‘Hey Christina, wanna come for a ride?’ Wais asked me one day, looking pleased with himself. ‘I fixed up the crown prince’s car!’
I followed him down to the garage where one of his men was polishing a white 1968 Chevrolet Camaro. The temptation of driving around in probably the only convertible in Afghanistan on its first day out was irresistible. Wais opened the door with a great flourish and I wrapped my scarf round my head, donned my sunglasses and lowered myself down onto the beige leather seat. The car used to belong not to the crown prince but his brother Prince Nadir Shah, the father of Mostapha whom I had met in Rome, and had been part of his classic car collection, along with a Thunderbird that Wais was also trying to locate.
‘Cost me six, maybe seven thousand dollars,’ said Wais as he turned the key and we set off, spluttering at first but then smooth. The car dealer in him soon came out. ‘Six cylinder, listen to that baby purr. Pure magic.’ As we drove through the untidy streets, everyone turned to watch. Turbanned men fell off bicycles, children ran after us, shopkeepers and bakers came out onto the street to point. Up above us the sky was brilliant blue and the air was crisp and invigorating. Waving to people as we passed, I felt like the Queen of Kabul.
Driving round Kabul in Afghanistan’s only convertible.
‘There are no rules here, man,’ complained Wais, shaking his head as he swerved to avoid a man with a rifle on his shoulder leading a flock of muddy goats down the main road. It was more a matter of compromise as the yellow taxis, blue rickshaws and black government saloons tried to find spaces between the shepherds and beggars and robed men. I laughed as Wais proceeded to go the wrong way round a traffic island on which a flummoxed traffic policeman in a long white coat and peaked cap was standing brandishing a Stop – Go sign. Seeing the convertible, the traffic cop looked astonished then began to wave excitedly. ‘These guys all know us,’ said Wais. ‘They’re all in our pay.
‘Oh man.’ He stopped talking and covered his nose and mouth as we crossed the Kabul River, which emerges from between the mountains to the south and west of the city and meanders through the middle. Wishing momentarily that we were not in an open-topped car, I tried not to breathe in the nauseating odour from the almost dry riverbed into which people had evidently dumped their waste. Once the river was shining blue, there had been gardens all along the side and Emperor Babur would sit on a specially built stone terrace to drink wine and admire the view. But the grass had died, the trees been cut down and the banks had become a sprawling bazaar of the old and the rotten. Children with wooden pushcarts were selling brightly coloured sherbets from glass bottles with marbles as stoppers that were cloudy inside and almost certainly contained river effluent. There were men with piles of old clothes, a few stalls of black bananas and one of eggs, and in the midst of it all beggars with arms or legs missing, in some cases both.
It was hard to equate with Nancy Hatch Dupree’s breezy description in my 1976 guidebook of Kabul as ‘a fast-growing city where tall modern buildings nuzzle against bustling bazaars and wide avenues fill with brilliant flowing turbans, gaily striped chapans, mini-skirted school girls, a multitude of handsome faces and streams of whizzing traffic’. There was nothing modern about the city at all; on the contrary it felt like going back several hundred years except for the yellow taxis and occasional four-wheel drive bearing the militia of one warlord or another. Even the lampposts and roadnames had been looted for the metal. The only women were ghost-like figures in burqas and the girls’ schools were still closed.
Kabul was once a cosmopolitan city.
The Kabul I remembered from twelve years earlier, although still a city at war, had almost a festive air. It was June, the wedding month, flowers and blossoms perfuming the air, the Kabul River swollen with molten snows, and I had sat in the sunshine licking ice-creams in the university café with lively young women in high heels, some with dyed blonde hair, one even wearing a T-shirt proclaiming ‘I’m not with this idiot’ tightly pulled across her large breasts. At the apartment of a bureaucrat I had met, I had danced at a party where a well-known singer called Wajiha had strummed her guitar in between puffs of her cigarette. The only real signs of war apart from the large number of men – and women – in uniform and the drone of planes, had been the dawn queues at the bakers as people waited for the daily rations of five pieces of nan per family and the music and ideological commentary blaring from the loudspeakers hung in trees around the city which bizarrely sometimes included work-out classes and the theme from Love Story.
The fashionably-dressed women and the flowers may have disappeared but the handsome faces of the men were as I remembered, providing the only real colour in a city that had become a meeting point of all the races of Afghanistan. There were hawk-nosed Pashtuns in silk turbans or gold-threaded Kandahari caps, shorter coarser-featured Tajiks in karakul caps, darker-skinned Baluchis, sloe-eyed, flat-haired Turkmen and Uzbeks in bearskin hats, stocky Asiatic-looking Hazaras and fair-skinned, light-eyed Nuristanis from the impenetrable northern mountains, believed to be descendants of Alexander. Apart from those trying to sell rotten fruit or old clothes to each other, most seemed to be just waiting, standing or crouched by the roadside, their long pyjama tops over their knees. Almost all had leather belts slung around their waists or across their shoulders bearing knives and ammunition, and gave the impression of great strength, for tough conditions in Afghanistan where the weak die young have created a natural selection process. One group was watching two men playing a kind of speed-backgammon using Coke bottle tops and another surrounded a man showing off the beak and legs of a fighting cock he was trying to sell, but most stood slightly apart from each other and the years of civil war and massacres of different ethnic groups had left their faces furrowed with suspicion.
As we drove over newly-woven carpets laid out in the road to be ‘antiqued’ for gullible foreigners and into the celebrated Dar-ul Aman avenue, the brilliance of the sky seemed to fade as the winter sun dipped towards the horizon. In The Road to Oxiana, Byron described Dar-ul Aman as ‘one of the most beautiful avenues in the world, four miles long, dead straight, as broad as the Great West Road and lined with tall white-stemmed poplars’. There was no sign of poplars or the grass-banked streams that had run in front of them. Instead the area looked more devastated than the photographs I had seen of Dresden after the Second World War. For as far as the eye could see there wasn’t a single block undamaged, just row after row of ruins. The façades of some buildings still stood including one which resembled a Greek temple with its colonnaded pillars, but all were pockmarked with holes from hundreds of rockets and bullets, and, like a film set, there was nothing behind.
Dar-ul Aman.
I had heard about the destruction and seen pictures of it, but to be confronted with it for myself instantly turned our afternoon joyride into something more sinister. On my previous visit to Kabul, four months after the last Russian soldier had left, the city had appeared almost untouched as the natural defences of the high mountains, rising like the scaled backs of dinosaurs from the plains all around, meant that during the Soviet occupation the mujaheddin had been unable to do much more than send a few rockets round the airport. In a vast concrete bunker of a compound near the start of Dar-ul Aman avenue, I had interviewed the Soviet ambassador Yuli Vorontsov, the First Deputy Foreign Minister, who was said to be the most powerful man in town. Now, feeling disoriented, I looked around in vain for that building but like the school and the cultural centre, the carpet bazaar and the match factory, it was gone. All this damage had been caused after the mujaheddin had taken the capital in 1992 and started fighting each other, first everyone against the luckless Hazaras, then the forces of Hekmatyar and Massoud continuing their long-running rivalry no matter who or what was in between. These ruins were the work of weapons supplied by the Americans, British and Saudis.
‘This is too spooky man,’ said Wais after we had driven about a mile further, in stunned silence. ‘I’ve seen it before but it don�
��t get any better.’ It was the first time I had seen him quiet and he was clearly uncomfortable with the attention his car was attracting. There was no other traffic on the wide avenue but lots of dark-looking characters hanging about, some sitting round a fire, apparently living in the ruins. I shivered. Dusk was falling and the cold felt like a dentist’s drill on my gums.
‘I don’t think other young people will come back,’ he said as he performed a hurried three-point turn. ‘What’s here? Just rubbish and ruins. Nothing works. Most guys my age have mortgages and kids and have been working six or seven years and are in good jobs. They ain’t gonna give that up to come here where the most you could earn has gotta be $100 a month and no schools for their kids. No way. Back in Ridgefield I was clearing forty or fifty thousand easy after tax, you could pick up a burger or a pizza on the way home or take in a movie and when you turned on the shower out came hot water like “pow!”, fast and powerful. Coming home is good but it ain’t that good.’
‘Look out for picturesque walled castles, cultivated fields and poplar groves’, recommended the indefatigable Mrs Dupree in my guidebook but all I could see was rubble and the familiar painted skull and cross-bones warning of landmines. Both intrigued and repelled by what I had witnessed with Wais, I had hired a taxi and set off back up the avenue of Dar-ul Aman, this time intending to travel its whole length. Dar-ul Aman means City of Peace and the road leads to the place that Amanullah, the king who tried to make his citizens wear Western clothes, had built as his new capital.
About two thirds of the way along, I stopped to take photographs. In the distance the white Dar-ul Aman Palace loomed, a large square building with a cupola on each corner, like some Gothic house of horror. The sky was grey and soulless, and the high mountains behind the palace dark and forbidding. Once again the wide avenue was deserted, and the only sound was the creaking of a cart on pram wheels carrying a man with no legs who was propelling it along furiously with his arms. A woman in a blue burqa clutching the hand of small boy drifted into view as if from nowhere and, amid all this bleakness, the vision was jarring as if some colour had seeped into a black and white photograph. Stopping in the road in front of me, she astonished me by lifting her burqa to reveal the moon-like face of a woman in her forties, kind if weary. Speaking in English, she invited me to lunch. ‘Please it’s all ready, just you come with us,’ she said, ‘it’s just across the road.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied. ‘I have an appointment.’ It seemed a very British thing to say in a city where nothing worked including the telephones.
‘Welcome,’ she replied. ‘We are very happy to see Britishers in our country, especially women. God will go with you.’
The taxi-driver hooted his horn. He had warned me that I would almost certainly be robbed or murdered on this road. I got in the car and we drove off, the woman and the boy still standing in the middle of the road gazing after us. When I looked back again there was no sign of them.
Dar-ul Aman avenue with the ruined palace in the background. Kabul Museum is to the right of the palace.
My driver, whose name was Yaqub, the Muslim equivalent of Jacob, was a classic-featured Kabuli with hooked nose and dark deep-sunk eyes, and looking at him it was easy to understand the once widely-held belief that the Afghans were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Just as with Afghanistan, land of the Afghans, no one seemed to know where the name Kabul originated. There were plenty of legends, many with Biblical links. Babur believed that it was founded by Cain, the son of Adam, and wrote of visiting his tomb in Kabul. Some credence is lent to this theory by the fact that in Persian, the word for Cain is Cabil. Mountstuart Elphinstone, in his Account of the Kingdom of Caubul about his travels from 1808–10, the first British description of the country, wrote, ‘the origin of the name of Afghanistan is entirely uncertain. They maintain they are descended from Afghaun, grandson of the King of Saul.’ Sir Alexander Burnes, the British envoy hacked to pieces at his house in the city he loved in 1841 by protesters against British occupation, wrote that it was popularly believed that two sons of Noah called Cakool and Habul were the founders of the Afghan race. When it came to naming their greatest city the two brothers could not agree and finally each gave a syllable of their name, hence Ca-bul.
Much of old Kabul was built by Babur who captured the city in 1504 and lived in the Bala Hissar fort on a mound south of the Kabul River until 1525, writing poetry, laying out gardens, and disposing of various rivals within his own family including a rebellious step-grandmother, before moving on to Delhi and founding his great Moghul Empire. He described the city as ‘an excellent mercantile centre’ with ‘the most pleasing climate in the world’, explaining, ‘within a day’s ride it is possible to reach a place where the snow never falls. But within two hours one can go where the snows never melt.’ In his own inimitable way, he added, ‘Kabul’s rhubarb is excellent’.
Yet it only became a capital city in 1776 under Timur Shah, second son of Afghanistan’s first king Ahmad Shah Durrani and his chosen successor. Timur moved the capital from Kandahar out of spite because he was so angry with the Kandahari tribes who had opposed his accession; he spent his entire reign quelling revolts. Apparently not learning anything from his own experience, he went on to have twenty-three sons and left no designated heir, which meant they all ended up killing, blinding, and locking each other up in the dungeons of the Bala Hissar, and never completed their father’s tomb.
Little remains of Kabul from Babur’s or even Timur’s days, not because of the jihad, as with the destruction of the ancient musalla and minarets in Herat, but because of two British punitive expeditions in the nineteenth century.
The first demolition mob, the Army of Retribution, arrived shortly after the murder of Alexander Burnes, in response to the massacre of thousands of retreating British officers from the Army of the Indus along with their wives and children, on the road to Jalalabad in January 1842. The attack had been led by Akbar, the son of Dost Mohammed, the king ousted by the British to install their puppet, Shah Shuja. The massacre was followed in April by the slaying of Shah Shuja outside the walls of his own palace.
One of the warring sons of Timur, Shah Shuja had been king before from 1803–09 when he was described by British envoy Mountstuart Elphinstone, who visited his Court in the winter capital of Peshawar, as being ‘surrounded by eunuchs’ and wearing so much gold and precious stones that ‘we thought at first he had an armour of jewels’.2 Pearls were strung across him like belts, the Koh-i-Noor flashed from one of the emerald bracelets above his elbows and his crown was ‘so complicated and dazzling that it was difficult to understand and impossible to describe.’ But for all this magnificent show, the ‘Luckless Prince’ as his troops called him, was ousted shortly after by his half brother Shah Mehmud, who he himself had toppled in the first place, then spent thirty years in exile in India before he was restored to the throne with the help of the Sikhs3 and the British. His return on a white charger draped with gold had been met with such indifference and hostility on the part of the Afghan people that the Army of the Indus had had to stay on in Kabul to keep him in power. Realising they would be there for a while, they had built cantonments, brought in their families (though there was also said to be considerable ‘fraternisation’ with the local women) as well as fine wines, crystal chandeliers and servants, and occupied themselves with amateur dramatics, ice-skating and hunting.
The killing of Shah Shuja meant that British honour was at stake. It also sparked a national outrage at one of the worst massacres in the country’s history, and by September the Union Jack was flying over the Afghan capital again as the Army of Retribution fought their way through the Khyber Pass and exacted their revenge, burning down Kabul’s famous seventeenth-century covered bazaar. Accounts from travellers describe the Char Chatta or Four Arcades Bazaar as a beautiful place, four painted arcades linked by open plazas in the centre of each was a fountain. It was one of the great crossroads of Central Asia where one could buy silk
and paper from China in the north; spices, pearls and exotic wood from India in the east; glass, pottery, silver and wine from Persia and Turkey in the west and slaves brought from both directions. The British forces destroyed all this, and set fire to so much of the city that flames were said to have still filled the sky two days later when the troops left. Having learnt their lesson, this time they did not attempt to stay and the following year, 1843, Dost Mohammed quietly reoccupied the throne, telling the British, ‘I am like a wooden spoon, you may throw me hither and thither but I shall not be hurt.’ After four years of disaster and the terrible human cost of the First Anglo-Afghan War, the British had left Afghanistan as they had found it.
Second Anglo-Afghan War.
The Second Anglo-Afghan war was founded on the ongoing rivalries between Victorian England and Tsarist Russia whose army maps had stopped showing any southern boundary to their territories, and was precipitated in 1878 by the refusal of the Afghans to join an alliance against the Russians or accept a British Mission to Kabul to counter an uninvited one from St Petersburg. The capture of the Khyber Pass, Jalalabad and Kandahar by 35,000 British troops forced a change of heart and in July 1879 Sir Louis Cavagnari rode into Kabul on the back of an elephant with an escort of seventy-five Indian soldiers from the Guides Cavalry to become the first British Resident in Kabul since the murder of Burnes. Six weeks later he too was dead, killed when the British Residency inside the Bala Hissar fort was stormed by mutinous Afghan troops, just one day after Cavignari had sent a cable which concluded with the words ‘all well’. The mayor of Kabul carried his head in triumph through the city.
The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 20