It’s still not too late to start.
© Provided by Slate Displaced Afghans from the northern provinces are evacuated from a makeshift camp in Kabul’s Shahr-e-Naw Park to various mosques and schools on Thursday. Paula Bronstein/Getty Images In the months before the Taliban took control of Kabul the first time, one phone call signaled the dark times ahead for our family. It was 1996, and my mother was shouting on the phone as if to make her voice physically carry across the space separating California and Afghanistan. On the other end was my cousin Fereshta, whose name is the Persian word for angel. Fereshta told my mother how the Taliban were beating women in the streets, how they were hanging people in public, and how she didn’t know what to do next. My mother was visibly shaken. The memory of their voices on the phone has never left me. It’s hard to forget the sound of an angel screaming. That memory was later replaced by a brighter one. In 2013, I was working in Afghanistan, and on Eid that year, I was able to travel to Mazar-e-Sharif to see Fereshta. I met her and her soft-spoken, intelligent daughter, who was learning to drive and then dreaming of becoming a pilot. The north was safe, and in the family’s little SUV, my cousin’s daughter drove us across the green hills of Mazar that turn red with poppies every spring. But now, just as with my parents and the generation before them, that sparkling memory of hope, or even just the possibility of hope, is a memory of a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Afghan civil society and we in the diaspora warned this would happen. But for the past decade, it seems the only Afghan the United States wanted to listen to was Dick Cheney’s old pal from the oil industry, Zalmay Khalilzad, who served in four presidential administrations culminating in this year’s last-minute push to reach a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban.
