Afghanistan Banking on the Wisdom of the Aged

Anyone seeking the measure of Afghanistan’s desire to rebuild need look no further than the sparkle in Abdul Rasul’s eyes.

His enthusiasm about the country’s future is so great that the Kandahar teacher found himself punching the air during a recent conversation with a foreign visitor.

“Now’s the chance to escape the past, to build the kind of future Afghanistan deserves,” said Rasul, who was surrounded by 10th-graders on the edge of a school soccer field. Then, nodding toward the students, he added, “This will soon be their responsibility.”

The boys were silent as Rasul spoke, for this is still a society that equates age with wisdom--and Rasul has a lot of both.

At 82, he’s one of two octogenarians on the faculty of this city’s prestigious Aborihan Albironi High School. He is also part of an important newly empowered group in Afghan society--elderly men who have forsaken leisure to join in the daunting task of rebuilding their shattered country.

In education, the military, business and politics, these senior citizens offer a precious commodity: knowledge of life when Afghanistan was just another exotic Third World country, a poor nation but one at peace, with elected representatives, a constitutional monarchy and lots of friendly help from countries on both sides of the Cold War divide.

“They can bring people together just with the respect they command,” said Ahmed Karzai, brother and confidant of interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai. “Their wisdom can help revive Afghanistan.”

The graybeards are just one of several long-dormant elements of Afghan society now stirring in the wake of the Taliban regime’s collapse. Others, including wealthy expatriates, intellectuals and women, also have rallied to the nation’s cause.

But the seniors are especially important because of their status and the fact that their very presence symbolizes continuity with the past.

Their activism is a measure not only of the groundswell of hope that permeates Kandahar but of the fear that if good and wise people fail to act now, Afghanistan will once again be abandoned to warlords and religious zealots.

“If they [leaders of the interim government] don’t call us, it’s up to us to go to them to help,” said Mohammed Omar Sati, a 58-year-old agricultural specialist who runs a dairy cooperative in Kandahar. Sati said he is seeking financing for a program that would provide small incubators to illiterate rural women and then would buy the eggs from the resulting chickens. He noted that the idea had been rejected as un-Islamic by the mullah who ran Kandahar’s agricultural department during the Taliban era. Sati recalls the mullah’s befuddled response:

“He took one look at the eggs [in the incubator] and exclaimed: ‘This is not Islamic. Where are the mother and father?’ ”

Sati also hopes to dust off a plan to regenerate the region’s dairy cattle herds using artificial insemination. That idea was refused by the same mullah on the same grounds: un-Islamic.

At the political level, long-sidelined tribal elders in Kandahar province are already playing an important behind-the-scenes role in maintaining the fragile stability that has given Kandaharis new hope.

Eighty-year-old Wakil Lal Mohammed Khan, a Popolzai tribal chief who served 19 years as a member of the national parliament during the reign of the former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, and six years under house arrest during the Taliban era, has been asked to serve on a 30-member provincial peace council. The body was recently established by Kandahar’s governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, to mediate disputes over the spoils of the new era.

“I told him I was old enough to be his father, but I would work for him as a common foot soldier if he promised to work for all of Afghanistan and not the narrow, petty interests of the few,” Khan said. “He promised he would do that.”

Khan said Shirzai then immediately acceded to a second demand--that government officials working at the city and village levels in the province also pledge to renounce factionalism and favoritism.

Azizullah Wasifi, who once served as agriculture minister for the exiled former king, drew loud applause from several thousand people at a political rally in Kandahar on Thursday when he delivered a strong warning about the consequences of yielding to the regional, tribal, religious and ethnic jealousies that have so plagued this country.

“If you present yourselves as Durrani, Herati, Shiite or Sunni, you will divide yourselves into small groups, and I swear you will lose Afghanistan,” said Wasifi, a popular and respected figure in his day who was either in jail or in exile for much of the last quarter of a century.

In many instances, the return of the country’s seniors is a question of simple necessity. Rasul, who teaches physical education, and his 80-year-old colleague, Haji Mohammed, whose specialties are economics, logic and Persian literature, have returned in part because there is no one else to teach the students.

Mohammed Daoud, director of Kandahar’s Education Department, said 95 mainstream schools have been restarted in the city over the last month, a little less than half the number that operated during the last years of Zaher Shah’s reign in the early 1970s. Under Taliban rule, that number dropped to four. With the schools now desperate for experienced teachers, retirees such as Rasul and Haji Mohammed are getting the call.

“In the last 23 years, one generation was born in the trenches and another died in them, so there was no education and no one to train them,” Daoud said. “As a result, we have no teachers. These older teachers play an important role. They have a lot of advice and tips to offer.”

The picture is much the same elsewhere.

At a makeshift military academy near the Kandahar airport, Syed Abdul Karim, the former military chief of a group that resisted Soviet occupation in the 1980s, has called on older officers, including some who once served in Zaher Shah’s army, to help put together a military force for a democratic Afghanistan.

“Who else is there?” he asked with a smile. “We are starting from zero.”

It’s hard to argue with that assessment.

The academy consists of a cluster of mud buildings, a hodgepodge of equipment donated by minor warlords, and 300 willing recruits who drill in sandals and sneakers. In one building last week, about 20 officers were talking over lunch, exchanging stories about the old days and lamenting the quality of their recruits.

“In Zaher Shah’s time, recruits were well-educated,” said Noor Rehman, a 58-year-old onetime officer in the former monarch’s army. “Now they are mostly illiterate, and that’s a big change. For the Taliban, it was just jihad and nothing else.”

Rehman acknowledged that much has changed since Zaher Shah’s days in power, but he maintained that lessons can be drawn from the past, such as strong discipline.

“It won’t be easy, but we will build a good army,” he said. “We’ll take the best of the old and the new.”

Like Rehman, and despite the daunting tasks ahead, many of the seniors called back to help rebuild Afghanistan remain optimistic that the nation’s nightmare is ending.

“We’ve faced a lot of trouble and hardship, but we have survived,” said Rasul. “Now, if all Afghans can work together, our country can be great.”