 There's there are a lot of topics we could touch upon just because there's so many things in your book But there's two particularly that I wanted to focus on one is Afghanistan and Islamic culture but the other though is One of the bigger components of your book, which is the nature of duality Which is very common to a lot of Americans It's a nation of immigrants and many of us have a heritage we claim besides being American So with that in mind I wanted to bring up an anecdote from the book where you talk about going when you move over to the to this new To follow your father to his new his new post And they're gonna be a lot of American kids there and you're excited and you're right about this is gonna be great we're finally gonna meet other Americans and and you know, this is what a great opportunity and So when you go meet the kids they're playing and there's a clubhouse type of thing going on and at one point when one of the kids a boy says Referring to your sister and you hey Who let those dirty Afghans and and at that moment you're kind of like, you know, you stop cold and you write We remained Americans with an asterisk You're talking about later afterwards about you know how you have these new kids came in and stuff And you guys became kids were rotated out you guys became the ones to show them around etc But you always felt at that point that you were Americans with an asterisk. So what I wanted to ask you was do you still feel that way? well no, I don't at all and the thing about being an American is Every American is sort of an American with an asterisk, you know In contrast to to living in Afghanistan when I lived there, I feel like Despite all the kind of the ethnic patchwork. There's Afghanistan and all the linguistics sort of confusion that's there of Afghan society is much more monolithic And the the mere fact that American society is basically individualistic It means that in America you construct an identity by taking one from column A and two from column B and you put together your own thing So, you know, it it it took me a few years It took me like 10 years or something to really Figure out that I wasn't American or to feel comfortable about being here But now I completely feel like an American so is that what you meant in the point of the book when you write that after You sent off the email to 9-11 You felt as though these two parts of you were fused that you gave you as you say your American voice Use your American voice to to to talk about Afghanistan is that is that what you mean by that? That's only if you felt Whole as an American or that your identity was resolutely American. Well, you know, I Feel that what I discovered in the course of the the confused period after 9-11 the confused and terrifying period after 9-11 Was that at least here in America? Afghans are just as as Are not monolithic the way I felt we were in Afghanistan. I feel that Afghans here are also going through a fragmentation confusion about identity and that That I can be as Afghan as I want or I can be as an American as I want. It isn't quite as much either or Now the situation we've reached here I don't know if that answers that question. No, I mean as much as you know, you can you know Someone can provide a definitive answer. You have to something like that. His identity is is so fluid Right. I mean, I mean reading the book you realize and there's parts where you know you say And this is you know, I would think not in common to most people who are you know, if they're not a Wasp That you know when you're in one situation say among Afghans you feel particularly more American You know, but then in other certain situations you feel as if though there's that other part of you, you know that that that comes That'd be that that makes itself. No. Well, you know After I wrote my book I started to hear from young Afghans in America and quite often these these guys would say you know, I read your book and I feel I spoke to me I feel like it's my experience you're talking about and Initially my reaction was no it isn't you know My experience is exactly the opposite of you guys because I I grew up in Afghanistan and when I went home It was America and you guys are growing up in America when you go home. It's Afghanistan. That's that's the mirror image That's a complete opposite But but then as I got to know more young Afghans I began to realize that split identity is split identity. You know, it's like there's something about that that's a that's an experience that goes across all these different lines and You know my my friend biz Young afghan American artist one day said to me he said I Feel like or growing up I felt like when I went out and went to school I pretended to be an American and then when I came home I pretended to be an Afghan and so the question was where was I not pretending and I think that's you know That's something that's that's the core of the split identity by cultural experience But at the same time What I realized is that I have been in many split identity by cultural experiences that aren't necessarily cultural and that that you know When I think about that I realized that that we all go through many Kind of versions of that and I would be one. Well, you know at one time I was a hippie in Portland and then I Decided to get a job many years after graduating from college Joining society and so I came down here and Kind of accidentally I got a job at the Asia Foundation and the Asia Foundation was Wasn't is you know a suit and tie place where everybody was you know very Respectable and and and sure to my mind over very Republican So so so I bought a suit and tie at a Goodwill store not having any idea that that Men's fashions change from year to year and So I came to work, you know, and I felt like I was in disguise and I felt like man I'm if they ever find out who I really am You know then eventually I discovered that every most of us were in disguise, you know We're all we all wore put on our suits and came to work But when we went home, we were different people sure and many different kinds of different people sure so Which makes me think actually of your of your brother Riaz and do you think? Do you think that perhaps part of the reason that He became so Fundamentalist and his beliefs was because he maybe couldn't deal with that sort of The idea of duality you're never really you're kind of pretending always to be something you're never gonna There's never gonna be anything that's gonna be 100% definitive and this is gonna be purely your identity well, you know, I You're inviting me to speak about the laws in a certain way that that I sort of want to avoid because it's To say this is why he became a fundamentalist because he had these deficits of personality Well, I don't want to say that because he's Thinking human being that made his choice But what I I noticed that was curious Obviously, there's something about the bicultural experience that he reacted to in embracing Islam the way he did and And he went back to Pakistan. He couldn't go to Afghanistan, but he was Knocking knocking about on the border area Peshawar and you know there And whatever he saw really spoke to him and he and he converted But recently he came to visit me like a couple months ago and I took him to Fremont with me because I had an event there that was basically an Afghan event everybody there was gonna be Afghan and he was very Alienated and uncomfortable there. He didn't feel because he's a he's a a Nuvo Muslim and And he didn't he's not an Afghan. He's a Muslim. You know, that's a different thing. Sure. And I think many of his friends are people of all different cultures who have either converted to Islam or have Converted to a more zealous and and fundamentalist version of Islam even if they had an Islamic family or whatever so for example at this event in Fremont You know many of the young Afghans especially For example, the young Afghan women were dressed to the nines very fashionable, you know and that didn't Suit Riaz's sensibility about how people should be. So, you know, I think most of the Afghans there would would vary Indignantly claim that we are Muslims. What are you talking about? You know, you're criticizing me for not being Muslim enough But in fact that would be as criticism of them You guys are not doing the the thing the way you're supposed to so well The interesting thing is that you get that in some of the other different ethnic cultures I mean where you'll have, you know, for example, you know, I'm Mexican-American and you'll definitely get into situations where that sort of identity is politicized and the question becomes why are you, you know, if you act a certain way, you're not acting Mexican enough or Yeah, you know, I mean that like reading your book. That's that's one of the things that struck me was how much of a parallel there was that too to Similar experiences for other ethnic groups where you realize that yeah, you know and also another point that you make in the book And I guess this is what I may want to say about how your brother Riaz decided to adopt This nouveau Islam as you call it You say that, you know, you're often pulled when the wider the gap the farther away you are when you have like these two identities Often feel more the pressure that you have to choose one. Yeah, right? And I think maybe that's I think that's what's trying to get at that. He just basically said I'm gonna choose This is one comfortable with and that's that yeah, he certainly did he chose something that he feels comfortable with but you know He couldn't choose to be Afghan Because he didn't exactly grow up as an Afghan, you know, he his Childhood was spent in this Afghan-American town and since he was a little baby and up to about seventh grade or something He didn't really go to school Afghan school So his friends were all Americans and then he had a period in Kabul that we were back in Kabul and he was going to Afghan school we didn't know any Americans and It was very difficult for him, you know, he was like seven to nine or ten years old And he didn't feel like he fit in at all then we came here and He completely didn't fit in here. So right much more than me. He just didn't fit in anywhere I was this Reminds us something else to from from the book when I was when we get to the middle section where you're talking about going traveling through the Islamic world and you know for this Pacific news service you're going to do this this big think piece and as you get frankly more and more annoyed with the people you meet I'm talking about you know the the the the travel guides Morocco. He basically every official in Algeria Algeria with the Iranian young men at the embassy in Turkey the Iranian the Iranian embassy in Turkey I Kept thinking now is is he getting more and more annoyed because you haven't had any sleep or Or is it because is it starting to dawn on you that you actually don't have as much in common With the sort of large Islamic world as you thought you did Well, first of all annoyed wasn't the emotion I had in the Iranian embassy. It was more like very Nervous, I was frightened there. You know on the way out. Yeah, yeah on the way out and Yeah, you know, I think I was I was encountering the fact that There's many kinds of Islam in the world and there's many movements in Islam and there it's not all Like it what you know, like the Islam I knew as a kid growing up in Afghanistan and I was encountering the fact that there there is a politicized You know radical Islam in the world that was there then in 1979 or whenever Yeah, I think that's it right 79 80 when I was traveling. It was very well developed and it was and it was not kind of the cultural Conservative Islam that that I knew as a kid, you know, there's a difference between Political radical back to the 7th century Islam and old-fashioned very conservative Islam They they might seem the same but but they're actually very different and the You know the the old conservative Islam that I grew up with is very softened by tradition and all kinds of little customs and it's hard to tell where the Islam ends and the cultural Practices begin but this new Islam is idealistic which or ideological which means it's it's it's formed out of a book You know, so it's very kind of black and white Hard-edged you're in or you're out You know, it's it's that you use you at one point as you summarize it so well You say that you know it basically views world history as this constant battle between God and Satan Yes, and you're either on God's side or you're on Satan's side now Reading your book what struck me as being so awful and we know awful about the book But in terms of situation is that's not at all unlike what Richard Hofstetter wrote in the paranoid style of American politics Yes, about neocons in America, and I and I was wondering if while you were writing the book or even afterwards Has occurred to you at how much of a parallel there is between you know what we call radical conservative Islam and Some some parts of the Christian right in this country. Well, you know in writing my new book I I I found myself writing this passage about the period when I think Islam became Very sort of hard-edged ideological conservative and that was around the time of the Crusades and Before that for like 300 years since the founding of it It was a civilization with philosophers and you know science and all kinds of different ways of thinking and stuff And and then what happened is that everything began to crumble and the whole world was under attack from Turkish barbarian invaders and every day was very uncertain and it struck me that the the Theologians at that point who were preaching the idea that You know, you can't use reason to figure out the difference between right and wrong. You got to look it up in the book You know, you got to start your teachers edition. Yes, the teacher's edition with the annotations and What struck me is that you know, if you have if you agree to the idea that that You know reasonableness is is the is the measuring stick and you can use your your instincts and you you have dialogue with people Well, every person ends up having a slightly different position in the world You see You know as long as you admit there's shades of gray then there's a million different places to be and in times of chaos and uncertainty and fear People don't want to be isolated in their own little one one of a kind position. They want to clump together they want to be part of a herd and black and white ideologies enable people to clump together and so I think times of fear anxiety and uncertainty breed The popularity of idea systems that say, you know, it's down to one big battle between God and Satan black and white communisms and Democra or whatever, you know all these different dualities and That has happened in the Muslim world in part because that world has been Under attack and fraying for several centuries now It's an old thing that's been happening in the Muslim world and and it emerges from that but I think you know, there is fear of uncertainty and an Anxiety about endless random change in America that renders popular Fundamentalist notions that emerge out of Christian doctrine, which has happened here. Absolutely And they are mirror images of each other sure You have a a chapter in the book entitled the unintended consequences which is Very mordant actually in the way you sure so this domino effect of awful things that happen after you know one Westernizing reform after another just just really, you know goes backward And if anything instead of modernizing Afghanistan seems to have hurled it further back into the past And I wanted to ask you Do you see this trend continuing now? Particularly with you know with the war the US and Canadians and in Afghanistan presently is it is it are we still going down that track? Well, you know It's hard to say where we're gonna end up in Afghanistan now I think that why is that? Well because Right after the Taliban were driven out. I think there was like this huge moment of of opportunity in Afghanistan because You know Afghans were ready to to look for salute for They were ready to embrace peace if peace was possible would be possible and It didn't happen that way because the war in Iraq started that was a catastrophe It took all the attention away from Afghanistan This whole reconstruction thing has been a total fiasco. You know, it's like it's been really bad Some of that however is this unintended consequences thing What one of the things that's happened in Afghanistan is that big money has come in So it's not like there's no money been spent in Afghanistan big money has come in and not just from the US, you know China and and Japan and and other countries have put put in money and and so foreign companies and foreign workers have set up offices in Kabul from where they're gonna do the work out in the countryside and They have a scale of money to spend that is completely different than the scale of the economy that that was there in Afghanistan So there, you know, so anyone who has a house to rent to a foreigner is obviously gonna charge what the market will bear And I remember I talked to one guy who had been trying to do some Charity sort of work in Afghanistan even back in the days of the Taliban and he was renting an office for like a hundred dollars a month or something And by the time I talked to him like two or three years after the The reconstruction began that office cost four thousand a month Well, you write about this in your book to with your aunt with where someone wanted to buy the compound of the Saudis We're coming in. Yes at that time, right? And we're selling for an exorbitant amount They want we're willing to pay an exorbitant amount of money for yeah, that's right And so then that raises everything that raises all the rents all the prices and now You know, you have a situation where You know, you can't find a place to live and people who are working for the NGOs Well, they get paid by NGOs at global scales So they can afford something but the rest of the people are working for local economy, you know The the policemen are making $50 a month Teachers are making something like that gas still cost $5 or more a gallon Imagine if you're working, you know, you're trying to get to work and and it's that situation So Everybody who has any possibility of getting some extra income will use that of course they will now if you're a postal worker And you're selling a stamp for 10 Afghanis, you know, I could charge 10 Afghanis for that Charge 100 Afghanis for that Because you needed to yeah, I heard when I was in Kabul. There were like four or five car accidents that I saw, right? What was this? This was in 02 or 03? Okay, and You know, so I asked my cousin there I said the Do the police come or what's what happens when there's a car accident the way asked the police comes Well, what do the police do that the police finds? everybody involved Love is a fine and goes away. That's a windfall. I Said well, you know that that doesn't seem fair He doesn't try to figure out whose fault it was or anything and and that's all he does He said yeah, well, you know, he said no, I don't blame them. They have to make a living too. So so, you know, so so The the attempt to to reconstruct in the way that it was done in Afghanistan Ends up in a situation where there's rampant pervasive corruption. Everybody is taking bribes So now no work can get done You know unintended consequences. There's a chain of and now we have of course the Taliban is resurgent Once again that seems in the south at least. Well, you know The the Taliban there was something called the Taliban until 2002 or 2000 end of you know Until they were driven out And by that I mean there was a Mullah Omar the head of that come of that group There were ministers. There was there was an organization. They were cadre Now I don't think it's possible to say what there is that is called Taliban. What do you think it is? I think it's much more amorphous and much more Self-generating and self-regenerating. I think it's an attitude. I think it's a Really vague sort of movement so it's an official affiliation or anything like that I don't think it's an official and affiliation, which means it's not conquerable by by Standard military means you can't find the headquarters and and Bomb it you can't find their network of communications and disrupt it, you know, it's like they don't care if if it's well known that Any act of sabotage will help the cause You know and everybody sort of knows what the cause is then Anybody can say I think I'll do something and they don't need to wait for orders from above, you know, so This this sort of leads to something else you wrote in the book where you talked about when you when you were sent off on this on this long trip to the Islamic world and you're gonna write your big piece the working theory was that This that that the reason for this resurgence here for the popularity of this particular brand of Islam was because it would offer a material solution to material problems that basically, you know, this is, you know They would end rampant poverty. It would you know end all these sort of the social inequalities Yeah, but it becomes rather clear though that that it's not The motivation for as with your brother in the book when you write about that says, you know Materialism is not the motivation behind the sort of thing That being the case and how do you how do you how does one manage that? Or you know dealing with that with with that mindset well, I Guess what I was referring to there about materials not not being a material Goals not being at the bottom of this I was trying to draw a distinction between the Marxist analysis Okay, of all this uprising where you know Marxist would say well, this is good this is the the proletarian working urban working-class rising and and all we have to do is get rid of this super structure of Islam And we got a revolutionary class here but I think Well, you know, of course if if you're a Muslim and you're involved in this movement It's irreducible that Believing in God and believing in the mythology of Islam the religious mythology of Islam is part of what you're doing You know, it's like it's not just an added superstructure It is the reason it is the reason it's what you think But it's also the case This is something I'm trying to trace in my in my new book. It's also the case that An idea of social justice is at the very core of Islam. It's how it started and it was very It was a very prominent part of the Muslim story in that first 50 years when Islam was conquering the world And you talk about that in your book briefly, too Yes, I talked about briefly I go into it more in this in this new book And the thing is, you know, when you look at at what Muhammad was preaching in Mecca before he he went to Medina It was all about You know widows and orphans. That's that would be the best way to sum it up. You know, it's like you can't just Live high on the hog Fact don't have anything to do with hog. Yeah, no no living off the hog at all You but you know, you have to take care of the widows and orphans and you have to and if you're if you're living Sumptuously, then something's wrong And then when they went to Medina and they started the Muslim community It's a such a core part of the mythology of both Muhammad and all of his first successors And they didn't wear rich clothes, you know, they wore rags. They look just like anyone else You couldn't tell the Khalifa from anybody else and You know in the in the early days of conquest There was no Treasury, you know in in in Medina. They they sent the money back was distributed immediately It wasn't until like the third successor to Muhammad that they the guy said, you know what There's a lot of money in this. Let's let's put some of this in a bank and use it for some public good Yeah What are you gonna do? Leo when you're talking about that though becomes at least to me You know, I see the parallels to to Christianity in the parts of least the teachings of Christ Yes, you know which focuses on that too on the source social justice becomes a big part of that, you know But it's how funny that maybe not so funny But maybe how sad that is sent you have some very If you if you will ungenerous translations of all these sort of of teachings The other question is gonna ask you too was that when you were writing in your in the book about How you felt about your sort of ambivalent not entirely ambivalent about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Well only well you mean the sense because you're talking to the sky in Turkey He's like well, you know, it'll be good because the they'll go in there and they'll modernize the place and you know Right exactly, but at the same point we're going. No way. This is awful You know, they're going in there and they're killing people and they're maiming your children with those awful, you know Landmines and you know look like you know look like toys and this sort of thing and how overall what made you angry was that This idea is if though they were going to civilize You know, you know these animals in Afghanistan and I have to have to have to have to think that What's going on now then must be driving you crazy It seems you know frankly sort of a repeat of that sort of thinking in the in the region Well, you know the curious thing is I'll have to say this that the curious thing is that Even though I think you know the militant the military has made all kinds of terrible mistakes and they keep bombing villages and civilians die and and and I kind of know why that happens, you know But but before I go into that Let me just say that of all the things that that are being done or have been done in Afghanistan that are Reconstruction efforts. I think the military the US military has done some of the the best stuff and of that You know, they've built schools. They've restored water systems. They've done that kind of stuff and so Really, it's it's the political the neocarms. Yes, the management of that. That's that's really Idiotic and it's led to all this trouble However, it is the case, you know, it's like I've talked to some of these military guys and They don't have proper You know, they don't really know anything about the country and they're kind of proud that they're using Local or native translators and so they're they're really working with the people they told me and they told me that You know with with good information from these translators. They were able to during the election time kill a hundred Taliban who were gonna disrupt the election and I'm saying well, how do you know those were Taliban, you know How do you know you just didn't kill a hundred guys that your translators didn't like? Because I know that in my village during the Soviet era there was a feud between two sets of families and one of them went to the Communists and you know in in Kabul and said these other this other family They're in league with the guerrillas and they're you know, it's a nest of rebels So the communists went and bombed them and they got rid of them and they took their land So this can happen in these situations and what's the guard against that? I don't know And I will say that you know my I speak for see pretty well, but not not great and I can't read it very well at all and But the language that they speak in the southern part of Afghanistan is Pashatua, which is a whole different language Which I don't speak at all. So just the other day I got a call from somebody that said, you know, we're recruiting translators and we think you might be the guy I said, well, I don't think so But I talked to him a little bit jobs a job. Yeah, and he said, you know $225,000 for a one-year contract you want to go and I said, well, no, I don't actually But but I'll tell you I I don't really speak. I don't speak Pashatua at all. So I don't you know Aside from I don't want to do this You're barking up the wrong tree and he said that doesn't matter that much you you I'm going I speak it well enough. I can say still in my shit. How are you? That's it. Wow, well, that's that's not heartening Yeah, so you speak it well enough You'll learn all the job You'll figure out you got you got a sense of what's going on. Wow, that's that's not good so When when was the last time you've been back to Afghanistan? I went back right after the Taliban were driven out in 2002 2002 Yeah, and you still a family there. Well, yeah, I mean I have one cousin who lived there then Of the first cousin level and then I have lots of more distant relatives Who might think of as distant relatives, but they don't think of me that way, you know They think of me as a close relative. How are they faring? They were remarkably You know, they they seem remarkably like the old days to me when I went there at that point I Went to the village, you know and the village was very bustling and energetic and They all you know at that point the the Taliban had just been driven out and there was talk of a Marshall plan for Afghanistan So everybody was very upbeat there. They all thought, you know, the war is over and great things are going to happen So everybody had a scheme everybody wanted to you know, get me involved in a scheme Everybody was planning to rebuild their this and and plant that and so on And and see what I'm saying about reconstruction is if only it hadn't been Big-ticket big spending, you know corporations coming and saying we're gonna build of this, you know I should have been do you think it should have been voluminous microlending that went and put people in the country and And took, you know request for what do they call it RFP? Yeah took Took the initiative from the the people there and Funded them to do them the the you know, a hundred thousand small things they wanted to do rather than Five or ten big things like a single highway from one city to the other city or a couple of cement plants or whatever Stuff well backtelt doesn't you know and the thing is you can't control that than many of those people I mean I heard this is like well if you be giving $100 here and $1,000 there to Afghans. How do you know they just won't spend it on you know Well, what we're gonna blow it on what video games would they might but you know, yes They're kind of Vegas that's what's many many will actually like of course a lot of the money will be lost that way But a money a lot of the money has lost this way too. So it's it's like It's like a question of will the money be lost in Afghanistan or will the money be lost on its way to Afghanistan? That's that's a that's a question ask and You know You just have to have some some level of trust at some point All right, then I think with that Well in this part of the conversation right there because we want to open it up now to questions from you so I think that's Rosie back there with the microphone if anyone has a question. I mean you were mentioning about survival basic survival and Corruption briberies and corruption. I've been in a lot of different developing countries and It's I just want to know what your thoughts are and how do you distinguish between the two because there are people like The postal worker who will charge a little bit more for a stamp because he wants to survive He needs to survive. I mean there's some fundamental things that we as Americans don't understand about fundamental survival and what it takes and we perceive certain things as Corruption when in country, it's like we're just trying to eat In other words we look at that as corruption. We don't we don't know how to deal with it And we were critical of it because we think of it as criminal activity or something like that You know, I I must say I hate these questions that say what's the solution? Because I never know I'm my my whole orientation is say this problem that problem Well, you know and and right now when you ask that question, I'm thinking about My friend Yalda who more or less lives there comes back occasionally She was telling me that the You know that the price of bread was going up for a while And went up to just catastrophic levels and then the price of the bread stopped rising But the bread got thinner and thinner and now it's like just like buying an envelope or something So You know It's one long connected thread I'd say and you have to find where is the first thing that you could that that you can attack the problem and I feel like At least until recently I've been saying that the bottom of that whole thread is landmines Because there's still so many millions of them in the country And they make it impossible to have them to restore an agricultural system And Afghanistan is really basically an agricultural and herding economy. So unless you can make it possible for people to do that They'll do the only other thing they can do which is opium And once you have opium going you've got the makings of a narco state And the one thing you need for a narco state is a lot of armed men who are ready to be thugs and Afghanistan leads the world in that resource. So So I think that's one of the big things There's this country city thing in Afghanistan that's at a really extreme level, you know It sort of exists everywhere in the world We sort of have this blue blue state green state thing and that's a rural urban sort of a split but in Afghanistan it's very very pronounced and Whatever is happening in the city, you know to the extent that it's good. It's not happening in the country at all In the countryside at all. So somehow there has to be some way to get out in the countryside and do some good stuff there now so that's what I'm always thinking is that the place to start is out there and What I think about is the fact that we have like this Very large military force there. I think it's up to 50,000 now or something like that And it was at 20,000 for quite a while and now it's it's gone up like that and But there is no Proposal for peace That's or sort of reconstructive peace building kind of proposal That the military thing is built around if you were to say what is the military doing there? I think the answer would be there. They're there to fight the enemy, you know, and since I've since I think I've You know in my opinion, I think I've explained that the enemy doesn't exactly exist There is you know, it's like it's hard to say what the enemy is it melts into being the people And so you end up in a situation where you're actually there creating the enemy Whereas if instead of that you started for it by saying In this area right here, we're gonna clear the landmines and we're gonna restore the damaged irrigation systems And that's what we're here to do as Americans and and our military is there to protect that Project and we're not gonna let anything but he sabotage that Then the military has a purpose and the purpose is in some way related to what people cannot can you know appreciate as Being an effort to help them restore their lives Then the military Involvement would make sense and I hope it would grow from there So, you know the corruption you can't end it overnight That's you have to get the disparity of income in some way remedied and there's these other things you have to do first. I Have the mic Your mother, you know was American and she moved over there 20 years and Raised the three of you and when she came back here I thought it was selfish that your father didn't stay because you said she was 40 years old and didn't hold a job and She struggled to raise the three of you in America now What are your thoughts on that? Did I feel he was selfish for not making a life here? Well, she struggled to raise one of us, you know, I was off in school on a scholarship She didn't have to support me and my sister was in college. So when once we came here I never actually was a kid again. I was you know on my way to being an adult I Don't know. I guess I don't have that judgment of my father I don't think of it as selfish I Think he was not as viable economically here as she was. I'm not sure. You know, it's like we don't know and It's hard to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else and say what would it mean to him Then what he thought was at stake to never be with us with his Afghan family again to never see his brothers again I guess I I don't have that that judgment of him. It was tough for both of them It's not clear that his wife really wanted him to stay so So I Wasn't aware that at the time, but I think I became aware of it later on, you know, there's a guy up here Thank you I'd have to say on the question of corruption when I look at the Northern Alliance It doesn't seem we've totally avoided Corruption in Afghanistan with the path we've chosen, but when I look at Afghanistan There's Pakistan and the whole question of Indian cashmere. There's Iran. There's central Asia Can you what do you see happening to that whole region there? And how does Afghanistan fit into that whole geographic political picture you think are you saying there's a lot of trouble in the region Yes, you're right. There's a lot of trouble in that region You know, it's it's regional trouble, but there's also You know, you can look at each of those places and see how they have particular problems that are particular to that place You know, here I go again talking about complexity and problems and I don't have any solutions But I do know that you know in each of those places and I know Afghanistan best I know that there's a global sort of a thing lying on top of a long-standing whole other thing which is local and then they get mixed up, you know and in In the 50s and 60s and into the 70s There was a whole Cold War kind of intrigue going on in Afghanistan that all of the innate Afghan Conflicts mapped on to you know, so there is like this ancient kind of Ethnic problems between the different ethnicities in Afghanistan Not to mention within the dominant ethnicity the Pashtuns. There is a 300 year old Kind of feud going on between the southern Pashtuns and the northern Pashtuns. So all of this stuff was going on as well and and I think we often Tend to look at a place like Iran or Afghanistan or any of these places and think of it only in terms of Ourselves and and how we're strategizing it So, you know, I think in Iran for example In the era, you know since Bush came in actually There was a demonization of Iran and looking at Iran strictly as being part of the global conflict struggle over oil and you know The the anti-western anti-us kind of movement that's out there and And so in the demonizing of Iran our rhetoric and I as I understand that there was also actually quite a bit of actual Accursions into Iran that we don't hear much about but we have been bombing them over these years So they they felt threatened and so the domestic politics was such that before We got aggressive. There was like a lot of pro-Americanism amongst the Iranian people even though there wasn't in the Iranian government and In Iran during that period before Bush came in You know after the the Iranian Revolution and before 2001 Iran was in the situation where it was It was it had achieved the kind of a sovereignty and autonomy And so it could finally begin to deal with the religious issue within Iranian society the kind of the struggle between the the clerical establishment the old conservative religious folks and the secular modernist new Other Iran that also exists They were they were working that out and and I think the old conservative religious Establishment was starting to lose ground because there was no one to blame but them and they were in charge now but now with America coming in and being aggressive it renewed a kind of a chauvinistic energy within Iran and got this guy Ahmadinejad elected and And a whole new ballgame now now. So I think that kind of thing goes in each of these these local places One more I would like This thing of that you feel Put the mic right that you feel like an American and that definition. I would like to that you talk a little bit more about that I'm from Puerto Rico. I have been living here for 17 years and I Go back there very often and the last time that I was there I spent three months there to Puerto Rico We go back and yes, and I came back I live there for three months last year and a half and I came back here and I say I cannot live in my country. I feel That many things from this culture that I love but I identify and then recently I went to like Two weeks ago. I went to the Midwest and south of United States and it was another word for me was another America I don't want to hurt anybody here. Maybe there are some people from that area, but I say no way And then I say no, I'm Puerto Rican I can and I don't know if you make those distinctions because more than American I feel like I'm San Francisco These things Things like I love from this culture like and it's chopped. I cannot deal with those things in Puerto Rico I love to be on time. I like how these things are very organized that kind of thing But when I went to Kentucky another word came to me and I say no, I cannot you know I think the more than American I'm San Francisco not big area Person and I don't know you make those distinctions So what is for you to be an American or feel like an American? Well, you bring up an interesting point and and I will say this I Think I don't want to make that distinction that you're making even though I am a San Franciscan and I'm this type of guy and I'm not particularly close to those people who Cling the religion and guns because they're bitter about losing their jobs You know my sister lives in Kentucky and eastern eastern Kentucky and it's a very You know to go there is depressing for me but it's depressing because the cut that part of the world is just so economically downtrodden it's amazing to me that That a part of America is just so stepped on and so without an economy at all and I feel like you know When I say I feel like an American What I feel like is when we have a new president We should be thinking about helping some of those places rather than that's not my place. So I want you know You know, I want to I think we're all Americans and I want to Figure out how we can improve things in Kentucky so that we can so they they can be more like San Francisco There you go. All right, I guess we'll end it on that note Yes, we will okay. All right. Well, thank you all