Not Now, But Soon: Losing Your Country
Our new miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.
On this episode, host Malka Older reimagines Afghanistan and the stories we tell about its past, present, and future. She is joined by Nasir Andisha, ambassador and permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, where he represents the people—not the current government—of a country that has been navigating disaster for decades. Andisha shares the story of what it’s like to lose his nation while continuing to advocate for its people.
Resources
- Visit Nasir Andisha’s website to learn more about human rights, policy, and Afghanistan’s challenges.
- This episode features brief audio snippets from the BBC and Inside Edition.
- This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.
Transcript
Malka Older: Imagine Afghanistan. What are the images that come to mind? What stories pop into your head? Can you picture its snow-capped mountains, its mirage-inducing deserts, where trade routes, cultures, religions, and societies have collided for thousands of years? Or does your mind jump to tragedy, to war, to destruction? Can you imagine Afghanistan’s future or in your imagination, is it always in the past?
Welcome to Not Now, But Soon, a podcast miniseries about rethinking disasters. I’m Malka Older, a disaster responder, researcher, and speculative fiction author. In this episode, we are reimagining Afghanistan, the stories we tell about its past, present, and future. I am joined by Nasir Andisha, the ambassador and permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, where he represents the people—not the current government—of a country navigating disaster.
Nasir, welcome. Could you tell us more about what you do?
Afghanistan turned into a country where freedom of expression, freedom of media, freedom of assembly is almost zero.
Nasir Andisha: I am ambassador and permanent representative of Afghanistan in Geneva. I’m particularly focusing on, over the past almost four years since the Taliban takeover of the country, on the human rights and humanitarian profiles. Just staying here in Geneva and trying to represent voices of people of Afghanistan who lost their voice, because we know that Afghanistan turned into a country where freedom of expression, freedom of media, freedom of assembly is almost zero. I take a lot of pride in what I do here. It’s not a job, it’s not a career, but it seems to me that it’s a calling because I represent the people, not the country. I’m not linked to the foreign ministry of the Taliban, not to the leaders. I don’t take instructions from them. I make my own instructions, so in a way that I’m my own president, foreign minister, ambassador too.
Older: When someone hears that you are an ambassador, or when someone hears that you are from Afghanistan, what do they have in their mind as an image or as a story about this?
Andisha: I think it depends on who they are. For the ordinary citizens here in Europe, different places in the US, they have a lot of empathy. They are saying they’re very sorry of what’s going on and what you do. At the beginning it was like a bit obnoxious because every time they come on, they pat you, “Ohh.” It was sympathy basically at some point, not empathy. “We are so sorry what’s happening to you and to your country.” The others, they’ll ask me, “Look, how you do this job as a human being? How you carry yourself? How you process what has happened?” The others are very economic-minded. They’ll say, “How this office is running? You’re not connected to anyone. I mean, how can you do this?”
I think a lot of “hows,” but then I try to deal with every question in one way and that is that, look, I feel that I have a responsibility. And I’m somebody who is a bit superstitious or kind of a sufi in our tradition of Persian poetry, somebody who believes in metaphysical things. I think that it’s some sort of responsibility which was designated to me. Somehow you convinced yourself that I was supposed to be here.
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Older: It’s interesting how you talk about that, because I think it’s true for a lot of people who go through a disaster of this kind of magnitude, that they feel like a lot of the things they have learned before or gone through before are helping them then in this moment to get through that disaster and to build something better from it.
Andisha: Exactly. When somebody talks about resilience, I think that it’s not something inbuilt. It is something that you acquire over time and when you are pushed into a situation, it comes. I’m sure in all the languages, including the Persian language that we have, it’s my mother tongue. We have a proverb, we say that the necessity is mother of creation. So when you push them, you know how to improvise and how to show resilience. Yes.
Older: I met Nasir 20 years ago in Switzerland during a training on sports and diplomacy for youth from different countries. At that time, Nasir had just joined Afghanistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was playing for the country’s soccer federation on the side. He remembers those years as a time of opportunity and great promise for young Afghans looking to engage with the international community, something that inspired him to become a diplomat. That career has taken him all over the world, always with service to his country as his goal. Nasir won a scholarship to study in the United States, then worked for the Afghan mission in New York, and then became ambassador to Australia. He served as the country’s deputy foreign minister and as vice president of the UN Human Rights Council. In 2019, he was named ambassador and permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations in Geneva. And then, there was the disaster that happened.
News Clip 1: Shocking scenes of desperation and chaos in Afghanistan are being seen around the world.
News Clip 2: The Taliban is now effectively in control, including in the capital, Kabul. The takeover of the city has triggered deadly scenes of panic at the airport as people desperately try to leave. The international community is now calling on the Taliban—
Andisha: August 2021, when I was trying to do a special session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on Afghanistan, suddenly shattered the country, suddenly fall back to the Taliban. There was this huge disaster, probably even greater than what happened in Saigon and the images of those US military planes and people are hanging. Young Afghans who are running in the airport. It was the biggest chaos, probably, of the beginning of this century. A country which we built together with international community for 20 years, and we were thinking that the beginning of 21st century is the beginning of new Afghanistan. Afghanistan can divorce its past 20th century troubles and fighting and invasions and extremism and everything, and it’s time now that we’ll be a different nation. And we were building that.
When you have 20 years of different system, different hope and aspiration for future… and suddenly everybody leaves. I think it’s very difficult for anyone to process this.
Suddenly, everything collapsed. And we actually returned even to the worst of the nightmares, which is the Taliban, and even worse than the previous time. I think everything vanished in a matter of a couple of months. And still we are grieving, sometimes not accepting what happened to that country and not accepting that those people are now in the realm where they don’t allow girls to go to school, where they don’t accept anything to do with international rules and regulation.
When you have 20 years of different system, different hope and aspiration for future, and you have 48 countries of NATO and others there every day telling you that they’re with you, and you have elections and you have billions and billions of dollars, and suddenly everybody leaves. I think it’s very difficult for anyone to process this.
Older: It is hard to grasp the full scale of human tragedy that has unfolded in Afghanistan since 2021. According to the United Nations, by April 2023, 80% of school aged girls and young women were out of school. According to the World Food Program, one in three Afghans face hunger. Former government officials have been tortured, killed, and forcibly disappeared. Journalists and activists have been arrested. These are the headlines that dominate our understanding. They show that desperate conditions that people are living under now, the damage being done, but sometimes in our alarm over them, we forget what existed before.
Andisha: If I divide my life into two parts, the first two decades from ’79 until 2001, I think it was difficult times in the region. All of the world was going through the end of communism. In the west, the triumph of liberal democracy, the end of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall falling down. The world was going through turmoil on one hand, but also a triumph for the liberal democracy on the other hand. I had one or two years of good memories of my school, but then afterwards it was all fighting, all wars, displacement. I had been displaced a number of times from our village to the capital, Kabul, and then back from Kabul to the village when the fighting started. Then I went to university and then I was displaced from university. That was a very hard time, the years of civil war, the years of Al-Qaeda taking root in the country 1990s.
We have this rage in our heart that who is representing our country? We don’t deserve to have representatives like that at this time and this age.
But then after 9/11, of course, at the beginning it was very difficult because there was fighting, there was bombing, B-52s and everything. But it quickly finished. It started in October and finished around January. And then by February and March, we had the new government. The whole of UN and everybody was there. You could see all the expatriates. But that gave an opportunity and a hope for the Afghans, particularly for the younger generation, for my generation, also for the one who were younger, there was a real beginning of a whole century for us. It was 2002. The majority of the country had one of the most progressive time in all of our history. The past 20 years in terms of social progress, health, education, access to clinics, access to the roads, electricity, things very rapidly built. We didn’t have even telephone lines in 2001, and suddenly the whole technology and communication facilities was built, cell phones everywhere. There was internet. So that change was really something that we miss, and dignity as equal citizen of the world. All the people of Afghanistan miss that.
But also we have this rage in our heart that who is representing our country? We don’t deserve to have representatives like that at this time and this age, particularly after being exposed to every openness in the world. Suddenly you have a group which is a total anomaly. It makes us, you know, even like… to shout, to go somewhere and just shout, “This is not Afghanistan and this group is not supposed to be now representing us.”
Older: It’s hard to feel like something has gone wrong and it’s not the way it’s supposed to be. I’m really interested how you say you had this idea that it was the beginning of a new century, that the country was moving in a certain way. Can you talk a little bit more about that idea of what the country is going to become? And you’ve also told me when we’ve talked more recently about worrying about losing this idea of what the country is because the propaganda from the current government is so strong about it being a different thing. So what are those two images? How do you tell the story of the country and its potential and what it could become?
Andisha: This country is one of the oldest, ancient cradle of civilization. There was a Hindu civilization, Buddhist civilizations, or Zoroastrians, later on, Islamic. Afghanistan is an imagined community of all of these regions, a microcosm of all the civilizations, so this could be in a place where you’ll have a great tourism industry. And I thought that the Bagram Air Base in one time when there’s no militaries anymore will be one of the biggest airports in the region where you have tourists from all over the world who are coming to see the ruins of Buddhas in Bamiyan, natural parks in Wakhan, and also we had lots of mines and minerals and it’s the heart of Asia, there will be interconnections of the Silk route, and things like that.
I thought that’s our future. So that’s why when we feel hurt, is that where the hell this thing came from? When you have this imagination and you think that the past is just gone, it’s past, it’ll never come back. And this past comes back to haunt you like movies where you have a villain, which is some kind of a big animal and you think that you killed it and then suddenly it opens its eyes and hold you from your leg. So you think that this animal is done, this evil is finished, but it comes back to take you and to haunt you. One thing that I believe, why I’m sitting here and resisting the Taliban, maybe they are that kind of very strong animal, but I know this is the last breath that it has. Maybe it’s holding our leg, but it cannot survive more, because they are going in the opposite side of the history.
Older: You’ve said the connection with the international community, with the rest of the world is so important. Does technology always help with that? There’s a lot of tension and discussions about the risk of getting overpowered by large forces, whether they’re tech companies or governments who have a lot of influence. How do you see that?
You don’t need to fight them with guns. You have to fight their ideology.
Andisha: In the past 20 years, as I said, people got used to technology. We were interconnected to the world. Yes, Taliban are also using that technology to spread disinformation, misinformation, but on the other hand, they cannot completely shut it down. Yes, they have shut down education, but people are connected to outside. They shut down the official schools, but they are still some sort of underground schools, online schools, which is not sufficient, but at least it keeps the flame on. They’re censoring all the media in Afghanistan, but then there are international exile medias which broadcast in the country, and they get to listen. And that’s why every other day, I’m in one of these TVs, talking.
You don’t need to fight them with guns. You have to fight their ideology. And the easy way is have a proper education facilitation in that country. People are still receptive of curriculums which have been taught to them in the past, and they’re looking into getting their children to study abroad. That desire is there and the door is not completely closed, I think technology has to be harnessed in a way that can help people in Afghanistan.
Older: When you talk to television shows or YouTubers about the country, how are you presenting the situation? How are you showing them your view of what Afghanistan can be?
Andisha: We have to tell them stories. And I know the power of the stories. We live in a time which was even worse than this, because at that time we were not connected to outside. I remember we had some family members in the United States. We lost their contacts. We were trying to send a letter, but even at that time, the postal system was not working properly in Afghanistan, to get post out of the country. To make a phone call in 1995, you have to go to Pakistan, basically, to these dial up phones to make a call internationally. So I used to tell them this story, you know, now when I’m talking to some of the podcasts and some of the connections that I have with the younger generation that, look, we persist, we got ourselves educated, we resisted Taliban, and we had a hopeful future. So you have more opportunities. We have more potentials.
And Taliban are temporary phenomena for this country, for this whole world. Nothing like them exists. They are the last of their species. Hold on to this. Geopolitics is always geopolitics, you can’t change that. But what difference you can make at the individual and the community level is those stories.
Older: One of the ways that I make myself think about different possibilities is through reading fiction. Do you read to get away from stuff? Pr what do you read to give you ideas about what this possible future could be, to think what if we did all virtual education, what would that look like? Or what if we were connected to the whole world as this crossroads or this roundabout that has all these traditions in it, what would that look like? How do you go about stimulating that imagination?
It’s actually a need to push people in Afghanistan, especially at the time where you are totally in despair, to open your imagination and to at least to write what you want this country to be, even if it’s a crazy, fantastic utopian things.
Andisha: Maybe it’s part of the culture. Mostly we relate to historical fiction, what happened in the past. Past was like this, past was like that. There is a saying that the more you look behind, the clearer you see in front of you, which I think after some age you come to believe that… but no, I think past is past. You maybe learn from it, but future is a different future. It doesn’t look like past. I believe in telling not only history, which is depressing most of the time. You have to tell them stories. Myth is part of our culture too, where we have a great epic, which makes our history in that part of the world is called the Book of the King, Shahnameh. When you grow up, you read it all.
As a children, we always love the first part because the first part is the mythical part.It talks about a mythical bird, which actually keeps and nurtures a boy who is left by the king, and then when this person is growing up, it ends up being a very famous king and the father of one of the biggest wrestlers of Persian history, Rostam, and I think it’s actually a need to push people in Afghanistan, especially at the time where you are totally in despair, to open your imagination and to at least to write what you want this country to be, even if it’s a crazy, fantastic utopian things.
Older: Thanks to our audio engineer, Angelina Mazza and our podcast producers Kimberly Quach and Mia Armstrong-López. Music for this series was created by Stuart Leach. Not Now, But Soon is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a collaboration between Issues and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Additional editors on the Future Tense Fiction Project include Joey Eschrich, Andrés Martinez, and Ed Finn.
In our next episode, the final one for this season, I’m joined by Brigitte van der Sande, a curator and an art and culture historian, to discuss the intersection of art and war.