A Week in Wartime Kabul, Afghanistan

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Kabul January 2005: While I was visiting Kabul, many people asked me why I had come to the city. I replied jokingly that I heard the golfing was very good in Kabul. It was as credible an answer as any that I could give. It seemed ridiculous to say that I was a tourist, and most would not believe me anyway. In a warzone capital full of military personnel, intelligence officials and agents, UN staff, journalists, NGO and aid workers, and an eclectic mixture of foreign businessmen, saying I was a tourist was just not credible.

Of course, I could explain that I am a keen observer of humanity in my varied travels. Conflict zones often represent the most interesting and extremes of human actions. While I have not been in any live combat zones, and prefer not to, I have been in a few post conflict zones. But this explanation still would not seem a credible reason to choose to be in a high risk situation. Personally, although Kabul had just had a bombing attack a few days before my arrival, I did not see the city as an unreasonable risk zone. (My short road trip from the Pakistani border to get here, on the other hand, might have been).

Kabul was in the midst of a huge building boom. This was most apparent in its center and in some urban housing complex areas around the periphery of the center. Money was literally pouring in from the huge foreign presence. In a country that had been at war for the past 30 years, and in which a big chunk of the population lived on a dollar or two a day, the billions that showered in after the US invasion a few years back was a shock to the system. Large tracts of attractive and sizeable multi-story homes, similar to what one might see in a new suburban housing development in the USA, were springing up in several places. The new homes, costing several hundred thousand dollars, were stark testimony to the massive corruption of the US backed Karzai administration. Many local people said that it was mostly those associated with the government in some way, or drug dealers, criminals and some foreigners, who were mostly the buyers of the expensive homes.

Despite all the inpouring of money, Kabul was a very unpleasant place. First, it is so darn dusty, perhaps a trait of Afghanistan in general, that it is hard to breathe properly. Add in the fact that it is also very dirty and polluted, with huge swaths in rubble, and it is not a place that would get top rankings in the livability indexes. Of course, one cannot expect much in a city that had seen some of the longest and most ferocious warfare in generations, and where one regularly sees big armored troop carriers and attack vehicles rumbling down the road.

I stayed at the Mustafa Hotel slightly away from the downtown. It was convenient to everything, and priced reasonably. There were not many good choices outside a big and expensive 5 star hotel and a number of seedy looking guesthouses otherwise. I chose the Mustafa though, because I had read that it was the place where the most interesting foreigners in the city gathered for happy hour. Patrons of the Mustafa bar were said to range from journalists, spies, NGO personnel, many types of aid workers and fortune seeking businessmen.

I was not disappointed. Each of the several times I visited the bar at happy hour, I always met a cast of interesting and often colorful characters. One night for example, I had an interesting conversation with a member of Czech intelligence. Before talking with him I had about an hour chat with a hard drinking Australian free-lance journalist who had traveled undercover around the southern part of the country. If he had been stopped by the Taliban, he surely would have been executed, along with the poor taxi driver that he'd coaxed into being his chaperone.

One of the standouts from my happy hour encounters was Rajiv, a friendly and outgoing Indian salesman. Middle-aged, of medium stature, slightly pudgy, and always in an outgoing and friendly mood, Rajiv does employment placement. However, the type of employees he places are not office workers or company executives. He places Nepalese Gurkha mercenaries with various military agencies in the region. For those not familiar, Gurkhas are legendary in their fierceness and reliability as fighters and military workers. I had shared a couple of enjoyable evenings with Rajiv. If he is to be believed, the US military uses and trusts Gurkhas in their various operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places. Was Rajiv credible? I don't really know, but he was a regular in Kabul, many knew him, and he knew his way around. He didn't come there for the golf.

On my first full day in Kabul, I took a long walk through the city. For the first time in weeks, I was wearing my normal clothes again. I had come to Kabul after traveling in Pakistan a couple of weeks. In Pakistan, to blend in a bit, I had allowed my beard to grow , my hair to get longer and dressed in a traditional outfit for the region called a Shalwar Khalmeez. The previous night in the Mustafa Hotel Bar, a journalist acquaintance advised that it was actually better in Kabul to look like a Western foreigner than a local. He said there was less risk of attracting attention from the sometime trigger happy ISAF soldiers (International Security Assistance Force) constantly on patrol in the city. He also advised to not carry around my camera, a normal sized DSLR with a small zoom lens. He said that I might stick out as a tourist and therefore be seen as a "soft" or unprotected target by dangerous people, including Taliban. This is why the photo gallery for this story has a very limited number of photos of Kabul.

Walking across town my first day in town, along the busted up roads and sidewalks, I passed the huge US military base and another very large one used by the UN. A number of other official bases and centers were spread around the downtown area as well as several street checkpoints. A Czech armored patrol zipped by at one point followed a bit later by a US patrol.

Late morning, I had a reason to use an internet cafe. Unable to find one in the area I was, I asked a couple of teenager boys I was passing on the sidewalk if they could direct me to a cybercafe. One of the teenagers asked me where I was from and if I was American. When I replied that I was from California, he offered immediately to walk me to the internet café. I told the polite and neatly dressed adolescent that he needn't trouble himself walking with me, but to please just point me in the correct direction.

The teenage boy insisted, with his friend nodding in agreement, that he personally take me to the internet cafe. I was a guest in his country, he said, and it was his responsibility to take care of me. He also explained that since I was an American, he felt it was a small thing he could do to pay back the debt that Afghanistan owed America. The boy was named Sabir, and appeared closed to 16 years or so. He was extremely well-spoken and seemed overly mature for his age. I soon realized that this was due to all the sadness and war he had experienced.

Sabir went on to explain that many felt a huge debt of gratitude to the Americans for saving them from the unbelievable hell of the Taliban. He declared himself at my service for the day and would aid in anything I wanted. He then offered, if I could wait till later for the internet cafe, to take me up a hill that had a great view of Kabul and was an important place in recent history.

Agreeing, I went with the two boys and we all hiked up a nearby hill overlooking Kabul. It was surrounded on 3 sides by the city and did give a commanding view. Along the way up, we passed a bombed out tank and some other war debris.

During our walk Sabir told me his story. His father had been a modestly prosperous shop owner in Kabul at one time. However, tragedy struck when the city population became the target of warring factions in the early 90s.

At that time antiaircraft weapons were used by the various competing belligerents to terrorize the people of Kabul. Several warring factions fired these weapons from the hills overlooking Kabul onto the city mercilessly, targeting civilians for long stretches of time. Most of the western part of Kabul has been destroyed, many areas completely leveled.

An antiaircraft shell made a direct hit on one of the shops owned by Sabir's father when he was in it and he suffered a horrible leg wound. Sabir's father hung onto life for over a month, but ended up dying from his wounds. In the process, his family had to sell off all three shops he owned and most everything else to pay the medical bills.

During the Taliban era a few years after his father's death, Sabir's family and had to flee Kabul. They were members of a subset of Muslims called Ismaelis. Considered heretics by the Taliban, the Ismaelis were targeted for destruction. Sabir's family and other Ismaelis fled to the northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif, before the Taliban had gained control of that area during the civil war at the time. However shortly afterward, the Taliban took control of Mazar-I-Sharif. Sabir's family and other Ismaelis were abruptly forced to flee Mazar-I-Sharif. Sabir said that their group wandered for two days and nights in the freezing winter with no food or water during that period.

Sabir gave me many examples of Taliban lunacy. For instance, according to Sabir, most or almost ALL hospitals were eventually shut down in Kabul. This surprised me. My understanding had been that women's hospitals had been shut down and that women were blocked from admission to the regular hospitals. (Women weren't allowed in a hospital unless the doctors were women—an impossibility since all women were banned from working or being in public without a male family member). Of course, Sabir also mentioned the much publicized things the Taliban idiots did: banning all music, games, nightclubs, kite flying, card playing of any kind and any other conceivable form of entertainment. In attempting to create their sick vision of Islam, they banned almost all forms of technology, including the internet, even confiscating transistor radios. And, of course, all women were banned from going to school or working.

Sabir told of a particularly hideous episode that occurred before his family had to flee Kabul. The Taliban put out the word that a big soccer match was to be played at the central stadium. When the stadium filled up with people, including Sabir and his family, expecting to watch the game, armed Taliban security closed and locked all the exit doors to the stadium. A public execution was then performed where a person's head was cut off. There was no soccer game. It was a trick to get people to view "Islamic Justice" in action.

After spending the day with Sabir and his quieter friend, I bid them goodbye as they brought me to an internet café close to my hotel.

A day after meeting Sabir, I hired a driver to bring me to the few museums that Kabul has with anything left. One of the museums, with exhibits on military mines, was closed. The main Kabul museum was open, but a sad experience. The Taliban had destroyed much of what was still left after the civil war of the early 90s. The National Art Gallery on the other hand was more uplifting. Unexpectedly, it had a fairly decent size exhibit. There have been several Afghan painters of note over the past century, most of them relatively recent. When the Taliban was in charge, 108 original paintings housed at the museum had been destroyed. However, many others had somehow escaped destruction. Those that survived had been put into a single room during the Taliban era, and fortunately had been left undiscovered. From the explanations given by the small dedicated staff at the National Art Gallery, the concealment of the surviving art was an act of heroism by the staff at the museum during the Taliban period.

Another day, I was wondering amongst the rubble of several war destroyed villages in West Kabul. Some young boys came up to me and asked me where I was going. I had been walking over the broken remains of a winding road, around large piles of concrete rock, and into a section of tall bombed out building shells. The oldest boy in the group, who appeared not more than 10 or 11 years old, insisted that I turn around and go with them. Pointing to where I was headed, he said, "Terrorists! Crazy people!". Taking firm hold of my hand the boy escorted me out away from the area I was headed.

Walking into another section of destroyed buildings, the boy holding my hand asked me if I could visit his home. I agreed. In a few moments I was in very humble house of traditional mud wall and brick construction. The small house and had been heavily damaged in the wars. All of their neighbor's houses in the surrounding villages had also sustained heavy damage. I was surprised that anyone was actually living in these blown up and broken down buildings. There was trash all over, and the ground was a huge mud patch. It was all overlain by large jagged and busted concrete rocks. Yet the whole village was still occupied by those that had lived there for generations.

Inside the small dirt house, about 8 boys and two girls crowded around. All were related. One of the oldest boys had lost his father in the late 1980s who died fighting the Communist regime then in power. An adult male came in and sat down with us as a veiled woman brought everyone tea. The conversation turned fun when they found out I was from California. They all knew the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger who was governor of California, and became very animated and excited talking about Arnold.

When it started to get dark outside, I got up to leave. An older boy in the group, a bright 14-year-old enterprising kid who sold magazine subscriptions on the street, led me in the right direction to my hotel. He mentioned he was hungry, so I happily treated him to a chicken dinner. Although it seemed paltry in comparison to the warm hospitality and care that several Kabulis had shown me, I bought him a large bag of oranges to take home to his very kind and hospitable family.