U.S. Afghans Ponder Returning to Native Land After Wartime

So what if Ehsan Mayar is 69 and retired? He can dream. He’s not having the business cards printed quite yet, but he’s picked out the title: Minister of Reconstruction, Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

When he heard that his adopted country was dropping bombs on his native one, Mayar, a former engineer now living in Texas, had two thoughts. The first was to call his brother back home and tell him to get out of Kabul. And then:

“Good. Now I can go to my lovely country and start there the rest of my lovely life”--by which he meant picking up an expanded version of the job he had almost 30 years ago, at the end of the reign of King Mohammed Zahir Shah, overseeing Kabul’s power grid.

Forget, for a moment, that he belongs to a generation whose thoroughly Americanized kids roll their eyes when they hear their parents talk like this. Many older Afghans who came to the United States in the 1970s and ‘80s to build new lives are telling themselves they can leave it all behind and reinvent themselves as statesmen, diplomats, Cabinet members--as something important in a country they haven’t seen in decades, except on television.

Over the last few weeks, about 100 Afghan expatriates have streamed from the United States to a hotel in Rome near the villa where the king lives in exile, and where he is sketching the outlines of a new government, according to his grandson. Many more are waiting to be summoned, or lining up for visas; the Italian Embassy in Washington says it has received dozens of requests from Afghans.

They are people whose lives reflect a slice of Afghanistan’s history: Their parents were public figures during the king’s reign. (Indeed, Mayar’s father was governor of Kabul.) They left because of the 1979 Soviet invasion, thinking it might be temporary, but then settled in the United States as dentists, doctors, professors, construction workers, restaurateurs.

But “I would give it up easy,” said Dawer Nadi, president of the Afghanistan Peace Assn. Nadi is a dentist in Queens, N.Y.; his three children were born in the United States and speak only fragments of his native dialect. “What I have here is nothing. Working there, that is my dream.”

One reason such expatriates want to go, but will admit only obliquely for fear of seeming boastful, is the chance to reclaim some of their familial or personal glory. In the United States, they live fairly anonymous lives amid a sea of immigrant strivers. In Afghanistan, they could be part of a vanguard that builds a democracy.

In his three-bedroom house in Grapevine, Texas, Mayar is toiling on volume three of a history of Afghanistan--fine work, but nothing compared with the chance to sacrifice, he said.

“Here we live in a good situation. We go to Albertson’s. We buy our bread and milk,” he said. “But we have an obligation not just to live a good life, but to take on a burden, to go there and take their hand and say, ‘I am Afghan, just like you.’ ”

Mayar, who has been invited to Rome by the king and his supporters, plans to go in the next month.

Guilt also motivates the expatriates. The majority of Afghans in the United States have been here long enough to enter the middle class--and to see the lives of their relatives back home stagnate.

“That kind of despair and destruction haunts you. It leaves none of us alone,” said Quyum Karzai, who runs a Baltimore restaurant. “It’s a guilt that you’re here with a nice house and a car, and they are over there with the hunger and poverty and disease.”

Karzai, too, is headed to Rome, after 30 years in the United States. His vision of himself in a future Afghanistan is vague but urgent. “Definitely not politics,” he said. But he’d like to help build a civil society and teach his fellow Afghans about American ways.

As for the restaurant: “These days you can do anything remotely,” he said hopefully. “They must have computers there.”

Much of the excitement has a whiff of nostalgia, most of it focused on the 86-year-old king, whom the older expatriates affectionately call “Baba.” Although he’s been in exile since 1973, many Afghans here and abroad see him as their country’s last hope, the only one who can unite its disparate factions.

The expatriates identify with him because they’ve lived abroad as long as he has and they too have picked up Western ways. Some worked for him and remember only the good parts: that under his reign Afghanistan enjoyed its brief period of democracy, holding elections, in which women actually ran for office.

On Oct. 6, Afghans in New York and Southern California--none natural monarchists--held rallies where they signed declarations in support of the king.

Wazhma Fazli, 23, who spoke at a rally in Queens, was reared on stories about the king. Her parents would take out a National Geographic from 1965 with a picture of the king and his grandson and talk of his reign as a golden age--”festivals, beautiful buildings, everybody happy.”

But when her parents and their friends get dreamy-eyed and talk about returning, Fazli doesn’t buy it.

“My generation is saying, ‘Yeah, right.’ There’s no way they’re going back. They don’t even have a mall over there.”

One person left out of the excitement is the king’s eldest son, Ahmed Zaher Shah. His younger brother, Mirwais, is in Rome, acting as a spokesman for the king. Ahmed, the heir apparent, stays home in an apartment in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va., in multicultural anonymity. He is widely described as a poet, artist and recluse. Afghan journalists say he has attended only a few weddings and funerals in more than 20 years here.

“He does not want to get involved,” said his wife, who answered a knock at their door. But in his absence, he has become a symbol for what younger expatriates won’t miss about the royal family.

When he lived in Afghanistan, Mahmad Azimi, 34, had no real opinions about the king. But once he came here, he smoldered.

“Once you get to a Western country and you see what life can be like, you realize how little the royal family did for us,” said Azimi, who works at a hotel in the Washington suburbs and lives in the same apartment building as two members of the royal clan.

“You don’t see these people at the mosque, at family gatherings, nowhere. And that’s because, anyone who is under 60 will tell you, they are ashamed. The royal family sat in Rome and watched our country be destroyed.”