Said Hyder Akbars ordinary suburban Californian life was turned upside-down after September 11th. Hyders father a scion of an Afghan political family left for Afghanistan to become the new presidents chief spokesman and later governor of Kunar a rural province. Obsessed since childhood with a country he had never visited seventeen-year-old Hyder convinced his father to let him join him. Working alongside his father at the presidential palace and in Kunar gave Hyder a unique perspective on the creation of democratic government in Afghanistan. In Come Back to Afghanistan Hyder interweaves his personal journey - that of a teenager struggling to find his identity in his parents homeland - with his travels which take him from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands to give a dramatic account of political and civilian life in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
