An article exploring the connection between Mustafa Aryan and his home country that he was forced to flee, Afghanistan
Mustafa Aryan, a Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow, attended the American Studies program Democracy on the Front Lines: Polarization, Culture and Resilience in America and the World from 3rd to 7th November 2022. He worked as the Director of the Regional and International Affairs of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation before the Taliban seized power from the Afghan government in August 2021, and is currently residing in Canada. From his childhood all the way to his dreams for the future, Mustafa revealed to us how Afghanistan colors every aspect of his life.
Childhood and change
Mustafa was born in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital city, during the 1990s in the midst of the civil war. The instability of Mustafa’s environment as he was growing up meant that he spent time in different parts of Afghanistan.
Mustafa paints a vivid picture of himself as a boy seeing men with guns on the city’s streets and hearing gunshots. He recalls that, “The topic [of conversation] was always the ongoing war. It was always about the casualties. It was always about our neighbors, family members or friends dying or getting injured or leaving the country.” The inescapable duality of the aural sense is at the heart of his memories: on the one hand, simply hearing the concomitant sounds of war just outside his home, and on the other, actively listening in on the stories about the war being told inside his home. War is all-encompassing, especially for those born into it.
From the very beginning of Mustafa’s story, the one constant is change. When discussing the US-led engagement starting in 2001, he asserts that, “It changed the country, it changed my generation, it changed me.” So, how does someone, who has experienced so much upheaval forced upon him, actually deal with change?
“So, developing a flexible mindset and also developing resilience and having a prepared mindset for unexpected change helps to deal with [change]. It will be not easy. It will require a lot of patience. It will require a lot of effort...but that's possible.”
Where is home? Being an Afghan living in the West
Mustafa is now based in Canada and previously spent time in the UK studying for his Master’s at the University of Reading, but it is of course Kabul that he calls the home of his dreams. For him, leaving Kabul in August 2021 with only a backpack and an uncertain future was the saddest moment of his life. Home, now, is a place where he “can critically think and openly express [his] ideas”. Unlike troops deployed abroad, the small luxury of a physical space in the world called “home” that one can fly back to is not granted to war refugees.
He says that he was able to cope with all the challenges that arise from fleeing one’s home, but is acutely aware that “the immeasurable grief and pain caused by my home country's loss cannot be healed in a year”. In Mustafa’s words, “In August 2021, a generation grew old overnight, burying its dreams and hopes next to the graves of its loved ones and fallen soldiers.”
When talking with those from the West, he also knew that he would be answering questions almost exclusively about the war: “They thought there is nothing going on in the country, but only war”. And yet, Mustafa, as the first Afghan many of his Western friends had met, tried to show them that there are other sides to Afghanistan beyond the one-dimensional, myopic narrative in the media, which perpetually turns its attention to the latest, new crisis: “Afghanistan may fade from the global headlines, but we, as the younger generation of Afghanistan, will continue working to keep the country's dreams alive”. As such, he would emphasize Afghanistan’s beauty, nature, food, music, history…everything that characterizes a country, everything that could make a place a “home”.
Democracy and a dream
The first half of the title of the American Studies program – “Democracy on the Front Lines” – seems particularly pertinent to Mustafa. Democracy, to him, means “allowing the people to choose their future by using their votes, one person, one vote for their future, to decide on what they want”.
It is no coincidence that his first words on democracy addresses fair elections: his op-ed for Diplomatic Courier pinpointed fraudulent elections in Afghanistan ultimately as a major factor in its downfall. Mustafa’s very conception of democracy cannot be divorced from events in Afghanistan.
Nor can Mustafa’s personal dream be separated from Afghanistan: “To live in my country as a citizen, where all my fellow citizens – men and women – have the same rights, equal opportunities, justice, and also having the opportunities to live like other people in the rest of the world”.
His last point serves as a reminder that his dream is something that is often taken for granted in other countries. He is not asking for the world; he is simply asking for an Afghanistan that is “a peaceful, developed, prosperous and democratic country”.
