`I know it's insane'
AFGHAN-CANADIAN RETURNING TO KABUL AS TALIBAN TIGHTENS GRIP
As Afghanistan tumbles toward an uncertain and frightening future, many of its occupants have one goal in mind: to get out.
The U.S. has almost completed a military withdrawal that made possible the Taliban's lightning-fast advances in recent days. Embassies like Canada's are looking to their militaries to help evacuate staff. NGOs are sending foreign employees home.
Thousands of interpreters and other Afghans who worked for Western nations — making them prime targets for the insurgents — have taken refuge in their employers' countries. Even the finance minister decamped to the United States a few days ago.
And then there is Ahmad Zia.
The Afghan-Canadian and Kabul government official has been here for the last month, visiting his wife and two children at their home in suburban Toronto. He is a citizen of this country and could stay — as friends, family and just about anyone else with an opinion insists he should.
But on Sunday, Zia is scheduled to return to Afghanistan.
Yes, return. With the country's second and third biggest cities succumbing to the Taliban, with Kabul itself in dire peril, the 52-year-old is flying back into the belly of an increasingly ferocious beast.
“I know it's insane,” he admitted on Thursday, as his 17-year-old daughter Hadya sat quietly reading nearby. “But I'm not crazy. I know what I'm going for. Maybe it's a mistake, maybe it's a crucial mistake that will cost me very much. But I'm not alone in this fight.”
Which doesn't mean that leaving his Toronto family this time is not wrenching.
“As the hours are passing by,” he said three days before his flight out, “I feel the pressure more and more.”
Zia also wants Canadians to recognize the humanitarian crisis emerging in Afghanistan and help those holding out against the Taliban as food supply chains are choked off.
But in some ways it's not surprising that he's going back. For the last 15 years, Zia has lived mostly in Afghanistan, working in various capacities to help the country he still loves, most recently rubbing shoulders with the country's political elite.
His uncle is Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, three times a top presidential candidate, then holder of the prime minister-like post of chief executive. Zia was head of protocol for Abdullah when he filled that job, arranging meetings with foreign ministers, generals and other dignitaries.
Ironically given recent events, Abdullah's most recent role is as head of the High Council for National Reconciliation, the body that's been negotiating on behalf of Kabul with the Taliban. Zia is his communications adviser and even while in Toronto was working late into the night reviewing and posting news releases and statements on Afghanistan time.
But there is another magnet drawing him back into the cauldron, too. Zia's elderly parents, siblings and other relatives remain in the country and are unlikely to find a way out.
It is a family closely entwined with Afghanistan's recent history.
Abdullah was a key aide to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Northern Alliance leader assassinated just before the 9/11 attacks. One of Zia's brothers was in the room when suicide bombers posing as a TV crew blew themselves up next to Massoud, and still bears the shrapnel scars on his face.
Zia himself weathered the first few years of bizarrely authoritarian Taliban rule, before he, wife Homaira and three-year-old son Ilyas won refugee status in Canada in 2000.
Zia obtained a journalism diploma from Toronto's Seneca College and his wife eventually got a job with CIBC, where she still works. They had Hadya and became citizens.
At this point, most refugees would breathe a sigh of relief and embrace their new life of safety and stability. But Zia saw a native country reborn after the 2001 fall of the Taliban, and wanted to contribute.
He went back in 2006, taking jobs with the fledgling Afghan parliament, government ministries and USAID, the American development agency.
Later he would be at his uncle's side through three presidential campaigns and in government.
Every four or five months for the last 15 years, he's returned for extended visits with his family in Toronto's modest northeast suburbs.
Jeevan Campos worked with him for a USAID subcontractor, Overseas Strategic Consulting, both earning good, ex-patriate salaries. But in a sign of his commitment to the country, Zia has lived the rest of the time on meagre Afghan-government pay, even though he could have found other, well-compensated NGO jobs, Campos said.
Zia argues there have been major, lasting advances since he went back: education for girls, more rights for women, human rights protections generally and a working — if flawed — democracy.
But the problems that have more and more weighed down Afghanistan have also been readily apparent.
He saw firsthand the corruption within Afghanistan's government, alleged fraud in three elections that he believes his uncle should have won, and the continuing strength of the Taliban and other armed Islamist groups.
Horrible, sudden eruptions of violence became a part of life even in Kabul, which had once been a relative oasis of peace.
A relative died — his body essentially vaporized — when a truck bomb exploded near the German embassy in 2017, claiming 90 lives. Zia's office lay only 200 metres away.
“It creates kind of a sensational fear,” he said about the terror attacks. “You lose your focus on work and life.”
Though the Taliban struck a peace deal with the U.S. in 2020 and have been negotiating with the Afghan government since, Zia believes they were merely buying time and never had much interest in peacefully entering the political sphere.
He said he gets why the U.S. is pulling out of Afghanistan after two decades of fighting, having spent a trillion dollars and lost hundreds of American lives. But that forever conflict still coincided with major improvements in Afghan life, freedoms and rights that could be stamped out if the Taliban take over.
“The 20 years of war was much better than the peace they're offering now,” he lamented.
Zia said he also understands the good intentions behind the evacuation of interpreters and others who worked with foreign powers, but worries about a brain drain as the country enters a dark new phase.
Then there is Khalid Payenda, the finance minister who announced via Twitter on Tuesday that he had resigned and moved to the United States.
“I don't want to be this guy ... fleeing like a fox,” said Zia.
Payenda reportedly left in part to be with an ailing wife. Zia's own family have thrived in his frequent absence. Son Ilyas, 26, graduated from York University with honours and is now pursuing an acting career — he's appeared in TV ads for Harveys and other major brands — while their daughter is hoping to study environmental engineering after she finishes high school next spring. They were nonetheless desperate for him to stay.
“It's tough,” admits Hadya, a bright and animated teenager who says she'll be texting her father regularly to check that he's all right. “When he comes back it's a weight off my shoulders.”
Zia says he's never much depended on the government of his adopted homeland while in Afghanistan. But will register with Canada's embassy as soon as he gets back.
“I know the embassy (staff) may have to leave,” he said. “But Canadians must remember they will have one guy left behind.”
IT'S TOUGH.
WHEN HE COMES BACK IT'S A WEIGHT
OFF MY SHOULDERS.