Biography

Engineer Kabir Hakim was born in the city of Mazar-e Sharif, in Balkh Afghanistan in the 1950s. He attended high school in Lycée Bakhtar in Mazar-e Sharif. After graduating top of his class, he scored one of the highest exam scores in Afghanistan’s University Entrance Exam which allowed him to be admitted to the Faculty of Engineering in Kabul University. Engineer Kabir was able to secure a scholarship to India, where he studied textile technology and received his B-Text degree from GCTI.

During his time as a student, alongside his colleagues, he created the “Islamic Association of Afghan Students” in India to organize demonstrations, public meetings, and establish a link with political elites in India to bring awareness to the brutalities perpetuated by the communist regime and the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. These demonstrations usually took place on the 27th of April (the date of the communist coup), and the 26th of December (the start of the Soviet occupation), in front of the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi (see Gallery page for images). The public meetings were organized across India including Bombay (Maharashtra), Sri-Nagar (Jammu and Kashmir), Calcutta (West Bengal), New Delhi, Hyderabad (Andra Pardesh), Bihar, among others. Some organizations which supported these activities include the Janta Party, Bharati Janta Party, Jamaat Islami Hind, Tameer-e Milat, Jamat-ul Hulma Hind, Akali Daal, Majlis-e- Ittehad-ul Muslimeen, and all parties based in Sri-Nagar.

His political work in India encouraged prominent Indian politicians to publicly condemn the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and participate in anti-war activism. Alongside Indian political parties, they formed an organization called “Friends of Afghanistan” and held numerous meetings and demonstrations across the country in cities such as Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Srinagar, and Hyderabad on the situation in Afghanistan. This important work was supported by the former Prime Minister of India, Atul Behari Vajpayee, Dr Subramanian Swamy, Sayed Shahabuddin, Ram Vilas Paswan, Professor Sondh, Dr Amit Mitra, Jamaat Islami Hind, and many others. 

Engineer Kabir was also a regular commentator and analyst and appeared on Indian news regularly to speak and be interviewed on the situation in Afghanistan during the 1980s. During his time in India, he also became the founder and editor and chief of several popular newspapers and periodicals, including Mirror of Afghanistan (published in English), Tolo (published in Persian), and Fateh (published in Urdu), published fortnightly and monthly, to propagate the Afghan cause. When Engineer Kabir graduated on 1981, he left for New Delhi to assist refugees from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was successful in working alongside the United National High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to open an office for refugees. 

In order to be directly involved in Afghanistan, in the year 1990, Engineer Kabir moved from India to Peshawar, where alongside a group of Afghan intellectuals and professionals founded a non-political development NGO called Pamir Reconstruction Bureau, which later changed to Partners in Revitalization and Building (PRB) and became its director. Since its inception, the aim of PRB has been to assist in aid delivery, relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction in Afghanistan.

With the assistance of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and later, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in their work on privatizing the veterinary service in Afghanistan, PRB was able to implement this work successfully. More than fifty veterinary field units were established and privatized in northern, central, and south-western Afghanistan as a result. During this period, several construction and rehabilitation projects – such as schools, roads, bridges, and canals – were successfully implemented across Afghanistan. By partnering with organizations such as WPF, PRB was also involved in creating bakery distribution centers in Kabul, Logar, and Jalalabad. With the assistance of FAO, PRB was able to implement the Kabul Milk Scheme project which allowed the procuring of pasteurized milk to the inhabitants of Kabul. With the support of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) - formerly the United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) - PRB also led poppy reduction projects and created surveys of poppy cultivation across Afghanistan in the 1990s. One of the many major projects that PRB undertook in the 1990s was the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Parwan irrigation canal dam in Kapisa.

Since 2001, with the presence of the international community in Afghanistan, PRB partnered with new donors to provide development aid in the country and was able to branch to the western regions of Afghanistan, including Herat. Successful new and ongoing projects supported by WHH have been geared towards empowerment, especially women’s empowerment in their communities. Most recently, PRB implemented a project on Cashmere production funded by Oxfam with its findings published in 2021. 

In early 2001, due to the nature of his work and given the unavoidable political circumstances in Afghanistan, Engineer Kabir was forced to migrate to California, in the United States, with his family. Since then, he has traveled regularly between the United States and Afghanistan and continued supervising PRB and has been working as a consultant for various projects that PRB was awarded. In 2005 he received his Master’s in Project Management from Jones International University in Colorado, United States, where he graduated with high marks.