Come Back to Afghanistan: My Journey from California to Kabul

Said Hyder Akbar’s ordinary suburban Californian life was turned upside-down after September 11th. Hyder’s father, a scion of an Afghan political family, left for Afghanistan to become the new president’s chief spokesman and later the governor of Kunar, a rural province. Obsessed since childhood with a country he had never visited, seventeen-year-old Hyder convinced his father to let him join him. Working alongside his father at the presidential palace and in Kunar gave Hyder a unique perspective on the creation of democratic government in Afghanistan. In “Come Back to Afghanistan”, Hyder interweaves his personal journey – that of a teenager struggling to find his identity in his parents’ homeland – with his travels, which take him from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands, to give a dramatic account of political and civilian life in post-Taliban Afghanistan.