From the penthouse of a six-story building overlooking Kabul, Aziz Sadat sees hope for Afghanistan.
The Monroe businessman helped transform the building, a former hotel, into a modern office complex. Floor by floor, crews patched over bullet holes, replaced shattered windows and restored the interior that the fundamentalist Taliban regime had burned twice.
It is Afghanistan’s first World Trade Center, and the landmark building today shapes the skyline of Kabul the way the twin towers once defined New York City.
"It’s symbolic for the Afghans who’ve never had it, and for the world, because Afghans are not against the World Trade Center and America," said Sadat, who received a congressional leadership award in July. "We’re trying to open Afghanistan to the rest of the world."
In a country once home to terrorist Osama bin Laden, Kabul’s World Trade Center now exemplifies the group’s motto: peace and stability through trade.
"To think that this trade center can deliver Afghanistan from the ashes is a wonderful thing. That’s what they were created for," said Robert DiChiara, vice president of the World Trade Centers Association, who led the group’s twin towers headquarters from 1991 to 1997.
DiChiara saw the first plane hit the north tower on Sept. 11, 2001.
"What happened two years ago was a terrible tragedy," said DiChiara, his voice thick with emotion. "But the concept didn’t die. The concept lives on. … What better way to help someplace like Kabul that has suffered so much."
Sadat opened the World Trade Center office in downtown Kabul in September. It was one of the first refurbished buildings in the city.
"People stood and watched it and wondered what it was. It is a sign of hope and reconstruction," Sadat said. "It is symbolizing that something new is coming to Kabul."
Sadat plans to memorialize the more than 2,750 people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks when Afghanistan’s permanent World Trade Center complex is built. The memorial, possibly a wall or a fountain, would be part of the $160 million project, he said. He envisions the complex including an 18-story office, 18-story hotel, a marketplace and a convention center.
Last month, Sadat met in Washington, D.C., with U.S. Agency for International Development and U.S. Department of Commerce officials to try to win some funding for the project. Afghan officials promised to provide a 35-acre site in Kabul.
For now, Sadat is focusing on the Kabul trade center’s current home and paying the $200,000 licensing fee for using the World Trade Center name.
"It has been very difficult for us," said Sadat, who tapped his savings to help rehabilitate the Kabul office, which cost $35,000.
Kabul’s World Trade Center already has partnerships with trade centers in Turkey and India, Sadat said, and he expects more international support. He is working on persuading chambers of commerce around the globe to fill the building.
By being a member of the World Trade Centers Association, the Kabul trade center is linked to more than 300 trade centers around the globe. This gives Afghanistan businesses unprecedented access to international markets.
Sadat, who became a U.S. citizen in 1979, believes the center will become an economic powerhouse.
"The economy is the backbone of every nation," he said. "By being a member of the World Trade Centers Association, we will attract investors from around the world to do business in Afghanistan and eventually bring education, peace and prosperity for the local people."
Last year, Sadat traveled from his Monroe home to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to win approval to open the center from the World Trade Centers Association board. He partnered with Oregon businessman John Dixon, who runs a World Trade Center in Okinawa, Japan.
"They have the full support of the association. Whatever we can do to help them, we’ll help," DiChiara said.
The trade center is a critical step forward for Afghanistan, said Ali Asghar Paiman, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of planning, who visited Everett in October as Sadat’s guest.
"Without a strong economy, it’s very difficult to have peace," Paiman said. "A World Trade Center will be a strong asset to the economy. The government is behind it 100 percent."
The Kabul trade center, a nonprofit organization, will offer an array of classes for local business owners, including instruction in marketing, global trade and English.
Yet, its key mission is to expand educational opportunities for Afghanistan’s next generations, funneling aid and international expertise into the classrooms of 4 million children, Sadat said. Little education was available while the fundamentalist Taliban regime ruled Afghanistan from 1996 through 2001.
Kabul University and most of the nation’s other schools have reopened, despite lacking essentials such as chalk and chairs. Most textbooks are two decades old.
"The desks were pockmarked by shells, buildings marked by bullets. If the university was in America, it would be condemned as an unsafe building," said Everett Community College speech instructor Mark Murphy, a friend of Sadat’s who taught English and communications at Kabul University this summer
The university has 25,000 students at its four campuses. Murphy traveled there with Sadat, who taught political science and helped install a satellite link that will connect Kabul with North Seattle Community College. Classes could be offered via satellite from Seattle as early as March.
The next step is establishing technical schools and reaching central Afghanistan, where few villages have schools, said David Huskey, head of the Kabul trade center’s Afghan Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development. The institute, run from an office at Sadat’s health foods store in Monroe, is the Kabul trade center’s humanitarian arm.
"The most important aspect in restoring peace is education," said Huskey, a retired hardware engineer from Seattle who met Sadat in 1993. "We can go in with military strength and enforce a peace, but unless you have an educated public, it’s not going to hold."
Sadat, 44, is a quiet man who prefers to work behind the scenes. This is the first time he has spoken publicly about the Kabul World Trade Center, and he’s reluctant to discuss his role in the project. Uncomfortable in the spotlight, he frequently shifts the conversation to others helping Afghanistan and his native country’s future.
"My heart has always been there," he said softly. Sadat came to the United States in 1973 as a high school exchange student in Longview, Wash., and stayed to study architecture and political science at the University of Washington. He eventually sought political asylum here, becoming a U.S. citizen around the time the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
For the next decade, he went home for a few months every year to join Afghan freedom fighters battling Soviet soldiers. The trips stopped after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 triggered a power struggle and a bloody civil war.
The war postponed his dreams of returning to Afghanistan with his wife, Faiza, and their five sons. Instead, Sadat bought the Good Life Health Food Store in Monroe, and his family moved to the city in 1991.
Sadat, who had worked at nutrition stores when he was in college, said his store and life in Monroe were a respite from the battles in Afghanistan.
"I felt safe here, and it was quiet," he said.
Although the boys were all born in Washington, the five — Mustafa, 15; Kahalil, 13; and Ahsan, 11; Aziz Jr., 9; and Hasib, 7 — say their true home is Afghanistan, Faiza Sadat said.
Mustafa, a Monroe High School sophomore, played wide receiver on the school’s junior varsity football team this year, runs track, plays soccer and listens to rap.
He and his brothers have never been to Afghanistan but know its geography and history. Thanks to Sadat’s ban on English at home (a rule regularly broken), the five are fluent in Farsi, the language spoken by most Afghans.
Mustafa says he’s eager to visit the country and supports his father’s plan to move back.
"I want to go back to help rebuild," he said. "I want to see my culture. There’s family there I’ve never met or seen. I want to meet them."
This month, it’s Faiza Sadat’s turn to visit Afghanistan.
It’s her first trip back since her family fled the country for Pakistan when she was 12 years old. Her father fought against the Soviets with Sadat, whom she married in 1986 and followed here.
Faiza Sadat, 33, a nursing student at Everett Community College, is working in a Kabul hospital and orphanage during her monthlong visit.
She’ll also gauge the country’s safety, schools, housing and overall quality of life to get a feel for how soon the family can return. She and her husband are considering taking the boys there next summer.
"I left when I was very young. To me, now that I can go back, (there’s) a responsibility to go and help," she said. "When I go, I’ll see how possible that is with the kids. I’m not sure that would work."
On the morning of her Nov. 13 departure, Faiza Sadat said she was trying to remember to use less eye contact in Afghanistan and to avoid smiling, both signs of disrespect. As she explains this, she can’t help it. She grins.
Before leaving, she makes lunch for the boys, checks their homework, tells Mustafa to help his father and gives a long hug to her youngest, Hasib. She’ll miss his eighth birthday.
Hasib hugs her again before leaving for school. The last thing he tells her is, "Bring me back a cell phone."
Faiza Sadat sighs, then smiles. "He really wants a cell phone."
Afghanistan is due to adopt its first post-Taliban constitution in December and plans to hold its first democratic elections in June, key changes that Aziz Sadat fears will draw little notice from the American public.
Two years after the successful U.S.-led invasion ended Taliban rule, American interest in Afghanistan has waned. Although U.S. soldiers continue to occupy the country, the war in Iraq has shifted the focus.
With Afghanistan approaching major political milestones, Sadat said that help from the United States is still essential.
Afghans are grateful for American assistance in toppling the Taliban, the militant Muslim group that ruled the country under its severe interpretation of Islamic law, he said.
Many Afghans credit the United States for providing stability and allowing schools to reopen. Economic growth hit 30 percent this year, and the once-empty streets of Kabul are full again. The city has grown to 3 million people.
Sadat started a construction supply business in Kabul in April and plans to build two housing developments there. His Afghan Development and Reconstruction Group is expected to employ about 10,000 people.
Building political stability has been much tougher.
"On the political side, there are major obstacles that have to be worked out," said Sadat, who advised the Northern Alliance during negotiations in December 2001 over an interim government for Afghanistan.
Those roadblocks have the potential to tear the country apart again if the United States backs away from promises to aid Afghanistan, Sadat said. Leaving Afghanistan or letting the country fail again will be the failure of the U.S. war on terrorism, he said.
"It could bring the exact same regime back in a different name," he said. "For that reason, we think America will not let Afghanistan fail. … There’s a big hope they will not leave us. If they leave, it will be a disaster, an absolute disaster."
Sadat said he is "cautiously optimistic" about Afghanistan’s future, and thankful he can help rebuild the country. That wasn’t possible when he returned to Kabul in 1995 to try to start a school.
During that visit, Taliban forces accused him of being a spy because they found a copy of the U.S. Constitution and letters of recommendation from Northern Alliance leaders in his backpack, he said.
The Taliban kept him for a few days, then turned him over to Pakistan, where he was imprisoned for two months.
Then-U.S. Rep. Jack Metcalf, whose 2nd Congressional District includes most of Snohomish County, worked with the U.S. State Department to secure Sadat’s release.
It was during that trip, Sadat said, that he realized that Afghanistan had turned into a breeding ground for terrorists.
The Sept. 11 attacks "were a terrible tragedy," Sadat said.
But the terrorists lost.
"What happened after that was Afghanistan was freed from the Taliban because of that," he said. "The World Trade Center freed my country."
Reporter Katherine Schiffner: 425-339-3436 or schiffner@heraldnet.com.
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