I owe this country nothing. I have fought for her, and she has fed and sheltered me. Better, she has given me opportunity. She is not my country, but I love what she stands for. My country, which I love, does not love me, nor does it love what I wish it had, which is what this country has. I owe my own country nothing. I have fought for her, and she has spurned me. I love her but she has exiled me, and scattered my family across the world. Despite this, I love her. I was born in war, and have known war all my life. But now I live in peace in a land of peace. To be more precise, at this exact moment I am sitting peacefully with my would-be brothers in a café. These brothers, who live in peace, in a land of peace and have never known war, talk of nothing but. I don’t quite remember how I came here, except that I met these guys at a friend’s shop in London and somehow we adopted this run-down café nearby. I think my current bout of homesickness was brought on by the presence of two Afghan ‘brothers’. I must stop doing this. Apart from my two compatriots, I cannot remember the nationalities of the others in this ad-hoc debating group. Is there a Tunisian? An Iraqi? I am pretty sure there’s a Bangladeshi. They have all been eclipsed in my memory by the shining moon-face fringed with an orange beard that holds forth in a soft Irish accent. He speaks with the joy and intensity of the convert. The others look a bit shifty. Converts are always a bit embarrassing. They call each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ rather too often, keen to try out all the new forms of language they have recently learned, all atonce and at every opportunity. They are mostly romanticizing some ideology which is unacceptable to many in Muslim countries, but they have a different understanding of those countries; they see these backward, ignorant Muslims around them as true representatives of the people in those countries. Michael, now Mohammed, is in full flow on the subject of the hour. Discovering that I am an Afghan, especially one just arrived from Afghanistan, he is delighted at the chance to commune with another of the world’s most oppressed peoples, hinting at the depth of his own people’s persecution to emphasise our brotherhood. He warms to his theme, exhorting me to return home to fight for the Taliban and liberate my country from the infidel. The other two Afghans are looking really uncomfortable now. They have undoubtedly recognised me as being of Tajik background, and are therefore very unlikely to be fans of the Taliban. In fact I can see that they are already having second thoughts about welcoming me into their group. They mumble agreement with the Irish man. I pay them no mind: my own cousins are just as bad. I recently had a blazing row with some of them who had fled the war fifteen years ago to come to Britain. They whined on about how things were better under the Taliban, and how a woman’s honour was safer. Safer! Women across Afghanistan are persecuted and punished and abused! As the Irishman chides me for dodging jihad, I realise how much I miss my war, and wish I was back in it. This is not because of the remote theoretical chance that I might kill this Irish idiot. I miss the war every day. I miss the war because we made a difference. I miss the feeling of waiting at the pan for the CH47s, the walk towards the Chinook, hearing the beautiful noise of its engines. I miss taking off and seeing the lights of the camp lying below us, receding as the Chinook manoeuvres away from the camp. I miss seeing dead Taliban. I miss being with the SAS: that feeling of being invincible alongside the best in the world!
