Last week’s suicide bombing in Afghanistan, the deadliest in years, was devastating for many. We lost several of our friends and partners, whom we’ve gotten to know as individuals committed to building democratic governance, shaping the market economy, and promoting genuine reforms in Afghanistan.
Soon after arriving in Kabul in July 2004, I found myself in a certain kind of solitude, tasked with proving oversight for the formation of the leadership of the nascent Afghanistan International Chamber of Commerce (AICC) with which CIPE was working at that time to transform from a concept to a bona fide reality. The undertaking was not insignificant; especially considering that in the making was the first truly nationwide independent business association in the country’s history.
The term “nationwide” takes on as a specific meaning in Afghanistan as most anywhere. It first implies that Afghans comprise a nation (they do) and second, that there may exist sufficient common interests built on perspectives shared from Amu Darya to the once-capitol Kandahar. In respect to the first half of this term, perhaps surprisingly, in my eighteen months of living, working, and traveling throughout Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006, I found that by and large, Afghans identified themselves first and foremost as just that – Afghans.
Its combination with latter part of this term – “wide” – is, in a word, problematic when seeking accord amongst a people who are spread across a range of mountains, families, tongues, cultural spaces, deserts, and all the differences they realize, brutally exacerbated by a series of wars whose combatants were often first grouped by ethnicity and/or tribe, and then by tactics and convenience. Against this background, those individuals that chose to rebuild an Afghanistan not based on clan but rather consensus embraced the mightiest of endeavors.
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