UPDATED WITH LINK TO VIDEO . . .
Hasan Nouri, the Laguna Hills civil engineer and war orphan advocate profiled in a Weekly cover story a year ago (“War N Water”), and Nabil Miskinyar, the owner of Irvine-based, Dari Farsi-language network Ariana Afghanistan Television, were on CNN talking about their native Afghanistan minutes before President Barack Obama unveiled his war plan on U.S. national television Tuesday.
The link to CNN's video of the piece is here.
Nouri tells the Weekly he was interviewed for 10 minutes, but CNN only used about a minute on air. As one of an estimated 300,000 Afghans living in the U.S. and the son of a former diplomat there, he tells reporter Casey Wian that the war is personal to him.
“Every time a young American man gets killed, it is an enormous pain for me,” Nouri says. “Every time an innocent man, woman and child are killed, it is enormous pain for me.”
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Nouri has contributed to Republican candidates over the years and counts Orange County congressmen Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington
Beach) as his friends. But, speaking from an Irvine television studio,
Nouri says he supports Democrat Obama's plan to increase U.S. troop
levels by 30,000 fighters.
“We have messed up things so bad during the last eight years,” Nouri says, “that we need immediate and interim increases in the number of troops to provide enough security so the Afghans can establish [and] elect a national government that has no allegiance to any foreign nation or power.”
He also backs a clear exit strategy, a point Obama drove home in a bid to win some support from the majority of Americans who want to end U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Miskinyar, who was also quoted in the December 2008 Weekly story on Nouri, is identified by CNN as a frequent critic of the Afghan government. He says troop levels are “irrelevant” because the Afghan people have no confidence in their own leaders.
The civil engineer and the television executive–who broadcasts via satellite to 20 million Afghans and Iranians around the world and hopes to begin beaming into Afghanistan next year–do agree on one thing when it comes to their homeland's history: despite being composed of various tribes, often with different agendas, no one there accepts foreign occupiers for very long.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.