What do New York City Afghans Think?

(The following is a guest post from Smriti Rao. You can find this article and her other work at raosmriti.wordpress.com)

On Wednesday this week, President Obama will conduct the fifth strategy meeting with his national security team on Afghanistan. Looking how quickly the U.S. is sinking into this hole, I decided to do a little bit of poking around of my own in New York City to get a sense what Afghans living here had to say about what was happening. As expected, many expats were either extremely reluctant to comment or were decidedly politically correct- one of them even quoting Gandhi and Martin Luther King to me. But it was interesting nonetheless to head out Kissena Boulevard, in Queens, which is home to almost 10,000 Afghan expat families.

Many of the Afghans in NYC fled Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of the country from 1979-89. In recent years, continuous fighting between NATO-led troops and militants in Afghanistan has prevented many of these families from returning to their homeland. “What’s the point?,” asked Ahmad Waish, a law enforcement officer in New York who hasn’t been back home for 30 years. “The Americans may shoot me, thinking I am an Afghan fighter,” said Waish who was dressed in a traditional Chapan (Coat) with a Keffiyeh around his neck, “And the fighters may attack me saying I am American.” Waish has also been unable to visit his father who lives in Kandahar. “My father can’t go outside - he will be bombed to pieces.”

Outside the Masjid Saliheen at Kissena Boulevard the streets empty out ahead of the evening prayers. Men in beards and tunic-pants hurry to make it to the mosque in time. Two blocks down, in a park across the street, three men sit in a circle playing Chess or Shatranj on a board made of stone. “We are veterans of war,” says one Afghani who did not wish to be named, referring to the Soviet invasion, the Taliban and the American forces. “We have seen so many killings, homicides. We don’t support war in any form. War is destruction,” he said, adding he was against any troop increase in Afghanistan. As he moved his pawns across the chess board, his companions - a Hispanic immigrant and another Afghani from Kandahar puffed silently on their cigarettes. “I remember the first time America attacked Kabul - the rockets firing- bombs left and right in the city. Sometimes I feel like the war was imposed on America - Sept 11 forced America into this war.”

Other Afghanis like 27 year old Yama Qadari are weighed down by a similar sense of war fatigue and are against putting more boots on the ground. “If there was actually any progress on the ground, then why would we need to send more troops to the country?” asks Qadari, adding there needs to be a cohesive strategy to end the carnage in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan started off as a multilateral effort in 2001. At present, there are 39,000 NATO troops along with 65,000 Americans. If the President decides to dispatch another 45,000 more U.S. troops, the longest American war would also potentially turn into its deadliest. “Afghanistan for the last 30 years has been at war,” added Waish. “ Most people under 30 were born under bullets. Children were born under war. What is the condition of people like that? Their main instinct is ‘kill in order to survive.’”

Others expressed cynicism at the President’s Peace Prize. “What peace are they talking about,” asked Akram Jalali, a former medical worker in Queens.” Everyday there are bombings in Kabul, people are dying all the time, they don’t know the meaning of peace,” he fumed. “People are suffering, innocent civilians are dying. Anyone who has been reading the papers knows the carnage there,” said Waish. Meanwhile, as the Chess game continues in the park, one of the Afghani immigrants sums up the feeling in the community. “Everyone here is tired,” he said. “If only people paid more attention to the teachings of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.”

Despite the gloom surrounding the state of affairs in Afghanistan, some immigrants like Yama Qadari are hopeful for the future. He smiles as he says “No country is beyond repair.”