A two hour flight and I am in another universe. Stepping off the plane, I remembered the first time I ever arrived at the Almaty International Airport: June 15, 1999, 4:30am. Getting off the flight from Istanbul, still hung over from my “last night in America” drinking binge with my college friend Dan, I had no idea what I was about to get myself into. I didn’t realize that the two years I had pledged to spend in Kazakhstan would turn into five, that less than 24 hours before I had met my future husband in the elevator of a twenty-storey hotel blocks from the Sears Tower, or that what I was about to do would change the course of my life.

Back in 2006, I am jumping over deported Koreans (see post below) to be first off the bus to Passport Control (I am an expert at this) and then on to baggage claim. Aigul is there to meet us with her new 17-year-old girlfriend. My husband and I hop into her Neva and drive to the city. I was only there last year, but so much has changed. There are new apartment blocks on literally every corner, supermarkets are almost outnumbering the mom-and-pop shops and there are very few kiosks. Soviet and Russian cars are predominated by Lexuses, Hondas and Toyotas; Kazakhstanis are doing well. I couldn’t help but think about how far this sparsely populated country had come since the fall of the Soviet Union and since the first time I came seven years ago.

Seven years ago the hotel rooms had communal toilets and hot water for only two hours a day; there were only two supermarkets in town, Rossei and Ramstore; nobody wore deodorant and the only types of buildings were the constructivist Soviet-era blocks. All of the changes—the stylish young people, lack of beggars, consistent electricity and water, availability of every consumer product imaginable—made me think about Afghanistan. I wish that I could travel back in time to that moment in the early 1980’s when the CIA decided to intervene to make Afghanistan “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam”. I wish that I could somehow have convinced the US government to stop arming the Mujahadeen and fomenting the insurgency. Then I think about how things might have been. When the Soviets occupied Kabul there were tramvais. The thought of a tramvai (trolley) on the streets of Kabul, where cars can now barely go, blows my mind. They built apartment blocks, the set up infrastructure; there were hospitals, schools, electricity. I am by no means excusing the horrible atrocities that the Soviets committed against the Afghan people (land mines shaped like dolls, for example), but maybe, just maybe, all of the problems the world is facing with terrorism could have been mitigated if the Soviets had stayed.

I realize that there are a lot of ramifications from this line of thinking--the war in Afghanistan clearly had implications for the fall of the Soviet Union—but looking at a place like Kazakhstan, and more appropriately, Tajikistan, makes me wonder what might have happened. There is something to be said for authoritative development.