A New Perspective

I spent last year living in Tajikistan with a host family and working alongside Tajiks for an international organization. Now, as a student in an American organization with 11 American peers and a new host family that I don’t know very well, I have less contact with Tajiks than before. However, now that I’m studying Dari, the form of Persian spoken in Afghanistan, I have much more contact with Afghans than I ever have before. I have two teachers from Afghanistan—one from Kabul and one from the northwest part of the country—who each teach me for seven hours a week. In addition to this, I have an Afghan conversation partner—a guy from Kunduz who’s about my age and studies at the local medical school—who I hang out with for three to five hours a week.

More than simply being the language resources they were ostensibly intended to be, they have come to serve the more important role of providing insight into what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan and how it’s interpreted by its people, who aren’t in a position to conjecture about pulling out and abandoning the country. The difference between American and Afghan points-of-view of the news coming out of Afghanistan became extremely clear at the close of a half-hour conversation about recent events there. “I thought that you didn’t like talking about politics,” I mentioned to my teacher, remembering his telling me as much a couple weeks earlier. “We weren’t talking about politics,” he explained, “We were talking about my life.”

To be sure, I feel the most privileged to have contact with these friends when our conversations about Afghanistan stray from the topics that teenage Navy SEAL wannabes and middle-aged armchair spies read about on the internet. I can learn the most about Afghanistan when—aided by the absence of words like “strategic” or “improvised explosive device” in my Dari vocabulary—we end up talking about how weddings or birthdays are celebrated, what special foods their families make, gender relations in high school and college, what music and movies people like there, or what their favorite jokes are. When these topics come up, the narrator’s face invariably brightens with a proud nostalgia that makes him long to return to the place that so many in America can (understandably) picture only as a place from which to flee. One of my teachers asserts that it’s exactly this kind of appreciation and pride in Afghanistan as a country that will allow it to take advantage of the current confluence of foreign aid from all directions. According to him, a feeling of national unity, shared pasts and futures, and mutual responsibility can quiet corruption and intra-state conflicts.

While it’s clear that I’m not quite getting an unfiltered sense of their perceptions of America, I can already see that they’re starting to see me as an individual who bears no personal responsibility for America’s actions in Afghanistan. Initial conversations began with reluctant and polite, “In America everyone’s free…” and after just a month may now begin with the more candid, “Please don’t be offended by this, but…” One teacher was skeptical of America’s intentions in Afghanistan, not because America is evil, but because Americans are only human. “Every war is fought for some personal reward. Whether it’s for mineral deposits or agricultural exports, America is there because they want money.”

Most poignant of all, though, is how conversation about the future of Afghanistan—an entertaining topic of heated conversation for my friends and I back home—brings a melancholy and pensive gaze to the faces of these Afghan nationals, as they mull over what’s in store for them and their families.

Kramer is studying Dari in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.