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You never know who you might meet when you open the car door and greet the Uber driver all over the US. A surgeon who fled from Maduro's Venezuela who has not been able to validate his degree and is now a chauffeur in Miami. A Somali refugee in Minneapolis. A mother who has gotten off alcohol in Des Moines. A Russian repeating Putin's lies as he flies through New York. Or, in Washington, the last finance minister of Afghanistan.
Khalid Payenda managed a $6.000 billion budget until August last year, when Afghanistan was taken over by the Taliban. He now bagged just over $150 a night behind the wheel. "If I arrive
Five minutes later, I got a bonus of 95 dollars”, he acknowledged with tragic realism during the day spent in 'The Washington Post', the newspaper that has brought his story to light.
Payenda was part of the Kabul government that collapsed last summer, when the US decided Afghanistan was no longer its war and the Taliban toppled it within weeks. Not all members of that government had the same luck. The president, Ashraf Ghani, fled on the run shortly before the capture of Kabul. It is believed that $169 million is collected from the Afghan Treasury. His finance minister tries to scratch a bonus by racing late at night, often as a chauffeur to drunken youths. He also participated as an adjunct in a class at Georgetown University, but paid him just $2.000 a semester. Keep browsing with the Uber algorithm.
A democratic Afghanistan
Payenda, 40, was one of those young reformers who believed in the dream offered to them by the Americans after the invasion of Afghanistan: their goal was not only to punish the Taliban after 11/XNUMX; They would also lay the foundations for a modern, democratic Afghanistan, with liberation for women and respect for human rights. Nothing was collected, despite the fact that a billion dollars and the lives of thousands of soldiers were spent.
Exiled with his family to Pakistan during the civil war of the XNUMXs, he returned to Afghanistan when the US military toppled extremists from power and was one of the founders of the country's first private university. Afterward, he followed the typical training of reformers: he worked at the US Agency for International Development and the World Bank, he trained at the University of Illinois on a Fulbright scholarship.
In 2016, with the war entrenched, he entered the Ministry of Finance as deputy minister. And in 2020 Ghani called him to become the portfolio holder. The country was already in decomposition, but it lasted. "I was part of the failure," he now admits to the American newspaper. A week before the fall of Kabul, he declined due to disagreements with Ghani. By then, his wife and his four children were already in the US and he soon joined them. Many were left behind. "You come inside," said the sober break between the dreams of elevating his country and the reality of his failure and the life he leads now. The US has already turned the page on Afghanistan. Payenda remembers it at every traffic light and with the added guilt of actually being privileged.
