Afghanistan

In Kabul

BEHIND THE VEIL. Women still feared retribution by the Taliban supporters within their communities.

In the three and a half days that we were in Kabul, I saw only three women out of burgas. An article in Sydney's Daily Telegraph of 22 February 2002 claims that 99% of the women in Afghanistan still wear the burga. One of the 1% that do not wear the burga is the newly appointed Minister for Women's Affairs, Dr. Sima Samar, who told us that women still feared retribution by the Taliban supporters within their communities.

Dr. Samar is quoted as saying that while "women understand that the law has changed", they are too scared at the moment. There are too many soldiers around and too many Taliban who have only changed their turbans. Maybe slowly, as security improves, they will start to take them off."

The predominance of women in burgas is all the more troubling when we recall that Afghan women had voluntarily shed the wearing of the veil in 1959 under the rule of Mohammad Zahir Shah. My own three headscarves warmed my neck, and after a quick visit to a local hat shop, my head was covered (even when sleeping) by either a fox-furred hat or a knitted Kabul cap.

We arrived soon enough at the ASSA Guesthouse - our home for three nights. We were the ASSA Guesthouse's first guests. Our enterprising host had done a quick interior decorating job and turned a disused 5 room semi-detached house into a guesthouse for foreigners. The charge was $45 per room per night, inclusive of two meals a day. We took all the rooms.

The rooms were of varying sizes and cleanliness. I was shown to the ladies' room, which was quite large, and had dirty pink walls, pink curtains, and a cracked glass door that opened onto an unused balcony. I did a quick mending job to stall the draft from outside with my trusty plastic garbage bag and roll of masking tape. It worked to a degree. The room was furnished with two beds, with very warm looking blankets, and pillows that were as hard as rocks, and a 1960's style dressing table with a mirror. I jealously eyed the boys' rooms that were half the size, had yellow ones, and looked considerably warmer and cheerier. I passed the first night sufficiently warm in my Sierra Design minus 30-degree sleeping bag, with two Russian-made green fake-fur blankets draped over it.

ASSA Guesthouse improved each day that we were there. Our host had arranged for ASSA to receive 24 hours of electricity each day which meant that we got some power some of the time. Our rooms were heated with small electric heaters that look like two-bar toasters. The second and third day, the power situation deteriorated till we had no power at all, and eventually no running water.

There were two bathrooms that were reasonably clean, when there was power and which got cleaner after my cleaning instructions, only to revert to a stinking cesspit when there was no water. As I had predicted, things just got colder and darker. By the second day, our host had installed kerosene-sawdust heaters in each of our rooms. Mine malfunctioned and instead smoked the whole room. Cold seemed the better of the two options.

Besides our group, ASSA Guesthouse had another guest - a Japanese journalist who was on our flight, but who arrived sometime after we had settled in. I guess he didn't have a liaison officer, like our Salim Qayum, to deal with the bureaucracy. It was only on the last morning that we learned that he had previously rented the house for 3 months.

As Najeeb, the ASSA Guesthouse's cook told it, the owner rented the house to our host after our journalist left. As we took every room in the house (all 10 beds), we had effectively turned the journalist out of his former premises!! He ended up squatting behind a curtain partition off the living room. He was so quiet, we hardly knew he was there, even though he must have been hurtling curses our way each night as we would chat rather loudly (and in retrospect, rather inconsiderately) as we shared the day's stories over dinner, and our après dinner portions of whisky and copious quantities of "choi saab" (green tea).

Much like the swirling smoke from the kerosene stoves, our dinner talk would meander from the job at hand, to tales of the Bangladesh civil war, Afghanistan in the mid '70's, the Moghul empire, the recent bombings, Osama . . . always to reveal the principles that kept us together, and the chasms that kept us apart. Like the moth nearing the flame, we knew how to flirt gently around the issues, and then to flit safely away.

To make up for our inconsiderateness to our Japanese housemate, I left behind all of my food. As there was soya bean, noodles, miso soup, chicken noodle soup, and lots of other Asian travel favorites, I think we may have been reputationally redeemed. He even came to the gate to see us off, along with all of the staff of the ASSA Guesthouse.

During the days, we were occupied with visits to, and making arrangements for the renovation of, the premises of our new "Special Liaison Office", meetings with other international agencies, and establishing contact with the new administration. We shared all the tasks amongst us, and worked as a team.

We took measurements of our new premises, drafted small contracts, chose the color of the wall paint, and shared our many other disparate tasks together - each of us richer for the experiences.

We met with many ministers and high level officials from the Interim Authority, including the Mayor of Kabul, and Mr. Ashraf Ghani, advisor to Mr. Karzai, at Dilkusha Palace - the same pace where in 1933,a young student stepped forward at a prize giving ceremony and shot the king, Nadir Shah. The Palace still looks grand, though it has lost much of its opulence. We were told by Mr. Ghani, who was living at the Palace that there was no running water and no heat for much of the time. I understand that most ordinary citizens never have power, and that those of us who had a few hours of power a day are indeed privileged.

Many of the Ministers we met impressed us with their extraordinary commitment to the country. The Minister of Higher Education, Mr. Sharif Faez, for example, had left his job and family in Washington to help his country. He is encamped at the Inter-Continental Hotel, a once-gleaming modern hotel on a hilly section of Kabul. The hotel was damaged in previous bombing, and only the lower floors are now inhabitable. The place has been taken over by as accommodation for the Interim Authority, and hence was heavily guarded. You could see and feel the guns and security men everywhere.

We arrived just past nightfall, with a light wet snow falling, which added to shrouding the building in mystery. We had to approach the Ministers' visiting room by taking the fire exit behind the kitchens of the coffee house, and winding our way through past many guarded rooms. The whole place teemed with intrigue and politics. On our way out, we stopped by the hotel bookstore, which had a good range of English language books on Afghanistan for exorbitant prices. We bought two maps of Kabul for $10 each. Entrepreneurship is blossoming in Kabul, and not just by the locals. Even Afghan-Americans are getting into the act.

Two Afghan brothers from New Jersey started the only other hotel in town, the Moustafa Hotel, just after September 11. The sign just inside the front door of the hotel claims that just about every news and TV agency is headquartered there. The men that hung out in the entrance "lobby" looked like "cool" characters straight out of an American TV serial in dark glasses, college jackets, and sneakers. Their rooms are small and filled with as many beds in the room as the space could fit. The second floor hotel eatery looked like an interesting place to hang out to get the latest news. Everyone is waiting to make a quick buck and to survive, and in that way, Kabul is no different from anywhere else in the world.

Commerce thrives in the local bazaars, and the lives of ordinary people continue as it has done for the last 100 years. But it is not commerce that drives everyone in Kabul. Ideals and principles rank higher than the call of even survival for some. One of the high-ranking officials we met told us that he had been a strong Massoud follower. He also told us many stories of things he did to oppose first the Soviets, and later the Taliban. One was that he never wore a beard. He also told us that he had been imprisoned for a variety of political "crimes" for a total of 6 years, 1 month and 13 days. Although he also impressed with his knowledge -- he holds a M.Sc. from a well-reputed US college --, passion, intelligence, and graciousness, I was in no doubt that this was a man who had seen the darker side of life.

But as Louis Dupree wrote with reference to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan:

If this is the destruction that can be done by "friends" of Afghanistan, what then the acts of "foes"?

On our last morning, just before heading to the airport, we took a detour to pay a quick visit Babur's Gardens, which lies on the western slopes of Sher-I-Darwaza. The great Moghul Emperor Babur laid it out in the 16th Century. His modest tomb has lain on the terraced slopes since 1530. Although he died in Agra, he so loved the garden that he asked to be buried there. I saw no garden, no trees, no grass. Just an uncovered terraced hillside, with a couple of heavily damaged structures at the top of the hill. There was nothing even close to Nancy Dupree's description below.

This is all that's left of the once magnificent chinar trees so beloved by Babur.

On the way back into town, we had to take a detour to get past a road closing. We detoured up the hill slopes, and I got a chance to see how the majority of the inhabitants of Kabul live. Open sewers flow onto public streets, where children play, and the homes are little more than dark mud shacks eked out of the mountainside. The situation on the West side of the city towards Kabul University is far worse. Once a wealthy suburb of Kabul, the entire district has destroyed. Even so, people continue to eke out a meager living amidst the rubble.

Much has been made in the media about the extent of the destruction in this section of Kabul. On several occasions we left the car to walk away from the road. Each time, within minutes, we would be surrounded by young and old and the maimed, who seemed to rise from amidst the destruction, and who stared at us with curious eyes rimmed with toil.

The haunting desolation of mile after mile of flattened bombed out societies, viewed through the cold swirling dust clouds off the street, and the stark harsh beauty of the ice-capped mountains in the background, will stay with me for a long time as a reminder of what terrible things humans can do to one another.

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View the Photo Gallery -- "Afghanistan: The Aftermath"

Back Arriving in Kabul	A Glimpse of Afghanistan