The former finance minister of Afghanistan is now taxing in the USA: how his life turned out - ForumDaily
The article has been automatically translated into English by Google Translate from Russian and has not been edited.
Переклад цього матеріалу українською мовою з російської було автоматично здійснено сервісом Google Translate, без подальшого редагування тексту.
Bu məqalə Google Translate servisi vasitəsi ilə avtomatik olaraq rus dilindən azərbaycan dilinə tərcümə olunmuşdur. Bundan sonra mətn redaktə edilməmişdir.

Former Afghan finance minister now taxis in the US: how his life turned out

Until last summer, Khalid Payenda was Afghanistan's finance minister, overseeing a $6 billion budget, the lifeblood of a government fighting for its survival in a war that has long been at the center of US foreign policy. Now he drives his Honda Accord and works for Uber. Former official told the publication The Washington Posthow his new life in the USA turned out.

Photo: Shutterstock

Now, seven months after Kabul was captured by the Taliban, Payenda lives in Woodbridge, Virginia. And although at the moment his success is measured in hundreds of dollars, not billions, he is satisfied with his life.

“If I make 50 trips over the next two days, I will receive a bonus of $95,” he said.

This job is his way of providing for his wife and four children after he has depleted his modest savings.

"I'm incredibly grateful for that," the 40-year-old said.

It was a temporary respite from the obsession with the ongoing tragedy in his country, which had been plagued by catastrophic drought, a pandemic, international sanctions, economic collapse, famine and a resurgence of Taliban rule.

The question of what happened and who is to blame haunted Payenda. He blamed his fellow Afghans for this.

“Seriously speaking, we did not have a collective will to reform,” the ex-minister believes. He does not blame the Americans for handing over the country to the Taliban. He blames himself.

“It eats you from the inside,” he said. He felt trapped between his old life and dreams of Afghanistan and a new life in the United States that he never wanted.

“Now I don’t have my own place,” Payenda complains. I don't belong here, and I don't belong there. It's a very empty feeling."

On the subject: The baby was lost during the evacuation from Afghanistan: six months later he was finally found and brought to his family in the USA

He stepped down as finance minister a week before the Taliban took over Kabul. Then-president Ashraf Ghani lashed out at him in a public meeting and then privately rebuked him for the ministry's failure to make a relatively small payment to a Lebanese company.

“He was very angry,” Payenda recalled. Aides say the tension over the American departure and the Taliban advance brought out the worst of the Afghan president, who was indefatigable but also petty, distrustful and quick-tempered.

Payenda did not think the government was about to fall, but he felt that he had lost the president's confidence. At one point, he even worried that Ghani might arrest him on false charges. Therefore, he quickly boarded a plane to the United States, where his wife and children, who had left the week before, were waiting for him.

On August 15, the day the government collapsed, Payenda woke up around 14:00 pm, still exhausted from jet lag and tired of watching the news. All of a sudden, he saw a text message from the Regional Director of the World Bank in Kabul.

“What a sad day,” it said.

The official looked on Twitter and found out that the Taliban are now in control of Afghanistan. Then he wrote: “We had 20 years and the support of the whole world to build a system that will work for people. We failed miserably. Everything we built was a house of cards that collapsed so quickly. A house of cards built on a foundation of corruption. Some of us in the government chose to steal even when we had our last chance. We have betrayed our people."

In the hours that followed, Payenda's cabinet colleagues began exchanging messages in a WhatsApp group chat - first in shock and concern for each other, then in anger. They criticized a member of Ghani's inner circle who fled the country with the Afghan president and appeared to be reading their WhatsApp messages from a safe haven.

“Cursed is the life of those who fled,” wrote one cabinet minister.

“You have a responsibility to us,” complained another. “We are like prisoners here, and you are outside. You can help".

Payenda considered joining the discussion, but remained silent. "What's the point? he remembered. “It’s like scratching a wound.”

Seven months later, his former post as finance minister was taken over by a childhood friend of Taliban founder Mohammad Omar, who had made a name for himself during the war by raising money for suicide bombers in Kandahar.

“It’s like part of my life is a story that someone else told me and that I didn’t live,” Payenda said.

Once Payenda visited the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, where they held trainings and meetings with fellow economists about the future of his country.

You may be interested in: top New York news, stories of our immigrants and helpful tips about life in the Big Apple - read it all on ForumDaily New York

He was attracted to this work by the desire to help his homeland, from which he fled as a child. In 1992, he was only 11 years old when shelling broke out in his district of Kabul, part of the civil war that followed the collapse of the Soviet-backed government. His family left their basement bunker and moved to Pakistan. Ten years later, after the Americans overthrew the Taliban, he returned to co-found Afghanistan's first private university.

He has worked for the US Agency for International Development and the World Bank, and came to the United States for the first time in 2008, studying at the University of Illinois on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Even in the last years of the war, Payenda was part of a small group of young Western-educated reformers who still believed in the possibility of building a competent and democratic country. In 2016, he became deputy finance minister, determined to correct some planning flaws that kept the government from spending up to 50% of its annual budget. By the time Payenda left the government in 2019 and moved temporarily to the United States, he had helped increase the amount spent to over 90%.

In November 2020, the official returned to the Afghan capital to work on a short-term project for Ghani when his parents fell ill with COVID-19. Payenda interrupted his work and spent 13 days with them in the ICU.

“The worst 13 days of my life,” he stated then.

The hospital - one of the best public facilities in Kabul - could not afford a $200 machine to help his mother breathe.

A few weeks later, Ghani offered him the position of finance minister. Payenda's wife and former colleagues urged him to reject the offer: the Taliban were gaining strength, the Americans were leaving, corruption was draining huge sums from government revenues, and the threat of assassination was real.

But the conditions in the hospital and the suffering of his mother convinced Payenda that he should accept the job. The son knew that the chances of success were slim, but he had to try.

Now he tells his wife that he would like never to accept the position.

“I saw a lot of ugliness and we failed. I was part of the failure,” the ex-minister admitted. “It’s hard when you look at people’s suffering and feel responsible.”

Payenda, among other things, together with an American colleague from Kabul, taught a course on war and reconstruction work at Georgetown University. The teaching fee was only $2000 a semester, but Payenda didn't do it for the money. He hoped the course would help his students—future State Department officials and aid workers—see the conflict from the perspective of those who receive aid from the US and Europe, rather than those who provide it.

The course was also a place where Payenda could work on issues he had left over from the war. What caused the massive corruption that destroyed the Afghan state? Selfishness? Afghan bureaucratic incompetence? A US strategy that empowered warlords who were good at killing Taliban no matter how ruthless they were or how much they stole?

In the months before the fall of Kabul, Payenda made a surprise visit to an illegal customs post outside of Kandahar that brought in millions of dollars a day—money desperately needed by the Afghan government and military. When he confronted the officers in charge of the operation, they cocked their guns and pointed their rifles at him. Video of the incident, saved on Payenda's mobile phone, shows Payenda being escorted out of the building by his security team.

One of the biggest mysteries for Payenda was why US officials, in his opinion, effectively handed over the country to the Taliban in peace talks that excluded the elected Afghan government, which it spent more than $1 trillion to create. Payenda knew that the Americans were tired of Afghanistan.

But he could not understand how U.S. military officials and diplomats could so easily abandon the noble principles they said they had fought for all these years. As he drove through the streets of Washington, past the buildings where so many decisions about Afghanistan's future were made, it seemed to him that American assurances that they care about democracy and human rights were nothing more than a "pretense."

“Perhaps initially there were good intentions, but then everything changed,” he said.

About once a month, the think tank invited Payenda to speak at a panel on the current crisis in Afghanistan. Aid workers and former government officials spoke of babies dying of starvation, mothers selling their kidneys, and parents selling their daughters to survive. International organizations that could help, such as the World Bank, did not seem to know how to provide assistance without violating US sanctions on the Taliban.

Payenda was particularly angered by Biden's decision to set aside $3,5 billion of the $7 billion Afghan central bank's frozen reserves for possible litigation involving 11/XNUMX survivors. The rest of the money will go to humanitarian aid in Afghanistan. Payenda feared that, taken together, these actions would destroy the Afghan currency, cripple the central bank, and plunge more Afghans into desperate poverty.

On the subject: How much money and lives the United States lost due to the war in Afghanistan, and what will happen next

Payenda often thought about starting a new career in which he could clearly see the results of every day's work. The former official imagined buying and renovating old houses, farming, or opening a restaurant with his wife.

He was still working on research and reports on Afghanistan for aid groups, but these days the Afghanistan-related work wasn't enough to pay the bills. He was recently offered an international development job in Iraq, and although he was tempted to go, his wife, Husnia Sidiki, talked him out of it. They have four children aged 2 to 15. "The kids need you," she told him.

Before the Taliban came to power, Payenda's wife and children had spent the last six years dividing most of their lives between Kabul and their home in suburban Virginia. They received a special immigrant visa in 2015, but Payenda said he never envisioned a "future" in the United States.

“I only had one country and that was Afghanistan,” he said.

Sometimes his thoughts returned to his 75-year-old father, who in August was too weak to force his way through the crowd that filled the Kabul airport and escape. Payenda knew that he could have easily helped his father obtain a Turkish visa before the country fell, but he did not expect the collapse to come so quickly.

“Most of all I regret that we were so focused on reforms that we forgot about more important things,” he lamented. “It would take me a while to get a visa.”

He thinks of his former colleagues, including the director general of customs, who was injured in an airport bombing in August and also stranded in the country. He would like to do more to help them.

Like many Afghans who fled the country, Payenda realized that when he tries to imagine a new future, his thoughts turn to his children. “I think that a happy, meaningful life is one in which you raise responsible children - aware, not too spoiled and not too materialistic,” says a loving father.

He wants to introduce them to the poetry of Afghanistan, its history and music. And he wants them to know about his struggles.

But he doesn't want to burden them, even his 15-year-old son, with tales of poverty and hunger. “The child must be protected from this,” Payenda said. “But not too much.”

Read also on ForumDaily:

A great solution for new migrants: how to get money without having a credit history in the USA

Drinking lots of coffee is good: 3-4 cups a day may even protect against cancer

How and what to talk about with Americans: personal experience

These people know five languages: advice from polyglots on how to master a foreign speech

Six things not worth buying at discount stores

Afghanistan Minister Uber Our people
Subscribe to ForumDaily on Google News

Do you want more important and interesting news about life in the USA and immigration to America? — support us donate! Also subscribe to our page Facebook. Select the “Priority in display” option and read us first. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our РєР ° РЅР ° Р »РІ Telegram  and Instagram- there is a lot of interesting things there. And join thousands of readers ForumDaily New York — there you will find a lot of interesting and positive information about life in the metropolis. 



 
1082 requests in 1,162 seconds.