The United States needs greater economic and diplomatic efforts, rather than just a better military strategy, to improve the situation in Afghanistan, according to Afghans settled in Fremont.

President-elect Barack Obama said during his election campaign that he would send more American soldiers to the country to fight the Taliban and hunt for Al Qaeda leaders in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.

“I don’t think more troops is necessarily going to help,” said Rahim Aurang, 68, who left Afghanistan over 20 years ago.

“We need security, but what’s really important is reconstruction, jobs, businesses. This would stop people joining the Taliban,” said Aurang, who runs a non-profit agency based in Centerville that has helped thousands of Afghan refugees settle in the Bay Area. 

Yar Mujaddedi, 73, a resident of Fremont since 1984, supported the idea of peace negotiations with the Taliban. “Until they hold talks, there can’t be security,” he said.

Mujaddedi is a former official in the Afghan Health Ministry who was imprisoned for 18 months under the pro-communist regime in Afghanistan in the early 1980s. He said the US had made a mistake by invading the country in the first place, but withdrawing American troops now would lead to another civil war.

Travel agent Zabi Ansari, 51, agreed that talks with the Taliban were necessary, but only with elements that were willing to lay down their arms.

“They need to be talking to the right Taliban leaders, not the ones who are extremists, and to do so openly,” said Ansari, who fled Afghanistan in 1987.

Farid Mehrzad, 33, who worked as an interpreter for US forces in Kabul for four years, said it was important that the American and NATO forces avoid killing innocent civilians when bombing militant targets in Afghanistan.

“Many people have lost friends and relatives in air bombardment by US and NATO forces. This encourages people to join the Taliban,” said Mehrzad, who arrived in the US a year ago and is studying at Ohlone College.

Abdullah Sayid, 54, who runs a grocery store in Centerville, said the cause of much of Afghanistan’s woes lay across the border in Pakistan. “The new US government must do something to stop Pakistan’s interference in Afghanistan,” he said.

Cease the support given them by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence services, and the “Taliban will melt away,” he said.

Obama needs to put pressure on Pakistan to close the porous border between the two countries, and to stop issuing visas to men from Muslim countries who end up fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan, said Sayid

“How do all these Arab and Chechen fighters end up in Afghanistan? It is not through Iran or India or on Afghan visas. They come from Pakistan on official visas given to them by Pakistani embassies in the Gulf,” he said.

Presidential candidates Senators Barack Obama and John McCain spent significant time in the two presidential debates discussing their potential Pakistan policies, if elected to the Oval Office. But many Pakistani-Americans see these policies as largely the same.

“Obama seems to be more upfront about what his plans for Pakistan would be, while McCain gives the impression he will be more diplomatic, while portraying Obama as more aggressive,” said Rafay Khawaja, 39, a software engineer who moved to the United States from Karachi, Pakistan, in 1990. “But I think they will be very similar in the end.”

Relations between Pakistan and the United States, allies since the 2001 Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, have been strained in recent months following reports that US military forces stationed in Afghanistan have conducted raids into Pakistan in order to strike militant targets.

During the Oct. 7 presidential debate, Obama said he would send US forces into the country to strike militant targets like Osama Bin Laden, if the Pakistani military was unable or unwilling to do so. McCain criticized Obama for “threatening to attack Pakistan,” and said he would coordinate efforts with the Pakistani government and military.

However, many Pakistani-Americans suspect that there will be little practical difference between their policies toward Pakistan, no matter who becomes president. They said the US should
respect Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty.

Shahid Khan, 57, an electrical engineer who has been in the US since 2000, said that “both candidates have the same agenda: they want to destabilize Pakistan. The reason for this is China. They want a permanent US base in Afghanistan because of its closeness to China.”

He strongly disagreed with the US policy of conducting military strikes across the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

“My question to the candidates would be, ‘What would their feeling be if US borders were violated?’” Khan said.

“Pakistanis want respect for their sovereignty. That’s the general feeling,” added Khawaja.

Laeeq Ahmed, 40 a software engineer who has lived in the US for 10 years, called for more coordination between the Pakistani and American militaries, and more communication between their governments and people.

“We need to understand the root causes of the problems [in the Pakistan-Afghan border area]. Is it an education problem, an economic problem? We need to address these issues first,” he said.

He said he hadn’t decided yet who he would vote for in the presidential election. Ahmed’s main consideration is which candidate will do more for the US economy, “because I live here now.”

Khawaja, who will be voting for the first time, said he had been going back and forth between the two candidates. Now he is currently leaning toward Obama, because he feels the Democrat is more likely to bring change to Washington.

He said the candidates’ policies towards Pakistan and the Muslim world will factor into his choice. “It matters, but it’s not everything,” he said.

Khan said he would vote for neither candidate, because he didn’t agree with their policies on Israel and towards the Muslim world.

“Maybe I’ll vote for Greenpeace,” he said.

The tradition of sending funds back home, called remittances, is a longstanding tradition among immigrants living abroad in the U.S. – including in Fremont.  

However, faced with a domestic and global economic downturn, foreign-born immigrants have been forced to tighten their wallets and decrease the amount of money they send back to friends and family in their native countries.

Fremont resident Carmen Garcia, 49, departs Ramirez Market in Fremont's Centerville District. Garcia said because of the economy, she sends her son, who lives in Mexico, about $200 less a month.

Fremont resident Carmen Garcia, 49, works full-time as a house cleaner.  Up until recently, she depended on supplemental income earned at a second job at a local banquet hall where she assisted with wedding celebrations and parties.

Garcia said last year she sent about $500 a month to her son Ramon Garcia, 25, who lives in Tepic, Mexico. Now, she sends about $300 a month, which Ramon uses for rent, food and school.

“There’s been little business, little work for me,” Garcia said. “So less and less money for my son.”

The economic crisis in the U.S. has hit Mexico particularly hard, a country where remittances drive consumer spending and make up the second-largest source of foreign income, after oil exports, according to the Bank of Mexico. In 2007 alone, expatriates sent more than $24 billion back home to friends and family in Mexico.

On Oct. 1, the Bank of Mexico said remittances dropped to their lowest level in 13 years, falling from 1.76 billion in January 2007 to $1.65 billion in January of this year, as cited by the Dallas Morning News.

A few days after that report was released,  Leslie Corona thumbed through the pages of a Latina Magazine at Ramirez Market in Fremont’s Centerville District, where she is manager.

Corona said foot traffic at the four-year-old store, which sells Mexican specialty products, have slowed considerably. The store also provides remittance services; Corona said money transfers have declined about 35 percent from this time last year.

“It hurts us a lot,” Corona said. “Everywhere it’s bad, everybody’s suffering.”

Corona said anecdotally, many Ramirez Market customers have lost their jobs in the service industry like car washes, landscaping, construction and painting. She said others have lost their homes in the subprime mortgage crisis. And even a few, with no prospects of work, have returned to Mexico.

However, not all countries are seeing decreases in the flow of remittances.

In Pakistan, remittances grew by more than $117 million between 2007 and 2008, according to the State Bank of Pakistan and reported in the Pakistan newspaper The Nation.

Expatriates living in the U.S. accounted for about $151.45 million of the total remittances in July and August this year, according to the State Bank of Pakistan.

However, there is no new data taking into account the recent global implosion of the financial sector, which has affected the amount of money Fremont restaurant owner and Pakistani native C.H. Saleem sends back to his siblings living in Lahore.

“I have to support my family here and support family back in Pakistan,” said Saleem, who co-owns the Indian and Pakistani cuisine Bismillah Restaurant in the Centerville Business District. “They’re (relatives in Pakistan) not getting enough stuff, enough food.”

Saleem said business at the restaurant has dropped 40 percent since the same time last year; he’s had to cut two lunchtime employees.

As a result, Saleem has reduced how much money he sends to family back home in Pakistan from about $500 a month to about $200 a month.

Philippine National Bank Customer Relations Assistant Mitchie DeCastro speaks to a customer about the exchange rate between the U.S. and the Philippines at the PNB branch in Union City. PNB has seen a 20 percent decrease in business since 2006 because of the sour economy.

“It’s been a struggle lately, and the pressures on me are high,” said Saleem, gazing at his empty restaurant at lunchtime.

“In the Philippines, it’s really bad,” said Mitchie DeCastro, a customer relations assistant at the Philippine National Bank in Fremont. She was busy assisting a small line of customers waiting to transfer funds to relatives in the Philippines.

DeCastro estimates the PNB Union City branch office has seen a 20 percent decrease in remittance transfers since 2006.

“A lot of people rely on money from their relatives, and it will probably get worse for them.”

Despite the two-year slowdown of customers at the Union City PNB, remittances overall to the Philippines increased by more than 14 percent in the first five months of 2008, compared to the same time in 2007, according to the Embassy of the Republic of the Philippines.

However, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration contributes the remittance increase to a 39.5 percent rise in the number of Filipinos employed globally.

Outside of the PNB, Danny Galang, 59, said he hasn’t decreased the amount of money he sends to friends and family in the Philippines, which he estimates to be around $8,000 annually.

“I want to send less, but I can’t,” said Galang, who works for the city of Hayward. “We’re kind of obligated to help out relatives and friends.

“My priorities are reset. There is less money coming in from work so I don’t go to the movies now, but I still send (money) to the Philippines.”