind to help nation rise from ruins
Anastasia Hendrix, Edward Epstein
San Francisco Chronicle
02/02/2003
Nine months ago, Said Tayeb Jawad was a workaday
stiff in San Francisco, toiling away as a consultant in an Embarcadero
Center law firm.
Now he's the right-hand man to Afghan President
Hamid Karzai.
"I love this country, and San Francisco,
too," said the 44-year-old Afghan emigre, who returned
to Kabul to help rebuild a post-Taliban Afghanistan and ended
up as Karzai's chief of staff.
Jawad, who grew up in the Afghan capital, is among
the Afghan Americans from the Bay Area who have interrupted
their lives to try to create a "modern, moderate"
state out of a land ravaged by decades of war, impoverishment
and extremism.
Jawad's rapid rise -- he hadn't even met Karzai
until arriving in Kabul last March -- shows the improvisational
nature of what has happened there since the Taliban and their
al Qaeda allies were ousted a year ago as part of the war on
terrorism.
"There are a limited number of people who
can get the job done in Afghanistan," said Jawad, a U.S.
citizen who had lived in the Bay Area since 1989.
So when Karzai asked him to join his fledgling
government as press secretary and later as chief of staff and
director of the office of international relations, Jawad felt
he had to accept.
His experience has been mirrored by other Americans,
such as former San Francisco investment banker Khalil Shariani,
who left the Bay Area last February to work for the Afghan government's
new Ministry of Finance as its general director for economic
enterprises and development.
Over the past several months, Shariani has made
repeated trips back to the Bay Area to meet with, interview
and recruit people to help the effort to rebuild Afghanistan.
"One of the main issues we have is the revitalization
of government enterprises," he said during a recent Bay
Area visit. "We want to create jobs for people because
we believe security, stability and economic development go hand
in hand. If we can create 16,000 jobs, that means 16,000 guns
off the street."
RECRUITING WORLDWIDE
Shariani has hired Afghans from the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Washington,
D.C.,
Maryland and Virginia as well as Australia and
Germany.
Admittedly, his job is difficult given the continued
instability in Afghanistan and the looming possibility of a
U.S. attack on Iraq.
"I tell them, yes, the challenges are overwhelming,
because the basic needs for the necessities of daily life are
inadequate," he said. "Transportation, health care,
banks, manufacturing, etc. . . . But the rewards are even greater.
"
Shariani's recruiting zeal hooked Zemar Achikzai,
who is so certain of Afghanistan's economic recovery that he
passes out a 10,000-afghani note -- currently worth only about
25 cents here -- to almost everyone he meets.
It's his way of putting money where his heart
is -- a symbolic gesture that shows his confidence in the future
of his homeland because he expects the bill's value to multiply
dramatically soon.
The goateed 34-year-old Bay Area mortgage consultant
is making another, more intensely personal investment in the
country's economic future. He is trading-in luxuries like his
black Mercedes-Benz and a gorgeous home near Chabot Regional
Park in Castro Valley to move to Kabul next month and take comfort
in helping his former countrymen make a decent living. He'll
help restructure Hokhest, the country's largest government-owned
pharmaceutical manufacturing factory.
"My interest is not to go and take a job
from these people, but to let them learn my skills so that they
bring the company to the next level, to the international standard.
They deserve that," said Achikzai, who is also the co-
chair of humanitarian projects for the Society of Afghan Professionals,
a Bay Area organization that has been working over the past
year to raise money and awareness about the country's many needs.
"In America we have ground zero, but over
there, it's ground below zero," he said, referring to the
massive rebuilding effort needed to bring Afghanistan back to
the modern era. "There is much work to do."
REDISCOVERING KABUL
Jawad echoes that view, saying he was shocked by the destruction
when he first arrived in Kabul, where his father was a university
dean and where he attended the French School as a boy. "I
knew the city had been destroyed, but nothing prepared me for
what I saw," he said.
But now, Jawad says, life is blossoming around
the capital, and nothing is more symbolic of the change than
the re-emergence of color in a society that he said the Taliban
had turned dark and forbidding.
"The biggest difference I see now is that
people are painting their houses in very bright colors, in pinks
and blues," he said. "It's like people are taking
their revenge on the Taliban by painting in vivid colors."
Jawad's odyssey is typical of the Afghan diaspora.
He fled in 1980, right after the Soviet invasion. He went to
Germany and studied law, then migrated to New York City, where
he worked in a law firm. In 1989, he reached San Francisco,
received an MBA from Golden Gate University and went to work
for a business law firm.
He kept in touch with people in Afghanistan and
became a well-known writer and commentator on affairs in his
homeland. He lived in San Francisco and two years ago bought
his home in the Oakland hills.
Jawad remains very much a creature of the Bay
Area, and recently enjoyed his first vacation in those nine
months by spending a few days with his wife and 12-year-old
son at home in Oakland.
He says he misses the food, restaurants and diverse
culture he enjoyed while living here, remains crestfallen over
the Giants' World Series defeat and hopes someday to come back
to the Bay Area to live.
"I'm a refugee, not from Afghanistan, but
from the expensive city, living in the Oakland hills,"
he joked. While he toils in Kabul, his family has remained behind.
His wife works to help pay the mortgage.
MAKING SACRIFICES
Shariani says it's been hard to find people who are willing
to leave family,
friends and loved ones behind.
"One of the major, major sacrifices is being
away from your family, especially when they are this young,"
said Shariani, a father of two girls, ages 4 and 6. "You
miss their ballet classes and regular father things, but at
the same time, my kids are going to school telling their teachers
and classmates that I'm in Afghanistan helping out, and there's
a pride in that."
Achikzai, who recently divorced and is father
of children ages 2 and 4, says he knows his heart will ache
while he is away from them. Like Shariani, he says he plans
to visit every two months and will keep in touch by phone and
computer messages.
Knowing his son and daughter are able to attend
good, safe schools, he says he wants to ensure the same for
the young girls in Afghanistan.
While there, he will be the point man for a Society
of Afghan Professionals project to build an all-girls elementary
school in Kabul. The group is raising money by raffling off
a new car donated by Fremont Toyota on Christmas Eve, hoping
to raise $100,000.
He's not sure whether his move will be permanent,
but he says this is a pivotal time in Afghanistan's history
-- and he can make a difference.
"For me, Afghanistan is like a body,
and if you see someone keep getting beaten, you want to go help
them," Achikzai said. "Right now, Afghanistan has
many wounds, but it has a big heart that is still pumping, and
I don't want to let it die."
