The finance minister of Afghanistan before the Taliban took over the country is now driving an Uber in Washington to support his family. Khalid Payenda oversaw a $6 billion budget in his homeland but fled as the country teetered on the verge of collapse.
Now, the father of four has joined the gig economy and tells The Washington Post, “I feel incredibly grateful for it. It means I don’t have to be desperate.”
Payenda is also co-teaching a course at Georgetown University and occasionally speaking at think-tanks as he copes with a sense of rootlessness and failure. “Right now, I don’t have any place,” he said. “I don’t belong here, and I don’t belong there. It’s a very empty feeling.”
Khalid Payenda told The Washington Post he has been haunted by the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Among those he blames are the Americans who touted their mission as upholding democracy and human rights in the region.
"Maybe there were good intentions initially, but the United States probably didn't mean this," Payenda said.
America withdrew from Afghanistan in August of 2021 after two decades of war.
Several months before the Taliban swiftly seized control over Afghanistan, former President Donald Trump's administration signed a conditional peace deal with the militant group in February 2020, promising to pull out US troops over the course of 14 months. The deal notably did not include the Afghan government.
Senior U.S. officials have largely moved on from the Afghanistan war, which began 20 years earlier with high-minded promises of democracy, human rights and women's rights and ended with an American president blaming Afghans, such as a Payenda, for the mess left behind.
"So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country," President Joe Biden said as desperate Afghans rushed to the airport the day after Kabul fell, adding: "We gave them every tool they could need. . . . We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future."
Payenda resigned as finance minister a week before the Taliban seized Kabul, as his relationship with Ghani deteriorated. Fearing the president would have him arrested, he left for the US, where he joined his family.
“We had 20 years and the whole world’s support to build a system that would work for the people,” Payenda said in a text message to a World Bank official in Kabul on the day the capital fell, quoted by the Post.
“All we built was a house of cards that came down crashing this fast. A house of cards built on the foundation of corruption.”
