Afghanistan’s last finance minister, now a DC Uber driver, ponders what went wrong

WOODBRIDGE, Va. — Right until past summertime, Khalid Payenda was Afghanistan’s finance minister, overseeing a $6 billion spending plan — the lifeblood of a government combating for its survival in a war that had long been at the center of U.S. overseas coverage.

Now, 7 months following Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, he was at the wheel of his Honda Accord, headed north on I-95 from his household in Woodbridge, Va., toward Washington, D.C. Payenda swiped at his cellular phone and opened the Uber application, which available his “quest” for the weekend. For now his accomplishment was measured in hundreds of pounds instead than billions.

“If I complete 50 journeys in the future two days, I acquire a $95 reward,” he said as he navigated the mild Friday-night time targeted traffic.

The task was his way of supporting his wife and four children after he burned via his family’s price savings from Afghanistan. “I really feel very grateful for it,” mentioned the 40-yr-aged. “It means I you should not have to be desperate.” It was also a temporary reprieve from obsessing above the ongoing tragedy in his region, which was suffering by way of a catastrophic drought, a pandemic, international sanctions, a collapsed economic system, a famine and the resurgence of Taliban rule.

Senior U.S. officers have mostly moved on from the Afghanistan war, which commenced 20 yrs previously with higher-minded guarantees of democracy, human rights and women’s rights and ended with an American president blaming Afghans, these as a Payenda, for the mess still left behind.

“So what is happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the place,” President Joe Biden stated as desperate Afghans rushed to the airport the day right after Kabul fell, including: “We gave them each tool they could have to have. . . . We gave them every single prospect to determine their own future. What we could not offer them was the will to struggle for that long term.”

The concern of what transpired and who was at fault haunted Payenda. He blamed his fellow Afghans. “We failed to have the collective will to reform, to be significant,” he explained. He blamed the Us residents for handing the state to the Taliban and betraying the enduring values that supposedly experienced animated their fight. He blamed himself.

“It eats at you inside of,” he reported. He felt trapped involving his old lifestyle and goals for Afghanistan and a new daily life in the United States that he experienced never ever really required. “Suitable now, I do not have any position,” he claimed. “I will not belong below, and I will not belong there. It is a extremely empty experience.”

He crossed the Potomac River into D.C. On his correct, monuments to America’s democracy and its Founding Fathers shone from the night time sky. His Honda rolled to a prevent in entrance of the Kennedy Centre, in which two George Washington College students had been waiting for him.

They settled into the back seat of his sedan and began conversing about their working day — the sudden fall in temperature, their designs for meal, a mishap previously that early morning on the Metro educate. “I dropped my cellphone and it slid down the overall motor vehicle,” a single of the women was declaring. “It was the worst moment of my overall daily life.”

Following a few minutes’ push, Payenda dropped the females at their condominium and rapidly checked his mobile phone.

“Four-greenback suggestion,” he explained.