By DUANE SCHRAG

Salina Journal

ABILENE -- Ask Yar Mohammad Bahrami which presidential candidate he wanted to see elected by Americans, and he thinks carefully about his answer.

"I was happy with Barack Obama," said Bahrami, 34, a teacher from Afghanistan who is getting a master's degree in English as a second language. In particular, he applauds Obama's willingness to talk with opponents.

"You have to sit down with the people and say what you want," Bahrami said.

But he's uneasy about Obama's pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan.

"Blood cannot be washed with blood," Bahrami said.

Bahrami was one of six Afghan teachers, all pursuing master's degrees at Kansas State University, who were on a panel Friday at the Eisenhower Library. They were invited as part of the library's Kansas Town Hall series, and talked about their country, their impressions of the United States and what they hope for.

The most common theme: peace.

"Our government is struggling," Bahrami said. "We are facing more problems than we had before. I think people are just hopeless. This is what the world wants, what we want -- peace."

The panel was asked what they would show Americans who came to visit Afghanistan.

"If you want to cry, go to Afghanistan," said one of the teachers. "There is no peace. There is nothing."

William Richter, professor emeritus of political science at K-State, moderated the discussion. He told the audience that when he visited Afghanistan in 1970, the country was peaceful and developing. By the late 1970s there was civil unrest but then the Soviet Union invaded in late 1979, uniting the Afghan people.

Bahrami said his father was taken prisoner by the Soviets; to this day he doesn't know what happened to him.

With covert assistance from the United States the Afghan freedom fighters, or Mujahideen, helped drive the Soviets out in 1989.

But that left thousands of armed Afghanis without a common enemy, and without a strong government.

"We started fighting among ourselves," Bahrami said. "Every commander who had 10 soldiers was a president."

And that's what gave the Taliban a foothold, he said. It imposed order. For all its faults, it restored a peace to the country.

When the Taliban was toppled by American forces in 2002, it created new tensions. There were orders to not negotiate with the Taliban, to either kill them or drive them from the country.

"How is it possible that half the country should be killed," Bahrami said. He shared an Afghan idiom that captures the ambivalence created by the civil war: "The Taliban have not come from the sky."

The teachers said production of opium in Afghanistan is tied directly to the conflict. Only when people can earn a living by legal means will it be possible to stamp out the production of narcotics, they said.

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