I keep a copy of the vision, mission, and core values of my company sitting in a clear plastic sleeve in front of my laptop in my home office. This week I inserted a picture in front of it. It’s a color picture of a 17-year-old Afghan young man. His name was Zaki Anwari. Zaki fell to his death trying to hold on to a US C-130 plane just after it took off from Kabul’s airport.

Zaki and his Afghan people remind me of my chosen core purpose in life – to make a contribution by helping bring connection and understanding founded on our common humanity; to see people as individual human beings of infinite worth living in a broken world. I need to look at that picture of those haunting dark brown eyes and his thick black hair and eyebrows for a while.

At age 17, Zaki had only known life in a free Afghanistan; far from perfect, but a place where he had been able to go to school, learn about the world, freely walk down the street, and play his beloved soccer. Zaki was good enough to be on the Afghanistan national soccer team. Zaki also was growing up in an Afghanistan where he could see girls also growing up to go to school and have choice in life about who they want to be; where Zaki could learn that girls and women, too, had hopes and dreams.

Whether we should have stayed to nation-build after we ran the Taliban into the hills is a matter for historians and pundits to debate. Twenty years in, the fact is we did embark on nation-building. Because we were there, we ensured an environment where Zaki and millions of young Afghans like him saw hope for a future.

I was fortunate to have visited Afghanistan twice in my work travels, in 2009 and then again in 2013. Three beautiful Afghan rugs cover floors in our house, including right here in my home office. I have various other souvenirs and gifts from my travels to Afghanistan which now sit on bookshelves. These are all nice tangible reminders of my visits there.

But most importantly, I took away from those trips evidence confirming my belief that we are all connected by our common humanity; evidence I have seen everywhere I have traveled. In Afghanistan I experienced the amazing comfort food Afghans make, with tender beef and rice. I experienced the warm laughter and hospitality of homes opened up to me. I watched the love of parents walking their young girls freely down the city streets in school uniforms, families full of possibility and hope. I met scores of smart, educated Afghans working for our company there who believed in what they were doing and dared to dream about a better future for themselves and their families. And they dared to trust us Americans. They opened up to us and showed us their vulnerabilities and fears along with their hopes and dreams.

I haven’t visited Afghanistan in eight years now and have lost touch with many of the people I encountered. I only hope that many of them made it out in the mass evacuations. They were some of Afghanistan’s best and brightest. I am honored and humbled to have crossed paths with them on the journey; to experience some measure of life together and see each other’s common humanity.

My core belief about the world and core purpose calls for us to connect, and despite all our differences – appearance, language, culture, religion – to seek out the humanity in each of us. My reminder of this is my picture of Zaki Anwari. His name is Zaki Anwari, and he was a human being of infinite value, lost to the world now. Godspeed to Zaki and all our Afghan brothers and sisters.

Image: The Wall Street Journal. Afghanistan’s Falling Man: The 17-Year-Old Soccer Star Who Plunged from a US Military Jet. April 24, 2021