Hassina Sherjan, scholar-in-residence at Bowers Writers House, is owner and chief executive officer of Boumi Co., an international home accessory business. Sherjan has a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School and an honorary doctorate of law from Queen’s University in Canada. She also founded and is the chief executive officer of Aid Afghanistan for Education.
For her final Bowers appearance, Sherjan was joined by Lt. Col. Joshua C. Burgess, a visiting military fellow with the Washington Institute and a U.S. Air Force political affairs strategist and pilot. Burgess has extensive experience with special operations and security cooperation, and while in Afghanistan, served as Afghan Hand, which allowed him to advise senior members of the Afghan government on anti-corruption strategies, policies and programs.
Sherjan and Burgess engaged in conversation with each other and their audience in a discussion of their varied interactions with Afghanistan’s population and territory. Their conversation covered post-war and mid-war Afghanistan from their personal perspectives and international responses to the war and its effects.
Their talk spanned topics, including how to find the right way to go about bringing change. The consensus in the room was that it is not enough to want to change things; there needs to be continuity in the long-term. Burgess explained that the leading general typically leaves after about a year of work, which prevents that kind of continuity from cementing itself.
Sherjan focused on the debate of winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan population. She explained that the U.S. military’s idea of giving gifts to win over the people would never work in Afghanistan. “The last thing Afghans care about is things,” she said. Instead, they prefer respect from their fellow humans, sympathy and comfort in grief and someone to share experiences with.
She also said that understanding the Afghan sense of humor is a surefire way to connect with them. General David Richards, one of the longer-lasting generals involved in the conflict and in infrastructure projects, was the one who really got it, according to Sherjan. Richards is a retired senior British army officer and former chief of the defence staff who served in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2008. He spent more time in the country than the U.S. leaders were permitted to and connected with the Afghan population based on their sense of humor and penchant for drama and acting.
According to Sherjan, Afghans know how to tell people what they want to hear, and this is why the international community has run into so much trouble trying to aid in rebuilding Afghanistan’s infrastructure and sending money to the country. The U.S. military is pragmatic to the extreme and deals with issues as they arise, according to Burgess, and because of this, they tend to experience a disconnect when it comes to Afghanistan.
The two also answered questions about whether or not Afghanistan experiences so much trouble in rebuilding its infrastructure because it is a largely tribal culture. They explained that this perception is in fact untrue. Afghanistan, Sherjan told the audience, is actually a tight-knit culture with a rich history of tradition and that the international community just has trouble understanding a culture so different from their own that they created these myths about Afghanistan in order to better explain why their armies could not conquer it and their religions could not gain a foothold. Burgess further explained that the current situation in Afghanistan is not due so much to the Afghan people as it is to mission creep. He defined this instance of mission creep as the U.S. entering Afghan territory with the purpose of rooting out terrorists involved in 9/11 and disbanding the Taliban, and having this purpose change over time without ever outright stating that their goals had changed.
“Afghanistan has always been the battleground between the superpowers,” Sherjan said. It has the natural resources it needs to build a booming industrial economy, but it lacks the infrastructure to do so. Because of that, other nations have always attempted to wrestle these resources away from each other at Afghanistan’s expense.
Despite all these tribulations, Afghanistan has endured. “There’s a history that you read in the books and the schools,” Sherjan said. She explained this history as something every student is expected to memorize. It is painfully complicated and is always about the kings and battles, never about the women or average people. “But there is an oral history,” she said. “It’s a very oral culture, and people always tell stories.”