Qatar – Afghanistan’s last finance minister now Uber driver …

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) The Washington Article

WOODBRIDGE, Virginia: Right until final summer months, Khalid Payenda was Afghanistan’s finance minister, overseeing a $6 billion spending budget – the lifeblood of a authorities preventing for its survival in a war that experienced prolonged been at the heart of US international plan.

Now, seven months soon after Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, he was at the wheel of his Honda Accord, headed north on I-95 from his property in Woodbridge, Virginia, toward Washington, DC. Payenda swiped at his cellphone and opened the Uber app, which made available his ‘quest’ for the weekend. For now, his results was calculated in hundreds of bucks rather than billions.

‘If I entire 50 visits in the subsequent two days, I obtain a $95 bonus,’ he stated as he navigated the light Friday-night targeted visitors.
The job was his way of supporting his spouse and 4 little ones just after he burned as a result of his family’s discounts from Afghanistan. ‘I truly feel very grateful for it,’ said the 40-year-previous. ‘It implies I don’t have to be determined.’ It was also a momentary reprieve from obsessing in excess of the ongoing tragedy in his region, which was suffering as a result of a catastrophic drought, a pandemic, global sanctions, a collapsed financial system, a famine and the resurgence of Taliban rule.

Senior US officials have largely moved on from the Afghanistan war, which began 20 years before with large-minded guarantees of democracy, human legal rights and women’s legal rights and ended with an American president blaming Afghans, this kind of as a Payenda, for the mess still left guiding.

‘So what is happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country,’ President Joe Biden stated as desperate Afghans rushed to the airport the working day right after Kabul fell, introducing: ‘We gave them each individual device they could will need. . . . We gave them every single prospect to figure out their personal potential. What we could not give them was the will to battle for that long term.’
The problem of what occurred and who was at fault haunted Payenda. He blamed his fellow Afghans. ‘We failed to have the collective will to reform, to be serious,’ he stated. He blamed the Us residents for handing the region to the Taliban and betraying the enduring values that supposedly had animated their fight. He blamed himself.

‘It eats at you within,’ he reported. He felt trapped between his previous daily life and dreams for Afghanistan and a new life in the United States that he had never truly needed. ‘Right now, I do not have any spot,’ he explained. ‘I don’t belong right here, and I will not belong there. It truly is a quite vacant experience.’

He crossed the Potomac River into D.C. On his right, monuments to America’s democracy and its Founding Fathers shone versus the evening sky. His Honda rolled to a quit in entrance of the Kennedy Middle, exactly where two George Washington College pupils were being waiting for him.
They settled into the back seat of his sedan and started chatting about their day – the unexpected fall in temperature, their designs for meal, a mishap earlier that morning on the Metro train. ‘I dropped my cell phone and it slid down the complete automobile,’ a person of the women of all ages was saying. ‘It was the worst moment of my full everyday living.’
Soon after a few minutes’ generate, Payenda dropped the women of all ages at their apartment and quickly checked his phone.
‘Four-dollar suggestion,’ he stated.
The telephone that glowed on Payenda’s dashboard and led him to his upcoming fare held the story of his final months in Afghanistan, in shots, videos and textual content messages.
He had resigned as finance minister a week in advance of the Taliban seized Kabul, when then-President Ashraf Ghani lashed out at him in a general public conference and then privately upbraided him over the ministry’s failure to make a rather little payment to a Lebanese organization.

‘He was offended and all above the spot,’ Payenda recalled. The strain of the Americans’ departure and the Taliban’s innovations experienced brought out the worst in the Afghan president, who was tireless but also micromanaging, mistrustful and quick-tempered, aides explained. Payenda didn’t consider the federal government was about to tumble, but he felt he had misplaced the president’s belief. A element of him even fearful that Ghani might have him arrested on bogus expenses. So, he speedily boarded a aircraft to the United States, exactly where his wife and kids, who had still left a week before, were being ready for him.

On August 15, the day the governing administration collapsed, Payenda woke all-around 2 pm, continue to jet-lagged and exhausted from looking at the information right up until dawn, and observed a text concept from the Environment Bank’s nation director in Kabul.
‘What a unhappy working day,’ it study.
He glanced at Twitter, acquired that the Taliban were being now in demand of Afghanistan and typed a reply: ‘Now that it truly is more than, we experienced 20 many years and the full world’s support to develop a system that would work for the people today. We miserably failed. All we constructed was a residence of playing cards that arrived down crashing this rapid. A dwelling of playing cards crafted on the foundation of corruption. Some of us in the federal government chose to steal even when we experienced a slim, final possibility. We betrayed our folks.’

In the several hours that followed, Payenda’s fellow cupboard ministers started exchanging messages on a WhatsApp team chat, 1st of shock and concern for one another, and then anger. They blasted a member of Ghani’s internal circle who had fled the place with the Afghan president and appeared to be examining their WhatsApp messages from the protection of exile.
‘Cursed is the daily life of those who fled,’ a single cabinet minister wrote.

‘You have a accountability to us,’ a further complained. ‘We are like prisoners here, but you are on the exterior. You can assist.’
Payenda assumed about joining the cost-free-for-tumble but stayed silent. ‘What’s the issue?’ he recalled pondering. ‘It would be like scratching a wound.’
7 months later on, his former placement of finance minister was held by a childhood buddy of Taliban founder Mohammad Omar who experienced produced a title for himself in the course of the war by elevating cash for suicide bombers in Kandahar.
As Payenda drove by Washington, the WhatsApp chats seemed as if they have been ‘from a distinctive lifetime,’ he mentioned. ‘It’s like a section of my daily life is a story a person else advised me and that I have not lived.’ His motor vehicle radio was tuned to Delilah, a DJ mixing tender-rock tune dedications with advice to the lovelorn. ‘I’m falling head in excess of heels,’ confessed a lady who sensed her new boyfriend didn’t truly feel the identical way.
‘Why would you want to be in these kinds of a just one-sided romance?’ Delilah asked.
Payenda was scanning the sidewalk for his following rider. ‘People simply call and explain to her their dilemmas,’ he stated of the radio host. ‘She’s 1 of my favorites. She’s so clever.’

All night, passengers cycled through the back again seat of his automobile. They gossiped about their friends – ‘Anthony states, ‘I want to do the job for Gucci and Chanel,’ but he’s not polished enough’ – and complained about their dinners. Occasionally a rider would discover Payenda’s accent and question him in which he was from and how extensive he experienced been in the United States.
‘What’s it been like so much?’ one questioned.
‘Quite an adjustment,’ Payenda replied.
On this Friday night time, Payenda’s Uber application steered him earlier so lots of reminders from his outdated daily life.
There ended up the Environment Lender and Worldwide Financial Fund headquarters – boxy, present day structures exactly where Payenda experienced at the time attended coaching periods and meetings with fellow economists on his country’s potential.

He had been drawn to that function by a wish to assistance a homeland that he experienced fled as a baby. He was just 11 in 1992 when shelling broke out in his Kabul community – part of the civil war that adopted the Soviet-backed government’s collapse – and his household abandoned their basement bunker for Pakistan. A 10 years later, right after the People toppled the Taliban, he returned to co-identified Afghanistan’s initial private university.
He considered in all the items that the People explained they were being fighting for – democracy, women’s legal rights, human rights. He worked for the US Agency for Global Enhancement and the Entire world Financial institution, and in 2008 he came to the United States for the first time, attending the University of Illinois on a Fulbright scholarship.

Even in the war’s later on years, soon after American ambitions had shrunk from leaving at the rear of a secure, democratic place to simply leaving, Payenda was part of a small team of youthful, Western-educated reformers who nonetheless considered it was attainable to develop a qualified and democratic point out. He became deputy finance minister in 2016, identified to correct some of the lousy organizing that had left the government not able to shell out up to 50 per cent of its annual spending plan. By the time he remaining governing administration in 2019 and relocated quickly to the United States, he’d helped enhance the total invested to extra than 90 p.c.

Two many years afterwards, a nightmarish encounter in a Kabul clinic drew him again to Afghanistan. In November 2020, he’d returned to the Afghan capital to operate on a limited-term challenge for Ghani when his mother and father fell ill with covid-19. Payenda slash shorter his do the job and put in 13 times with them in an intense care device. ‘The worst 13 times of my lifetime,’ he reported.

The healthcare facility – a single of the best general public facilities Kabul – could not find the money for a $200 device to aid his mother breathe. She died with Payenda at her bedside.
A couple months later, Ghani presented him the task as finance minister. Payenda’s wife and previous colleagues urged him to reject the supply: The Taliban had been gaining floor, the Us citizens have been leaving, corruption was siphoning off big sums of govt income and the threat of assassination was real.
But the ailments at the medical center and his mother’s suffering convinced Payenda that he experienced to acquire the career. As lengthy as he thought there was continue to a slender chance of results, he experienced to consider.

Now, he tells his spouse that he wished he had by no means approved the place. ‘I saw a good deal of ugliness and we unsuccessful. I was component of the failure,’ he explained. ‘It’s tricky when you look at the misery of the people and you experience dependable.’

Prior to he had established out on his Friday-night time Uber shift, Payenda experienced co-taught a training course on the war and reconstruction initiatives at Georgetown University with an American colleague from Kabul. The training job paid only $2,000 a semester, but Payenda didn’t do it for the funds. He hoped that the class would assist his students – future Condition Section officers and aid staff – see the conflict from the standpoint of all those on obtaining close of US and European support, fairly than those offering it.

The course was also a place wherever Payenda could get the job done by way of the questions he nonetheless carried from the war. What had brought on the enormous corruption that had wrecked the Afghan condition? Selfishness? Afghan bureaucratic incompetence? An American tactic that empowered warlords who have been excellent at killing Taliban, no make any difference their ruthlessness or how a great deal they stole?
A few months in advance of Kabul fell, Payenda designed a surprise stop by to an unlawful customs article outdoors Kandahar that was netting thousands and thousands of bucks for every working day, cash that the Afghan governing administration and military services desperately required. When he confronted the police officers, who were managing the procedure, they cocked and pointed their rifles at him. A video clip of the incident, saved on Payenda’s cellphone, exhibits his stability group shouldering their weapons and spiriting Payenda from the building.

Among the major mysteries of all for Payenda was why US officials in his view had essentially handed the country to the Taliban in peace talks that experienced excluded an elected Afghan government that it experienced put in much more than $1 trillion hoping to make. Payenda understood Us citizens ended up weary of Afghanistan. He and his wife watched US television dramas leaving them sensation ‘bombarded’ with the fictional portrayals of misplaced and disabled veterans whose life and been ruined by the war. ‘It’s so damaging and subtle,’ he stated.
But he couldn’t have an understanding of how US navy officers and diplomats could so conveniently abandon the large-minded ideas that they explained they had been combating for all these many years. As he drove the streets of Washington, past the structures in which so several of the selections about Afghanistan’s long term had been created, it appeared to him as if the Americans’ assurances that they cared about democracy and human legal rights had been never ever much more than a ‘pretense.’

‘Maybe there were being excellent intentions to begin with, but the United States possibly didn’t mean this,’ he stated.
After a thirty day period or so a believe tank invited Payenda to talk on a panel devoted to the present crisis in Afghanistan. Support personnel and previous federal government officers spoke of starving babies, moms providing their kidneys and moms and dads providing their daughters to endure. Global businesses that could help, this sort of as the Earth Lender, seemed unsure how to supply guidance without having violating US sanctions on the Taliban.

Payenda was primarily exasperated by Biden’s determination to set aside $3.5 billion from the Afghan central bank’s $7 billion in frozen reserves for possible litigation involving survivors of the 9/11 attacks. The relaxation of the income would go to humanitarian help in Afghanistan. Payenda worried that taken jointly the moves would demolish the Afghan forex, cripple the central financial institution and plunge even extra Afghans into desperate poverty. ‘It’s outrageous,’ he had complained on a single of the imagine-tank panels. ‘This is the single most significant blow you can produce to the Afghan financial state. The afghani would be a worthless, dirty outdated piece of paper if you you should not have the belongings to again it up.’

Just in advance of midnight, Payenda picked up two young adult males from Lebanon heading dwelling soon after a night of partying. They talked about how prolonged they experienced been in the United States, how they skipped their people again property, and the Lebanese diaspora, fueled by a long time of war. ‘I’ve read there is certainly a larger Lebanese population outside the house of Lebanon than inside,’ Payenda stated.
The males ended up executives with a building business that builds universities. ‘An emotionally fulfilling occupation,’ a person of them said. ‘Good for the community.’
Payenda thought for a moment. ‘It’s tangible,’ he agreed. ‘I worked in general public finance, and it is not tangible. People say your budget is BS. It all receives ruined, and you are not able to even see the ruins.’
Payenda generally thought about finding a new occupation in which he could evidently see the results of just about every day’s do the job. He pictured himself purchasing and correcting up old properties or farming or opening a cafe with his wife.

He however labored on studies and stories on Afghanistan for donors and help teams, but there wasn’t ample Afghanistan-linked perform these days to pay out the bills. Not long ago he was offered an worldwide development work in Iraq, and although he was tempted to go, his spouse, Husnia Sidiqi, talked him out of it. They have 4 young children, ranging in age from 2 to 15. ‘The kids want you,’ she informed him. ‘And if you hold likely again and forth you will under no circumstances settle listed here.’
Before the Taliban takeover, Payenda’s spouse and young children experienced break up significantly of the preceding six several years involving Kabul and their house in the Virginia suburbs. In 2015, they competent for a Particular Immigrant Visa, but Payenda said he never imagined ‘a future’ for himself in the United States. ‘I only had one place, and it was Afghanistan,’ he mentioned.

Sometimes when he was driving, his ideas turned to his 75-year-outdated father, who in August experienced been much too frail to fight as a result of the crowds swarming the Kabul airport and escape. He realized that he could have quickly helped his father safe a Turkish visa just before the country fell to the Taliban, but he did not anticipate the collapse to appear so speedily. ‘My biggest regret is that we have been so focused on reforms that we forgot the even bigger things,’ he explained. ‘It would have taken me an hour to get the visa.’ He assumed about his former colleagues, including his director typical for customs, who had been wounded in the August airport bombing and was caught as nicely. He wished he’d performed additional to support them.
Payenda checked his Uber application, which was giving him a $19 reward if he finished three consecutive rides among 1 and 2 a.m. He dropped a rider at a dance club and ferried a couple house. His final trip of the night was an intoxicated 20-a thing who spent substantially of the trip unleashing a string of largely very good-natured profanities at the traffic lights and the instantly chilly weather conditions.
‘He cursed so considerably,’ Payenda claimed as the man stumbled towards his entrance door. Most of the people Payenda picked up after 1 am – when the Uber bonuses have been generally the finest – had been intoxicated. ‘I have viewed a large amount of unhappiness and hollowness,’ he reported, ‘people who get the job done tricky all 7 days so they can go get wasted.’
Payenda clocked off the Uber app and headed household. With suggestions he experienced netted a very little about $150 for six hours’ function, not counting his commute – a mediocre evening.
It was a minor immediately after 2 am when he pulled into his neighborhood of two-story colonials with American flags, basketball hoops and little, patchy lawns. For the first several weeks that he drove, his wife would wait around up for him to make confident that he experienced designed it house properly. Now she no lengthier nervous as much and still left the corridor light-weight on.

Like so numerous Afghans who had escaped the place, when Payenda experimented with to consider a new upcoming for himself, his ideas turned to his little ones. ‘I assume a delighted, meaningful everyday living is just one the place you elevate accountable youngsters who are mindful and are not also spoiled or far too materialistic,’ he said.
He required to expose them to Afghanistan’s poetry, its record and its new music. And he wanted them to be conscious of its struggles.
But he did not want to stress them – even his 15-12 months-aged son – with stories of poverty and starvation. ‘He should be secured from that,’ Payenda reported, ‘but not much too significantly.’

Payenda sat in his driveway in the dark listening to Afghan tunes of really like and faith that had been a section of his everyday living considering that childhood and that the Taliban now insisted had been forbidden by Islam. He turned off the auto and walked stiffly up his brick path, his again and legs aching from hours of sitting down.
He found a glow from behind the curtains in the upstairs playroom, exactly where his young children had forgotten to transform off the lights.

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