Afghanistan From the Air --- What does an airport say about a country? More than you might think. --- As U.S. troops prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan, Jeffrey Stern has surveyed the country from its rooftops and from behind the wheel, capturing the sights, sounds, and smells of a massive war winding down. Now he offers his third installment in the series: A view of Afghanistan from the air. --- KABUL—On a flight to Afghanistan, I sat next to a young Afghan man traveling alone and returning home for the first time in five years. A boy, really, 19 years old, wearing skinny jeans and a gelled-up faux-hawk, coming back for a wedding and to see an aging grandfather. -- The boy had flown from London, where he’d been going to school, to Dubai and then caught the short flight from Dubai to Kabul, which is when he began to get nervous. He used the bathroom three times; he fidgeted constantly; he actually began talking to himself. Finally, he asked me a question in the cockney accent he’d picked up in London: “Is it dangerous?” -- He was genuinely frightened to be returning to Afghanistan. His uncle was going to pick him up at the airport and drive him through some of the country’s more dangerous provinces to his family’s home, and he was worried he’d gone soft while getting his education abroad—too soft for his own country. He didn’t feel he belonged there, any more than the foreigner sitting next to him. -- It struck me that this young man was part of the equation we don’t often think about when we discuss what will happen here when we leave. The hopeful among us talk of Afghanistan’s urban generation—people who are educated or at least want to be, sophisticated about things like technology, and progressive about issues like gender relations. A decent future is achievable, so goes this line of reasoning, if this young generation—seven in ten Afghans are under the age of 25—can loosen the grip the old men with beards have on tradition and religion. -- I’m as impressed with this generation of Afghans as anyone. I believe they can keep this whole enterprise going in the right direction. The question the boy I met on the plane represented for me is: Do they want to? Do they even want to be here? Two of my closest and most educated Afghan friends are now in the U.S., applying for asylum. They are both the kind of people who, if you met them, would leave you encouraged about Afghanistan’s future. -- But there’s only so much you can do for Afghanistan if you can't or aren't willing to go back. And while there are plenty of inspiring young Afghans committed to working not just on Afghanistan, but in Afghanistan, many of them carry passports from Western countries and fly back and forth all the time. Meaning, they don’t always have a lot of skin in the game. They have escape plans. They’re not starting families here, buying land here, or spending money here. There are plenty of people working on improving education in Afghanistan, for example, but not enough of them are, at the same time, working to ensure educational opportunities for their own children. --- The Kabul International Airport has come a long way in the last decade, thanks in large part to money from Japan, which is the second-largest aid donor to Afghanistan after the United States. -- On the new Emirates flight from Dubai to Kabul, you can watch a live feed on your seatback-mounted monitor from cameras positioned on the plane’s nose, tail, and belly. As far as entertainment goes, the footage tends to be pretty underwhelming—a monotonous mix of clouds and occasional specks of terrain below. But when we entered Afghan airspace and dipped below the clouds, I could see the country’s craggy brown mountaintops rushing by at 500 miles per hour. It felt like fast-forwarding through history as successive empires—the Greeks under Alexander the Great, the Mongols under Genghis Khan, the Soviets under Leonid Brezhnev—poured into Afghanistan, only to be eventually, inevitably, pushed back. And as the landscape unfolded rapidly below, it was hard not to feel part of that parade. - More, Jeffrey Stern, The Atlantic, at: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/afghanistan-from-the-air/284409/