One Self-Made Man's Road in Troubled Afghanistan

        Pressistan isn't a central Asian country, yet it's the place where Sardar Ahmad found his way to success in a troubled Afghanistan. The 38-year-old resourceful man is the embodiment of those who refused to emigrate and surrender the country to wars, misery and the Taliban.

            As Afghanistan is the land of the Afghans, Pressistan is the "Land of the press". Ahmad established the company in 2009 to provide media services to foreign journalists, embassies and non-governmental organizations - practically the only foreign civilian visitors in the country these days. The tall, youthful man has a loud voice and a contagious smile which shines thanks to a golden tooth. His warm approach and ability to speak many languages have helped him overcome the country's woes and build a successful business in a war-torn city where most residents live in poverty.

            After decades of wars and conflicts in which leaders were brutally murdered, women were banned from public life and cultural activities were prohibited by the Taliban extremists, Afghanistan became a secluded, rough place where only the brave dared to go and stay.

            The road out of poverty has been long for Ahmad.

            The youngest son of an illiterate plumber and his illiterate housewife, he had nonetheless the chance "to have parents who valued education more than anything else. ``They sacrificed everything to send all of their nine children to school at a time when Kabul was a poor satellite of the Soviet Union,'' he said. ``What I remember the most of this period are the cartoons in Russian ; `the wolf and the rabbit' was my favorite show and I always made sure to be home at 6pm every evening to watch it. Now that the Soviet era is gone, I much prefer Bugs Bunny,'', he says with a smile. 

            Ahmad's father passed away when he was a teenager, leaving the family with few resources to make a living.

            ``We were poor, but so was everybody around us. I have to say that we had no idea about how people abroad were living, we thought everyone was poor like us,'' he said.  ``But we seemed to be content to have the little clothes or food that we had. We led quiet lives.''

            Ahmad was preparing to join Kabul University when the civil war broke out in Afghanistan in 1992.  ``The university was closed for some time and, anyway, I had no money to pay the tuition.''

            The Soviet army finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989 after ten years of occupation, leaving President Mohammad Najibullah and his army alone to fight the insurgency financed by the United States. Najibullah was finally deposed in 1992 and the Mujahiddin factions entered into a devastating war for the control of Kabul.

            During all these 10 years, Ahmad went from job to job, including stints at a jewellery shop and at the Kabul ``stock market,'' where he was trading currencies to earn a much-needed money to make ends meet and feed his family.

            ``When the Taliban entered Kabul in 1996, I actually celebrated because for me and for the rest of us here, we thought that this meant the end of the devastating civil war,'' he said. ``But I am now still looking for a word that would be worse that `worst' to qualify the Taliban! They forced us to live in a world where we could do nothing, except eat bad food and sleep. It was a dead life''

            Ahmad however never despaired. He kept saving money for private English lessons. He knew someday this would come in handy and help him get out of poverty. And this day came on September 11, 2001. That ``horrible'' day for America changed his life forever. The Talibans, who were sheltering Al-Qaeda's leader Usama bin Laden, America's number one public enemy, then faced a fierce bombing campaign by U.S. warplanes. The Northern Alliance, the U.S.-backed armed group opposing the Taliban, entered Kabul one month later.
            ``In the midst of all this violence, I found a job with a Japanese television crew as a translator and a fixer,'' he said. ``I worked with them for a year and then I was hired by a French news agency as a reporter to cover the daily press conferences at the U.S. army's Bagram base.''

            He had no prior training in journalism, and was learning it on the job.

            ``I kept re-writing English articles from the wire, the same one 20 times, over and over again, just to learn the technique, the way journalists write stories,'' he said. ``And guess what? After a while, I got a job as a real journalist with the French agency, and the `nobody' that I was suddenly became a `somebody:' a journalist!''

            Ahmad received two ``humanitarian'' awards for outstanding journalistic work, but he wanted to do more.

            ``I saw how foreigners had to rely on us locals for everything. And this is when I launched Pressistan as a company that would provide all kinds of services to foreigners, and because of the presence of so many foreigners in a country so rough like Afghanistan, our business is booming today.''

            "We provide security, drivers, translators, camera crew. We have a studio in our Kabul office to produce programs for provincial radio stations. We're doing media monitoring in English all over Afghanistan and we customize our services according to our clients, most of them western governments,'' he said.

            But Ahmad, ``a strong believer in democracy,'' doesn't brag about his success. He knows how fragile his kind of business is in a country where almost everything depends on foreign money and visitors. And with the planned departure of the NATO-led international troops at the end of 2014, he has of course some concerns about his future.

            ``I think it would be very stupid for the international community to leave this country just like this, without keeping a strong presence, after all the money they've spent here,'' said the father of three.

            Although Ahmad knows that Afghanistan isn't immune from any future armed conflicts, he is adamant about staying in his country.

            ``My brothers and one of my sisters live in Toronto, and they always exert pressure on me to join them in Canada, but I keep telling them that my life is here, and I know that if I had to go, I'd be again a `nobody.''