In a visit to Elon University, one of Afghanistan’s top diplomats to the United States on Wednesday called for Americans to continue military and financial support for his home country as the fight against the Taliban – and the hunt for Osama bin Laden – enters its eighth year.
M. Ashraf Haidari, the political counselor, acting defense attaché, and spokesman for the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C., made his remarks in an afternoon gathering with students and faculty in Whitley Auditorium for a question-and-answer discussion. His 45-minute presentation preceded an evening lecture in the same venue.
“Our people seek a future with democracy, not with the Taliban,” Haidari said. “We want international forces, we want U.S. forces, to be there to succeed.”
The charismatic Haidari offered the audience of more than three dozen students at the Q&A a brief history of his home nation, and how events starting in the 1970s led to a failed state by the time Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had established a sanctuary there by September 2001.
Afghanistan, he said, has never had a truly strong central government, and younger Afghans are demanding one now. Schools have reopened, and much of the population feels safer today than ever before, Haidari said.
Recent decisions by the Obama administration to bolster troop levels in the mountainous southwest Asian country give people hope that the Taliban won’t be able to reassert itself despite the protection Haidari said they receive in the mountains of nearby Pakistan.
“People care for their own basic survival,” Haidari said. “We hope this administration will be given a chance to implement its strategy. It’s important for your own security interests.”
Haidari currently works in diplomatic relations between Afghanistan and the United States government. He lived through the hardships of both the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and Taliban rule in the 1990s, when his family was internally displaced and took refuge abroad.
Educated in the United States, Switzerland, and Afghanistan, Haidari holds a master of arts in security studies from the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a bachelor of arts in political science and international relations from Wabash College. Married and the father of a young boy, he speaks English, French, and Russian.
Haidari is the first of three speakers scheduled to visit campus between now and mid October. All three visits are sponsored by the Non Violence Studies minor committee and provide perspectives on issues in Afghanistan in addition to those of Khalid Hosseini, author of the 2009/2010 common reading “A Thousand Splendid Sons,” who will provide the Oct. 13 keynote address at Fall Convocation.