by Naheed Mustafa
Photograph by Tim Hetherington
In the days after the Taliban was toppled, the Bibi Mahro Road from Kabul's airport was an obstacle course of snipers, roadside bombs, and grenades. But by July 2008, Afghan soldiers flanked the now-glass-smooth pavement, their bodies hidden behind monstrous guns. Some sat casually on white plastic patio chairs. As a first look at Afghanistan, this summery scene was a surprising and incongruous image -- one that spoke, perhaps, to the war-as-usual mindset I would encounter in many of the country's inhabitants.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c22d3cde-40a3-4a12-85f1-4eb7343d0444)
I share an ethnicity with half of Afghanistan's people, but my ancestral connection to this place is tenuous. In the subcontinent's post-colonial era (begun in Afghanistan after World War I, and elsewhere with the end of the British Raj after World War II) allegiances, like homelands, were determined by imposed borders. My ancestors belonged ethnically to Afghanistan; emotionally to India; and then, officially, to Pakistan. My family's looping narrative of migration -- mostly willing, occasionally forced -- thus began here. At its root is a legend, dating back more than a millennium, that all Pashtuns have a common ancestor who lived and died in Afghanistan.
Now read the rest of Naheed's article at The Walrus.
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