The Remnants of Kabul
Lying in bed at the UN Guest House in Kabul, I let sensations, impressions, and briefings blend like the seasonings in our lunch of mutton biryani. It’s hard to fully enjoy a meal, knowing that a government worker (when paid) receives $6 a month; but a 100 kilo bag of wheat, which will make some 400 pieces of flatbread, costs $20. There is little employment in this capital city of 1.2 million. Relief organizations like CARE and UNHCR feed tens of thousands. Many more are hungry.
Sandbags line the entrance to the guesthouse, which serves the international community. I'm warned that tomorrow is a holy day for the Shia, but not the Suni'i. Since the two Muslim groups represent majorities on opposite sides of the on-going civil war, the holiday might spark an attempt by the Northern Alliance to retake the capital. The front line, which once divided the city, is now about 14 miles north. Should we hear gunfire or an explosion while we're out on the street, we're to dive for sandbags. If the attack is successful, anarchy will likely reign, and looting will be rampant. The historian laying out that apocalyptic scenario adds a spicy story of fingers being amputated by impatient thieves when wedding rings don’t easily slip off.
Before coming, we were advised that the plane that brought us from Pakistan would not delay its departure for us. A half-hour ceasefire of anti-aircraft guns each day creates a window—just long enough for the 12-seater to touch down and take off again from the Kabul airstrip. If the pilot misses that window, he won't land.
The proximity to the front line is an ever-present thought. Soldiers cruise the streets perched in the back of pick-up trucks, excited grins on their bearded faces, black turbans their only identifying uniform. This army of religious extremists swept up from the Pashtun south. They call themselves "the Taliban"--"the students." They are armed with AK-47s, and their trucks have missile launchers on the back--remnants of three billion dollars of US military aid, augmented by captured Kalashnikovs and other Soviet equipment. They are fighting a holy war…and have the passion to prove it.
That passion is channeled not only into violence, but also what appears to American eyes as an energetic sexual repression. An elderly American woman, Nancy Dupree, who has lived in the area for decades tries to explain in terms I’ll understand. The young zealots, she says, are from the most conservative region where females are illiterate; where a girl is married off at puberty to a man she may have never met; where a father may kill a daughter caught in adultery. The Taliban went as young children to live at Pakistani seminaries where they absorbed passages of the Koran--but apparently little else about getting along in the world. They have emerged as adolescents with raging hormones, yet extremely uncomfortable with women, who in that culture bear not only endless progeny, but also the honor of the family.
Kabul, hardly a swinging metropolis, once bore the marks of modernity and a thriving international community of French, Germans, Americans…. Women with a macabre cloth grid over their faces walked the sidewalks beside women wearing make-up and miniskirts. Some 5,000 students were enrolled at the technical university. Today, that entire segment has disappeared. The middle class, the glue of society, is living in the Diaspora in the U.S., Britain, Italy, and elsewhere.
In Kabul, physical destruction ranges between 10% and 95%, depending on the neighborhood. The worst damage was not at the hand of the communists, but during the civil war that raged in the vacuum that followed the Soviet pullout. Our driver is fearful as I bring my camera out; he could be beaten and jailed for my offense because of the Taliban prohibition of images of living creatures. I rest the lens on the window ledge and drape the end of my long headscarf over it, pressing the shutter as we drive through the town, without holding the camera to my eye. Their spies are everywhere. We are not immune. While we are out of our rooms, our suitcases are rifled.
The capital was without electricity for a year and a half, just before the Taliban arrived. In the civil war lawlessness, women were abducted and raped. Is it any wonder that the orthodox Islamic students entered Kabul--with its cinemas and nightclubs—and saw Sin City? No longer. Now vice squads beat up citizens who transgress: a beard is not trimmed correctly, a prayer time is ignored, the 9 p.m. curfew is missed. The Taliban have banned paper bags, which might have been made from newspapers with Koranic writings on them. They have banned applause; instead one may shout, "Allah is great!"
We drive by the stadium where public punishments are meted out on Fridays, a 20th Century revival of the Roman Coliseum. Hands of thieves are lopped off; adulterers are executed. Homosexuals are buried beneath a wall, pushed over by a bulldozer. On the streets, a Suzuki pick-up passes us with tinted windows, a red alarm light, and white flag fluttering righteously on top. It’s a patrol from the Department for the Prevention of Vice and Promulgation of Virtue. We pass another Taliban on a bicycle, the tail of his black turban clenched between his teeth, a gun in a holster slung over his shoulder.
Humanity’s vicious streak weaves its way through Afghanistan’s history. We hear stories of the Mujahedin, U.S. supported religious fighters, skinning Soviet prisoners alive. As I listen to tales of barbarism - heads, noses, ears cut off – I imagine sitting down with my family in quiet Cambridge, and how impossible it will be to communicate what I've seen and heard, and connect the two worlds.