Updated November 8, 2006
Initial projects | Correspondence in 2002 | June 2006
I have been interested in Central Asia since 1982, when I began reading accounts of the mountaineers who traveled to the Pamir and Karakoram regions. In a sense, their view of the peoples and cultures of the area was most compelling because the mountaineers were generally ignorant, but interested in the people living at the base of the mountains. Futhermore the mountaineers tended to have one, obvious agenda: to climb their targeted peaks and survive. So their remarks about the people in the region were biased in their own way, but not with the same agenda, say as a colonial explorer or someone surveying a gas pipeline.
Other than those reports it was difficult to get information on the region, which piqued my curiosity. Fortunately, at Berkeley I got to know some Afghans while I was studying geography as an undergraduate, in the mid-1980s. We talked about the possibility of going to Kabul to help with the reconstruction from the Soviet occupation, never suspecting that it was about to get worse with a civil war after the Soviet withdrawl.
In 1990, as a master's student in Architecture and City Planning, I considered pursuing a PhD by studying the history of cities in Central Asia. Most of the significant historic cities are in (what is now) Uzbekistan: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Khojend. So I studied Uzbek and visited Tashkent in 1992, just after the USSR broke up. I soon realized that Uzbekistan was still functioning as a Soviet Socialist Republic; that I would need to know Russian to have any access to archives and bureaucrats; and that they were not going to be very cooperative in any case. So I finished my masters programs and worked professionally for ten years in urban design, large site planning, and low-income housing.
In the fall of 2002, it looked like the Bush Administration was shifting its focus to Iraq. Fewer reports were appearing about Kabul, but I saw an alarming trend with the emergence of severe rise in rents in the capital. I had just lived through the dot-com boom in San Francisco while trying to build low-income housing in the City. Given the social stress this had caused in San Francisco, I was worried about what might happen in a much more fragile, volatile situation. The mood in Kabul was still optimistic at the time, but I did not expect that to last.
So I contacted my longtime friends back in Berkeley, and through them reached the Afghan Coalition. On October 30, 2002 I met with Waheed Momand, and gave him my resume and a statement of purpose. I expressed by concern with the housing crisis and my interest to work--not on housing istelf, but on housing policy, since that is where we failed in San Francisco. Five days later, the Society of Afghan Engineers invited me to participate in their capacity-building program, working directly for the Afghan government. I arrived in Kabul at the end of May 2003, and volunteered in the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing for five weeks. I was treated as a guest Afghan-American, because I happen to look Afghan and because I was the only khariji (outsider) to participate in the program. Under the Minister's direction I coordinated a household sampling survey of 40 neighborhoods across the capital. It was an extraordinary opportunity to see more of the city than even most Kabulis get to see, because of the systematice spread of the survey.
I spent the next ten months trying to get funding to return to Kabul. The politics of money are critical for direct involvement in Afghanistan: not only are you constrained by the terms and conditions of the funder, but their reputation can compromise your ability to work and your safety. The one option that came through was to return to Berkeley to do a PhD program, and return to Kabul with academic funding. The other advantage is that I would have the chance to get up to speed on international planning and policy issues; since I had spent ten years in Architecture, I needed an update.
As it stands, I have completed my two years of required coursework, and I am now writing my research prospectus. I hope to take my qualifying exam in January 2007, and begin my fieldwork in Kabul in February.
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