Afghanistan after nearly three years away

Returning to Kabul after nearly three years was like coming home. Immediately the essence of Afghanistan emerged. At passport control, a smile, a hand to the heart and Salam-o-Alakum. The same from the bearded gentleman behind the counter that collects information from foreigners entering the country.

I wasn’t out of the airport before an Afghan came up to me to ask if I needed help. I didn’t, but how lovely and how Afghan to be asked.

For me Afghanistan is more than the Islamic Emirate and their repressive rules governing girls and women or the previous 20 years of corrupt, deadly warlords and a failed US-led intervention, it is about Afghans, those I have known for decades, others I meet on the street, who smile, who ask if they can help, who put their hand to their heart to greet you.

This trip back was sad and joyful. Sad because I went to Kabul to mourn with Amir Shah, my friend and colleague of more than 30 years, the death of his mother, Bibi Hajji. She had lived a long life, raised Amir Shah alone. His father died when he was just two years old.

He knows his father only through a picture, but his mother, Bibi Hajji, as he says “was all my life, just her and me.”

Even as she grew frailer with the passing years, she always stood to welcome you. She would hold my face in her hands and tell me how happy she was to see me. In these past three years away from Afghanistan she made a video from her home in Kabul and in the video she said: “Kathy Jan you have left Kabul, but don’t forget me.”

Forget you? Never Bibi Hajji. Never!

At her grave we offered a prayer and I told her again I would remember her always and I thanked her for giving the world the amazing and deeply kind man her son, Amir Shah, had grown to be.

Together with his wife, they raised eight children, all of whom have lives of which to be proud thanks to their father’s relentless determination and sacrifice, working as a journalist through some of his country’s most dangerous times. Amir Shah began his storied career driving taxi and retired one of Afghanistan’s most respected journalists and the strongest of pillars in The Associated Press’ Afghanistan operation.

Bibi Hajji’s grave was a simple one, but it stood in the shadow of the stunning blue domed Ziarat-e-Sakhi Shrine and Mosque in Kabul’s Karte Sakhi area. Located not far from Kabul University, at the foot of Kabul’s Asamayi Hill, better known in the city as TV Hill, the mosque and shrine is a powerfully important place for the country’s minority Shiite Muslims.

It is where the cloak of Islam’s prophet, Mohammad, is said to have been brought and where Ali, believed by Shias to be the spiritual heir of Islam’s prophet, visited. On holy days the grounds and nearby graveyard are packed with worshippers.

Amir Shah’s mother would be happy with her final resting place.

My visit was also joyful because friends, whom I have known for decades, were there to visit. Said one friend when I wrote to say I would be in Kabul, “welcome to your second home Kathy,” another said, “I am here and waiting. If you need anything I am here,” and another started as many Afghans often do: “God willing you are well, your family is well, your home is fine.”

There is a deep comfort in those words and even more in the friends who utter them.

I miss the friends who are no longer living in Afghanistan, but I know the love of their country is etched deep in their heart wherever life has taken them. Said one dear friend of many decades whose home has seen poets and kings alike pass through its always welcoming doors, “please be in touch from my dearest Kabul.”

It’s soon another anniversary of the failed U.S. led invasion and the return of the Taliban to Kabul and political pundits, more eloquent than me, will lay out the good and bad of today’s Afghanistan.

But for me, my return reminded me, just how lucky I was to first meet Afghanistan in 1986. Then the Russians were the invaders and together Afghanistan and I have shared a relationship that has weathered four decades, various Afghan governments and an American invasion.

The greatest gift it has given me is the generosity of spirit of its people and that has remained a constant regardless of who rules and who invades.

Kathy Gannon has lived and worked for nearly 40 years in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Middle East and Central Asia. This piece first appeared here on Substack.