The mysteries of Kabul

Kabul, Jan 17 : An icy wind blasted in our faces as we trudged up a rocky slope on the southern outskirts of Kabul, the war-shattered capital of Afghanistan. Around us rose a moonscape of treeless, dun-colored hills, broken by clusters of mud-walled squatter huts. I squinted into the sunlight, looking east toward the earthen citadel of Bala Hissar, a stronghold from the time of the Silk Road to the post-Soviet wars. High above us, another wall of mud brick and stone - a fragment of the ancient rampart of Kabul, constructed before the arrival of Islam in a futile attempt to defend the city against invaders from Arabia and Central Asia - snaked along the ridgeline.

"It's always been easy to conquer Afghanistan," said my companion, Jonathan Bean, the American co-founder of the Great Game Travel Company Afghanistan, which shepherded about 70 Western tourists, including several dozen Americans, through this rugged land last year. "The problem is keeping control of it."

After an hour's slog up trackless scree to the top of the ridge, Jonathan and I, along with our security guard, a lean, gray-bearded Pashtun named Shafik Ullah, reached the rampart. We followed it for a mile, sometimes walking alongside it, sometimes balancing ourselves on its crumbling surface. Perforated with apertures for archers, 30 feet high in places, the barrier climbed toward the summit of Kabul's highest hill, 7,200 feet above sea level.

The Hindu Kush, a massif of snow and ice, loomed 30 miles to the north; Kabul lay far below us, obscured behind a layer of dust and smoke that smudged the panorama like a dirty fingerprint. Jonathan opened a thermos of coffee, and we warmed ourselves amid piles of stones and spent cartridges, the remains of a military post used by Ahmad Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance fighters during the battle for Kabul in the early 1990s. "You can feel the history all around us," Shafik said.

In the 1970s, tens of thousands of visitors poured into Kabul each year, when the Afghan capital rivaled Kathmandu as the favored Central Asian haunt for young backpackers who bunked down in cheap hotels and congregated on fabled Chicken Street to smoke hashish and while away the hours in coffee and carpet shops.

Then came the Russians, then the Taliban, and then the bombings following 9/11, pretty much destroying Kabul's reputation as a favored stop on the Hippie Trail. Now, however, even though much of Afghanistan remains dangerous, tourists are beginning to trickle back in, some lured by the thrill of the unknown, others by the pleasures offered by such new tourist spots as the Kabul Serena, an elegant $36.5-million hotel that claims a "five-star ambience" in the heart of the city. As many as 5,000 Western tourists visited Kabul last year, Jonathan Bean told me, most of them affluent Europeans and Americans who have traveled to "30 or 40" countries, including developing ones. "Most our clients are experienced travelers," Jonathan said. "They've trekked in Nepal, gone on safari in East Africa. Some have returned after coming here in the 1960s and 1970s. They see Afghanistan as the next great adventure-travel destination."

Most tourists who pass through view Kabul as an overnight stopover on the way to more remote corners of the country: the rugged Pamir Mountains in the northeast; the exotic bazaar town of Mazar-i-Sharif; and Bamiyan, the former site of the giant stone Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban. But those who linger for a few days, as I did, will discover a vibrant capital, steeped in tumultuous history and rich with Silk Road atmospherics.

"Kabul is the definition of the frontier town," I was told by Rory Stewart, the British diplomat turned author of the "The Places in Between," a best-selling account of his winter walk from Herat to Kabul just after the Taliban's defeat. Today Mr. Stewart lives in Kabul, where he runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which trains local craftsmen and is helping to renovate the decrepit Old Town by the Kabul River. The city is "a pluralistic place, with a fascinating history, half a dozen languages and countless subcultures," he said.

The city's security remains a cause for concern. Although most of the violence is concentrated in Taliban strongholds in the country's southeast, a handful of attacks have rocked the capital during the last year, including a suicide-bomb explosion on Sept. 8 at Massoud Circle, a major traffic hub, that killed 2 Americans and at least 16 Afghans. Anti-Western riots broke out last May in the aftermath of a fatal collision involving an American military convoy and civilian vehicles; crowds chanted "death to America" and attacked restaurants, hotels, police stations and shops, and British marines evacuated 21 European diplomats from the city.

Most foreign aid workers and diplomats live inside walled compounds guarded round the clock by private security teams, and the United Nations restricts its employees to hotels and restaurants in the capital that meet its stringent security regulations, including high blast walls and buildings set back several dozen yards from the road. Those who live in the city said the United Nations also put out daily threat warnings: "Green City," meaning one could travel around the city freely; "White City," no unnecessary travel; and "Red City," advising foreigners to stay indoors.

Yet with a few spectacular exceptions, the capital has remained violence free. "NATO and Afghan security forces have done a good job," I was told by Vince White, a Ministry of Finance consultant who has lived in Kabul for nearly five years. "The security companies try to make us paranoid," he said. "They depend on expatriate fear for their business."

Jonathan Bean regularly takes foreign tourists on walking tours of Kabul with a single, unarmed Afghan security guard. "People love Kabul," Johnathan said. "They've heard nothing positive about the place - that it was destroyed, that it's dangerous. Then they get here and get a big surprise - they see a bustling bazaar city, full of life."

In a week of exploring the city, from the windswept, near-deserted ramparts to the teeming, labyrinthine passageways of the Mandayi Bazaar, I never once felt threatened. To the contrary, I was welcomed everywhere by Afghans eager to show me that their country and city were groping their way toward recovery.

My arrival at Kabul's airport from New Delhi, on a dreary November afternoon, however, offered a hint of the still-shaky state of affairs in Afghanistan. The electricity in the terminal had been cut, and, in the semi-darkness, laborers dumped piles of baggage on the floor beside the immobile conveyor belt, setting off a scramble among my fellow passengers. An elderly Pashtun in a shalwar kamiz (a traditional shirt often seen also in Pakistan and India) and a gray turban elbowed me aside and lunged for an overstuffed cardboard box. Two airport policemen stood by idly, watching the chaos. Bags in hand, I stumbled through the frantic crowd, hailed a battered taxi, and headed for the Gandamack Lodge, a renovated 1930s villa owned by Peter Jouvenal, an old Afghan hand and former BBC cameraman. (The Gandamak, which opened in 2002, originally occupied a house that had belonged to one of Osama Bin Laden's wives; Mr. Jouvenal moved it into its current building last year.)

It didn't take me long to discover one of the newest hubs of expatriate Kabul. A photojournalist friend directed me to the Cabul Coffee House, a cozy establishment, painted adobe-pink and filled with Central Asian handicrafts, located on a muddy alley in the lively Qal-I-Fatula district.

Opened last year by two American women and the Afghan husband of one of them, the Cabul Coffee House functions as a sort of cross between Starbucks and a Manhattan literary bar. In addition to its lattes and double-shot cappuccinos, it offers readings and lectures one or two nights a week. I got there at about six o'clock to find several dozen Westerners, including aid workers, teachers, contractors and consultants, along with a smattering of Afghans, eating cheeseburgers, Greek salads and kebabs while waiting for the cultural program to begin. (The fact that so many foreigners had ventured into the streets of Kabul after dark was perhaps the most telling indication of the capital's relative stability.)

The guest speaker was Whitney Azoy, a Princeton-educated former United States diplomat to Afghanistan. Mr. Azoy had left the foreign service decades ago and transformed himself into one of the world's experts on buzkashi, Afghanistan's national sport, a sort of polo played with a goat carcass.

When I arrived, I found Mr. Azoy huddled in a corner of the cafe with the American screenwriter of "Pretty Woman", J. F. Lawton, who had been in the country for weeks researching a documentary about buzkashi. Then Mr. Azoy stood before the crowd and delivered an hourlong talk, accompanied by slides, about his discovery of this rough, fast-paced sport in the mountains of northern Afghanistan during his diplomatic tour in the 1970s. There was an unspoken poignancy to his lecture and his slides, all of which had been taken during that era: the world he was describing in loving detail was soon to by obliterated by the Soviet invasion and the subsequent civil war. (Although buzkashi is not indigenous to Kabul, President Muhammad Daoud brought it to the capital in 1978; matches have returned to Kabul, on a sporadic basis, since the Taliban's fall.)

The following day I hired a driver at the Gandamack and set out to see the National Museum of Afghanistan, in western Kabul. Large sections of capital remained wrecked after decades of war and neglect; beggars swarmed over us at intersections, and the traffic in the downtown area, along the Kabul River, was horrendous. In the heavy rain, the myriad unpaved streets had turned into quagmires. (During dry periods, I would soon discover, an opaque layer of dust and car exhaust hangs over the city bowl.) As we drove west along the Darulaman Road, past the former Soviet Embassy - an area of heavy fighting in 1993 and 1994 between Massoud and rival warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - I looked over empty tracts and the hulks of shelled, bullet-pocked buildings. The devastation was ubiquitous.

The National Museum itself bears testimony to the traumas of the last two decades. Until 1992 it contained one of the finest collections of art and cultural artifacts in Asia: 100,000 pieces from two millenniums of Afghan history. During the fight for Kabul, mujahedeen armies occupied and looted the museum; the structure was shelled in 1993 and fire destroyed the roof and the second floor. By the time the Taliban seized power, only a few thousand pieces remained; the museum's staff had hidden away the best works. Then, in 2001, Taliban leaders ordered all art objects depicting the human form destroyed, and cadres set upon the remaining exhibits with axes and sledgehammers, ruining 2,500 more works.

But the museum, like much of Kabul, is struggling back to life. The two-story, gray concrete villa was rebuilt with Greek, American and Italian money in 2004. When I arrived, workmen were laying tiles in the lobby and putting the finishing touches on a marble staircase, a project being financed by an Austrian aid group. Though most galleries were locked and display cases empty, I pushed through a half-open door and came upon a magnificent collection of 18th- and 19th-century wood-carved deities and monarchs from Nuristan, a mountainous province northeast of Jalalabad. These surreal treasures, reminiscent of West African fertility gods and Picasso's cubist works, were recently patched back together after being hammered into fragments by Taliban zealots. After admiring the several dozen works - hatchet marks and gouges still visible in the wood - I met with Omara Khan Massoudi, the museum's general director.

Mr. Massoudi was preparing the museum's second exhibition since the Taliban's fall, set to open in the winter of 2007: photographs and artifacts salvaged from the covered bazaar in Tashqurghan, a unique, mud-walled complex of mosques, shops and homes, bombed into rubble by the Soviets in 1982. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam donated glass cases for the exhibition, and those cases will later be used to house the permanent collection. "I hope within two years we can restore the museum to something like it was," Mr. Massoudi told me. "It all depends on security."

Many of Kabul's most impressive structures are off limits to tourists. The citadel of Bala Hissar - occupied over the centuries by the Mongols, the Moguls and the British - is now a military installation. The surrounding grounds were mined during the Soviet occupation and have yet to be cleared. The domed hilltop mausoleum of Nadir Shah, father of the aged present-day monarch, Zahir Shah, remains closed while its vandalized marble facade is painstakingly restored.

I did gain entry to the Babur Gardens, a rehabilitated complex of rose gardens and poplars beloved of the Mogul emperor who won Kabul from a rival in the 16th century and made Kabul his capital. Among its treasures is a small marble tomb, built by another Mogul emperor, Shah Jahan, who later built the Taj Mahal. I also visited the OMAR Mine Museum, which displays hundreds of Soviet-era personnel and anti-tank mines, along with an arsenal's worth of mortar shells, bullets and cluster bombs, a testament to the brutality of the Soviet occupation.

The real fascination of Kabul, I found, lies in the ordinary rhythms of life here, in the bustle of a reviving city. Early one morning Jonathan and Shafik met me in the lobby of the Serena (perhaps the only luxury hotel in the world that operates on a cash-only basis), to which I had moved after a few nights at the Gandamack, and led me on foot along the Kabul River to the Mandayi Market.

Destroyed by British forces in the 1840s, and again during the 1990s civil war, this rebuilt bazaar is the nerve center of the Afghan capital. Shafts of sunlight penetrated serpentine alleys lined by canvas-covered wooden stalls; the harsh light illuminated the bearded faces of Pashtun merchants and their bountiful wares: nuts, spices, dried fruits, tea, slabs of raw meat, live turkeys, blankets, beads of lapis lazuli. Sparks flew from the spinning wheels of knife sharpeners, and strips of beef sizzled in huge pans of sesame oil. Adolescent boys careened through the passages pushing wheelbarrows, sending shoppers scurrying for safety; two butchers led a bleating black sheep to a rear courtyard for slaughter.

We turned into a cacophonous bird market, where bright-green parakeets and budgies flitted by the hundreds inside bamboo cages. Five ethnic Uzbek men, swathed in wool blankets, with dark faces and almond eyes suggesting their Mongol ancestry, marched single-file through the alley and struck a deal for a fighting partridge, a large, red-beaked bird whose killer instinct is legendary. "The High Court has ruled bird fighting illegal," Shafik told me, "But it happens across the city. It's a part of life in Kabul."

THAT evening, Vince White, the American consultant, took me to a teetering building in the shadow of the domed Pul-i-Khishti Mosque, the dominant edifice of central Kabul. We had come to attend a weekly gathering of Sufi Muslims, members of a mystical sect whose ritualistic music, qawwali, and dance were banned during the Taliban era but have since been revived. We slipped past hashish-smoking men in a muddy alley, climbed to the building's second floor, removed our shoes and entered a fluorescent-lit room.

Seated on the green-carpeted floor were burly ethnic Tajiks wearing the beretlike brown pakul, popularized by Massoud; Pashtuns with prophets' white beards and billowing turbans; sloe-eyed Uzbeks and Hazaras; and a Medusa-haired ascetic in rags who flopped down beside me and began haranguing me in Dari, Afghanistan's dominant language (close to Farsi). All other eyes were focused on an elderly sitarist in a white turban, an adolescent drummer, a harmonium player, a virtuouso of the rubab - a mandolinlike Afghan instrument - and a black-haired young vocalist who is regarded, Mr. White told me, as one of Afghanistan's finest Sufi singers. "All of these people are poor," he said, over the singer's wailing vibrato. "This is a great escape from the problems of life in Afghanistan."

I stared across the room at a black-bearded gnome shrouded in a white robe. His head was bobbing, his face frozen in a rictus of ecstasy. The wild-haired ascetic clapped his hands to his cheeks and began to sway back and forth. A young Pashtun poured me a cup of Afghan green tea, and I sipped contentedly as the music wafted over me. Then, near midnight, my companion and I headed back to our car, through a darkened alley, past the sweet aroma of hashish, and the huddled forms of men warming themselves around a wood fire glowing in a barrel. Kabul - raw, ruined, yet stirring back to life - had never seemed more magical.

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