Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

Editor’s Note: Columbia News21 Fellow Don Duncan has been travelling in Afghanistan, following an Afghan refugee returning there to visit for the first time since being resettled in Phoenix, Ariz. Watch for additional updates on their two-week journey, which is being supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

When Dost Mohammad Khairy’s computer goes idle, a picture of George W. Bush appears as a screen saver.

Khairy, a 30-year-old Afghan refugee, resettled in Phoenix in 2003 under the UNHCR refugee resettlement program. The program has fast-tracked him to citizenship, for which he is eligible this August. Although unlikely to be a citizen in time to vote this November, Khairy says he would unhesitatingly vote McCain. He is a Republican in utero, a voter-to-be, born of an intervention and of policy instituted under the Bush administration.

“Republicans seem to care more for the welfare of those outside the U.S. like in places like Afghanistan,” says Khairy.Like many of the 300 Afghan refugee families settled in here Phoenix since the 2001, Khairy, his brother Farshad and his mother Fakhra see Bush as a liberator of their country and as their own personal savior. For this reason, they say, they are firm Republicans.

“President Bush freed our country,” says Khairy who is an active political blogger and has received warnings and death threats from pro-Taliban agents in Afghanistan.

He is making his first trip back to the country since he left five years ago. And having kept up with news from home, he has some idea as to the changes his country has seen since his departure.

“There is a lot of change,” he says. “Nine million girls going to school that were not under the Taliban. More than ten private TV channels have been established. There are highways, hospitals, educational facilities …”

Within this context of development, Khairy sees calls for troop withdrawal from Iraq made by Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as portentous for his native Afghanistan, a country, he says, which has benefited enormously from the U.S. intervention: “If there had been a Democratic president after [in office] after Sept. 11, he would not have stayed longer in Afghanistan to rebuild it as it has been rebuilt.”

His native city of Mazar e Sharif, in the relatively stable north of the country, has been under continual occupation since 2001 and has seen significant development, initiated largely by Western funding.

But is this development sustainable? Will the roads, schools, TV stations remain, say five or ten years after an American withdrawal? Khairy has his eyes on the presidential election with continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan in mind.