Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

When I met Farouq Samim my first day in Kabul, I was prepared for a working relationship with him as my translator and fixer, but it rapidly became clear that we might be friends. We were together for fourteen hours a day every day that I was in his country. It was a frightening time to be in that part of the world; the abduction and ultimate decapitation of the journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan was unfolding as I transited through Islamabad and Peshawar on my way across the border. To my surprise, however, I loved Afghanistan, in part because Farouq so loved Afghanistan and communicated his passion so compellingly. Farouq had studied medicine in Kabul under the Taliban, which meant that each day contained many hours of religious instruction and only a few of medical training. He wanted to understand how doctors worked in a developed society, so after I came home, I spoke to administrators at New York Hospital, who said they would welcome him for a two-month visit to observe procedures.

Then he filed a visa application, with which I attempted to help. We were repeatedly told that the chance of an unmarried, young Afghan man getting into the United States in 2002 was virtually nil. Farouq eventually gave up medicine because he had no chance to broaden his insufficient education in Kabul and had found his engagement with foreign journalists deeply rewarding. He won a media fellowship to study in Canada. Nearly a decade after my visit to Afghanistan, we succeeded in getting him into the United States.

American policy is focused on security, and the 9/11 hijackers were Muslims to whom visas had been granted, perhaps recklessly. I know why Farouq’s profile scared consular officers. But I also know that Farouq had helped many Americans in his homeland, and that a visit to the United States in 2002 would have strengthened his positive impression of our country. He would have returned home with that gospel. He didn’t want to emigrate here and he didn’t want to blow up a building. He wanted to be part of the cultural exchange through which peoples come to know one another. I have more recently tried to get my gay, Libyan friend Hasan Agili a visa to come to the United States, where he could finish his medical education and help the sick and the desperate, rather than be deported to face the murderous gangs who await him at home. Such procedures have become no easier. When I was in Libya, the people I met who had an essentially pro-American stance had all studied in the United States, whereas those who were vehemently anti-American had not. This is not to say that a proliferation of student visas issued at the behest of Iowa State or UCLA will solve the world’s problems, but only that it’s hard to love a place you’ve never visited. A blanket policy of excluding visitors from “suspect” countries may ultimately damage our security, by preventing the people who would have spoken the best of us from finding out what there is to admire here beyond Baywatch.

After the Paris attacks of November 2015, cultural exclusion was put forward as our best defense, an argument that reached its nadir in American and European attempts to disenfranchise refugees from Syria and Iraq. Leading Republican presidential contender Donald Trump proposed that all foreign Muslims should be barred entry to the United States and that even American Muslims should carry special ID cards. This cruel demagoguery is contrary to our interests. Walling ourselves off from everyone else renders us odious to those who are excluded, providing incentive for them to become radicalized. Quarantining otherness breeds in those others an ignorance of us that engenders hatred, which soon becomes dangerous. It awakens an equally dangerous hatred in us. The central proposition of this book is that circling the wagons is not only impossible in a globalized world, but finally perilous. “Seek and ye shall find,” the biblical adage holds, but seeking is an early casualty of xenophobia. We sequester ourselves not in the well-guarded, imperial palace that American isolationists fantasize but in a festering prison.