Kabul: A city where war is never far away

Kabul: A city where war is never far away
By Tyler Hicks Published: July 6, 2008 Kabul: A city where war is never far away By Tyler Hicks
Sunday, July 6, 2008 My first trip to Kabul was in 2001. I arrived as Northern Alliance soldiers were fighting Taliban gunmen in and around the Afghan capital. Those who resisted were killed, and those captured were more likely to be executed than taken prisoner. There was a power vacuum in Kabul, a brief moment when one set of rulers had fled and the next had not yet taken over. This can be a liberating time for a photographer. There were no clear rules, no central authority that might restrict you from taking pictures. I've returned to Afghanistan nearly every year since then. Today, at first glance, the dusty stalls and kebab joints of Kabul, with their bearded men and covered women, look much the same - in at least one important way - as they did when the Taliban were forced to flee. Ordinary people seem stoic under the circumstances, which are better than they were in 2001 but still deeply uncertain. Generations of conflict have numbed the senses. From the Russian occupation during the 1980s, through the years of Taliban rule in the 1990s, and now the intensifying coalition war against the Taliban insurgency, violence has become ingrained in their lives. After a recent period being embedded with the U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan, I stopped in Kabul to wander the streets and take photos of a city forever in transition. The Western presence was something not tolerated during Taliban rule, so there have been some changes. A new shopping mall, with escalators in a city where constant electricity is a luxury, offers Western-style clothes, gold jewelry, a cafe. A fast-food establishment, mimicking American chains, offers fried chicken and fries instead of lamb kebab and rice. Meanwhile, refugees and internally displaced civilians, left homeless by decades of war, have created a beggar society, with the sick and disabled desperate for food and work. The cost of housing in urban Kabul is very high compared with that in the countryside, and many people live in crumbling buildings and makeshift tents. There is also, on a hill overlooking the city, an Olympic-size pool built by the Soviets in the 1980s. It is said that the Taliban forced criminals off the platforms to their deaths at the bottom of the pool. Now, as then, it contains little or no water.With unemployment at about 40 percent, a large number of idle men have little to do. Snooker clubs, where men play and smoke cigarettes, are popular. So are small video arcades. Most popular are the Indian and Pakistani movies that dominate the theaters; there, for the price of a ticket, viewers can watch increasingly revealing scenes of women.Drug addicts crowd into a dilapidated section of the old city, smoking hashish and shooting heroin. Drug addiction is on the rise in Afghanistan, fed in part by a flow of refugees from Pakistan, who find no work but can buy the drugs cheaply. War or no war, West or no West, Afghanistan remains the world's largest producer of opium, an industry that the Taliban continue to profit from. The newly resurgent Taliban continue to push for greater influence, and not just in the remote regions near the Pakistan border. A recent assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in Kabul killed three people. Then the Taliban freed 1,200 inmates in a brazen attack on a prison in the southern city of Kandahar.The Taliban, clearly, are still strong in Afghanistan. So war, as it has been for generations, is never far away.


Hasni Essa
Peace & Pluralism