Afghan Emigres Want a Role in Rebuilding

A coalition of Afghan Americans in California is seeking to grab the Bush administration’s attention in hopes of carving out a role in helping rebuild postwar Afghanistan.

About 400 leaders are expected to meet Wednesday in Fremont, home to one of the nation’s largest Afghan communities, to plot a possible course for the war-ravaged nation.

That effort comes as many leaders in the Afghan expatriate community in the U.S.--including doctors, scholars and other intellectuals who fled during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s--express dismay that American officials have not tapped their expertise.

Although they have sunk roots in the United States, many say they plan to return to help build a new Afghanistan.

Masoud Majrooh, 53, works at a Fremont security firm. But he says he will drop everything if peace returns to his shattered homeland.

“If someone said it was peace today, I’d be there tomorrow,” said Majrooh, a journalist during the decade-long battle between the Afghan moujahedeen and the Soviets. “We have to help establish an independent government led by people chosen by the nation.”

That is also the goal of Waheed Momand, president of the Afghan Coalition, a Fremont-based umbrella group. He talks of building a “cohesive coalition of intellectuals and knowledgeable people” to pair Western-style democracy and rights with Muslim traditions in their homeland.

Momand said the group plans to refine a proposal for an Afghanistan that promotes equality among often divisive ethnic groups, discourages gender discrimination and operates as a democracy based on Islamic cultural values.

“It has to be broad-based,” agreed Esmael Burhan, retired assistant director at the University of Nebraska’s Center of Afghanistan Studies. “This is very, very important.”

A key point, Momand said, would be to demilitarize the various rebel militias and establish a single national army to bring unity to a land torn by the Soviet occupation, subsequent civil war and now the U.S. battle against terrorism.

He said Afghan leaders from around California will attend, including representatives of the two prime players--the rebel Northern Alliance and exiled King Mohammad Zaher Shah.

As many U.S.-based Afghans see it, their homeland’s postwar prospects depend on the return of the intellectual elite, who largely fled after the Soviet invasion.

“Afghanistan is a country without a brain,” said Rona Popal of the Fremont-based Afghan Women’s Assn. International. “All the elite people are gone. Left are the poor people, the illiterate, the poor widows--the people who cannot defend themselves, the people who have no choice, no money, no way to get out.”

Maliha Zulfacar, a former Kabul University professor now teaching at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, sees the current situation as “an opportunity for Afghan intellectuals--bureaucrats or businessmen or professors--to become facilitators, to serve as a bridge.”

But people should be careful about how far-reaching that role is, she said, adding that Afghans who emigrated should not take over any new government.

“We’re the ones who left. We abandoned Afghanistan. We’re not there anymore,” she said. “The people left in the villages, their lives have been at stake from day to day, and they know what’s going on. They should be given the right to decide their lives, to determine their government.”

Among those eager to return is Taj Mohamad Wardak, a 77-year-old former governor of three Afghan provinces who lives in North Hills. Wardak said he and some other older Afghan statesmen would like to make the trip back to try to negotiate with the Taliban over Osama bin Laden, named by the United States as the prime suspect behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Wardak, who has visited Afghanistan three times in the last four years, said many supporters of the Taliban are simply scared of Bin Laden’s power. He said he knows some Taliban leaders from the time before the regime seized power, and could perhaps negotiate with them in a way outsiders could not.

“If they know you, they will talk,” he said.

He also said some of Afghanistan’s elder statesmen who now live in the Los Angeles area are planning a meeting soon to discuss sending a mission to their homeland.

Wardak said he has been unable to get the U.S. government to listen to his suggestion that there be more talking and less bombing.

The Bush administration insists that it is talking to the full array of Afghan political factions both inside the country and in exile. They include the exiled king, the Northern Alliance, southern tribal leaders and active exile groups in the United States, Italy, Germany and Cyprus.

But a State Department official acknowledged that not all U.S. Afghan groups were currently being consulted. Some have long been dormant or only became active after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Said Tayeb Jawad, a 43-year-old writer and commentator who left Afghanistan in 1979 after graduating from law school at Kabul University, worries that the United Nations and Afghanistan’s neighbors, including Pakistan and Iran, may end up having too big a say in determining the country’s future.

“They’re leaving the Afghan people out,” he said.

The younger generation also wants to help. Khaleda Atta, a 22-year-old bank account executive, left Afghanistan as an infant. But she said she might go back if stability returned, taking with her what she has learned in America.

“The judiciary, democracy, voting, gender equality--those are great strengths in the American system,” she said. “If it can be intertwined with Afghan culture, it could be so beautiful.”

Momand of the Afghan Coalition believes that more than 10,000 expatriates will ultimately return to Afghanistan to help.

But a former Kabul University professor living on the East Coast, who asked that his name not be used because of the tense divisions among Afghans these days, doesn’t believe such words.

Afghan Americans have grown accustomed to freedoms and comforts--from 24-hour electricity to TV to free expression--that will be scarce in the early days and months of any rebuilding effort in Afghanistan, he said.

“Let them all go,” he added. “In a week, they’ll be coming back here.”

Barna Karimi, a Los Angeles rug store owner who fled Afghanistan seven years ago, has joined with Taher Hashemi, a former political science professor at Kabul University now living in Thousand Oaks, to draft a petition to President Bush and the exiled king, who lives near Rome. It calls for representatives from all of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups to have a hand in ruling the nation after the Taliban.

“They’re not going to come listen to us,” Karimi said. “It’s our job that we make them listen to us. We call them. We bug them. Otherwise, they won’t.”

But not everyone is so confident that lobbying will make a difference.

Sayed K. Hashemeyan, a former professor at Kabul University who now publishes the expatriate Afghan Mirror, said he sent a letter to the White House on Sept. 16 warning that a bombing campaign would not hurt the Taliban but simply strengthen civilian allegiance to the regime.

Hashemeyan said no one from the administration acknowledged his letter.

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Times staff writers Robin Wright in Washington and Jessica Garrison in Orange County contributed to this report.