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Outside Magazine December 2003

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The Kabul Express (cont.)


	The Babur Gardens pool, one of Kabul's few oases (photograph by Seamus Murphy)

WAY BACK IN THAT ERA OF NAIVE JOY known as the 1960s, Afghanistan was a symbol of something other than war. It was the luminous mystery at the center of Asia, a kingdom of infinite skies and peerless peaks. Kabul was the antique capital of a romantic nation, and Chicken Street, the city's enclave of hotels and restaurants, was a ghetto of global hippies and seekers. By the late 1970s, Afghanistan had become perhaps the most storied name on the trekkers' road less traveled, the famous "overland route" where strangers banded together in VW vans, sharing love affairs and mimeographed tip sheets en route to the "Three K's"—Kabul, India's Kullu Valley, and finally Kathmandu. Islam was musical, mystical, and embracing, the prices cheap, the dope wicked. Afghanistan was, in the idiom of the age, mellow.

And it will be so again.

Yes, Afghanistan. After 25 years of war and civil war, the people and politics are beginning to come full circle. In the sixties it was the hippie trail that brought change; this time it was B-52s, dropping loads of modernization, leaving foreign troops and civil schemes in their wake. Since the American overthrow of the Taliban, in late 2001, the UN and its acronymic camp of followers have parachuted into Kabul, pursued closely by the shock troops of low-rent globalization: entrepreneurs and actual tourists. The future—however tentative and fragile—is back.

"There are a lot of cultural similarities between then and now," one of the veterans of both eras, Nancy Hatch Dupree, said. "They're trying to open it up again." In 1977, Dupree, an American expat, published the definitive—and, for the time being, last—guidebook to the country, An Historical Guide to Afghanistan, a 492-page odyssey down every bumpy road of delights. A friend to prime ministers, rebel commanders, and even the Taliban, Dupree now lives in Peshawar, Pakistan, but returns often, at age 76, to oversee various organizations she has founded—like SPACH, the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage—and to advise the Ministry of Information and Culture.

I'd picked a terrible time to travel: The country is still littered with unexploded ordnance, and even the "safe" provinces are dominated by warlords.

"Travel today is about like it was in the 1960s," said Dupree. This was partly a promise, and partly a warning—the highways are in shambles, the land is still scattered with up to ten million land mines. In many ways, I'd picked a terrible moment to venture into the provinces: The country is littered with unexploded ordnance; attacks by Taliban holdouts, mostly in southeast Afghanistan, have been increasing; and even the pro-government warlords ruling the "safe" provinces have their own armies. In early October, the White House formed a "stabilization group" for Iraq and Afghanistan, a tacit acknowledgment of the "deteriorating security conditions" cited in a June 2003 joint report on Afghanistan by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Asia Society. President Hamid Karzai's government has international clout but neither the money nor the troops to back it up in the provinces. At the current rate of training, there will be only 9,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army by mid-2004, compared with 100,000 militiamen for the various warlo— I mean "local leaders."

According to the World Bank, Afghanistan will need $15 billion in reconstruction money in the next five years, above and beyond relief aid. Meanwhile, opium has been reborn as a $2.5 billion shadow economy, twice the amount of foreign aid received in 2002 and more than the government's entire $2.25 billion budget. Last year, according to the report, one warlord, Ismail Khan, of the western city of Herat, reportedly levied $100 million in customs duties; the central government took in $80 million nationwide. But as one veteran of the UN's de-mining program reminded me, it used to be so much worse. Just over a year ago, Taliban rockets were still hitting close to Kabul. The memory of chaos is so fresh that, in one of those undiplomatically honest comments made only on background, she said, simply, "Warlord is good." Afghans want order, and are slowly getting it. "It's too early to talk about success or failure," said David Haeri, special assistant to Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy to Afghanistan. "Whether the glass is half full or half empty, there is water in it."



	Rolling through the city's bazaar (photograph by Seamus Murphy)

The CFR/Asia Society report concluded that "even though the international effort is not perfect, it has functioned reasonably well." Land mines are slowly being cleared; Karzai is collecting pledges of disarmament and (some) taxes from regional warlords; and European military personnel are gradually expanding their control beyond Kabul. Things that have been impossible in Afghanistan for decades are suddenly within reach.

The new age has its contradictions. A blob of opium, for eating, costs 25 cents in the back alleys of the Kabul bazaar, while a bottle of Absolut goes for $13 at the foreigners-only liquor store near the airport. Wine is available by the case now, but the drug of choice, as it was in the 1960s, is hashish—Afghan Prozac.

Chicken Street is being remade again. Foreigners are back. Nancy Dupree is back. Even ailing King Zahir Shah, exiled since 1973, came back from Europe long enough to accept the empty title of Father of the Nation. Everything banned by the Taliban (dancing, cameras, alcohol, opium, kites, pet birds, and Christians) is back. Everything old is new again.

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