FieldWatch:
Re-emerging Kabul
By Rasna Warah

Photo/Rasna Warah

Picture this. You are on a passenger-carrying cargo plane that has just landed on an airstrip on which a government minister was stabbed to death two days before, and the fields surrounding the runway are littered with the shells of fighter planes. Security is tight. Gun-wielding soldiers usher you into a dark hallway with shattered windows and huge holes in the ceiling. There is no immigration officer in sight. A non-official-looking officer walks up to you and asks for your passport, and after handing it over, he tells you that you will get it back when you leave the country. As you approach the luggage area, you realize there is no electricity and therefore no functioning conveyer belt. The luggage is thrown at the passengers through a hole in the wall; you have to identify yours in the dark. You move on to the arrival section, which is a dark, crowded, ominous-looking corridor. Beyond it lies your destination.

Welcome to Kabul, Afghanistan.

I arrived in Kabul on a wintry February afternoon, three months after the United States-led coalition had liberated the city from the Taliban that had had control over 90 per cent of the country since 1996. I was not alone. Almost the entire international community had descended on Kabul. Since last January, approximately 20 UN agencies, over 60 international non-governmental organizations and a sizeable number of bilateral aid agencies have sent their representatives to the city to map out short- and long-term strategies for the war-torn country. During the reign of the Taliban, aid agencies did not recognize the authorities as legitimate and therefore did not invest in Afghanistan. There was also widespread fear that funds channelled through the Taliban would go towards feeding the war. But now the drought had turned into a deluge.

The only recommended accommodation for UN staff was the UN guest house - a dormitory-style building in the centre of the city. As this was fully booked, most occupants had to double up and share rooms and bathrooms with other UN staff visiting Kabul. My roommate was an Afghan-American woman who had returned home after 28 years in exile. The guest house had several advantages; for one, it was one of the few places in the city that had both electricity and running water, and it had a bar, which only served whisky at $2 a shot.

Kabul was under strict curfew, from nine in the evening to six in the morning. This meant that I had to delay my tour of the city till the next morning. Winter mornings are chilly but crisp. On a clear day, the majestic snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains rise above Kabul, a painfully glorious backdrop to what I imagined was once a magnificent city. (Many armies, including Alexander’s in the fourth century and the Indian Moghuls’ in the 16th century, had passed through Kabul over the centuries.) As the day progresses, smells ranging from the sweet aroma of fresh naan bread to the stench of raw sewage fill the air.

Twenty years of war, beginning with the Russian invasion in 1979 and the subsequent insurgency of the mujahideen in the 1980s, which later transformed itself into the Taliban movement, not to mention the recent United States-led coalition against terrorism, have left Kabul’s physical, social and economic infrastructure in ruins. Entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble and no one quite remembers any more whose army destroyed which building. The only buildings still left standing are the mosques and the Soviet-built apartment blocks housing civil servants. Kabul Municipality estimates that almost 40 per cent of the houses in the city have been destroyed in the last 15 years. Solid waste disposal barely meets minimum standards, and running water and electricity are luxuries in most homes.

Photo/Rasna Warah

Amid the rubble, however, are signs of life. The open-air markets of Kabul are a beehive of activity, where butchers sell anything from cows’ hooves to goats’ heads, both considered delicacies. Women in blue tent-like veils (burqas) haggle over the price of cauliflower. Blaring sounds of popular Indian film music fill the streets - Indian films and music were banned under the Taliban and the Afghans have now laid claim on both with a vengeance.

These are some of the more visible signs of Afghanistan’s liberation. But what most people do not know is that even during the darkest days of the Taliban, a silent revolution was taking place in cities and towns across this landlocked country. Since 1995, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), as part of the UN Development Programme’s PEACE initiative, has been supporting over 80 community-based organizations - many managed by women - in six cities, including Kabul, which have been running schools, health clinics and business enterprises, thereby providing a unique system of local self-governance in an extremely difficult and complex environment characterized by violence, fear and intimidation.

Parveen Ahmed Zai manages one of these organizations in Kabul’s District 8. Like many women there, she still dons the burqa in public, not only for religious reasons - Islam came to Afghanistan over 1,000 years ago in the mid-seventh century A.D. - but also because she doesn’t quite trust the peace, and fears that there might be hundreds of Taliban sympathizers in her midst who will single her out for revenge once the coalition forces leave. Under the Taliban, women’s employment and education were curtailed, and community organizations had to be run from home. Parveen herself was often beaten by the authorities, because her organization ran a school for girls from home. Now, for the first time, she can leave home to go to work, and the girls in her community can go to school.

Parveen is not unique in her struggle. Over the next five days, I met several Afghan men and women whose stories revealed a wounded but resilient nation: the teacher who uses her skills to educate communities on how to manage small businesses; civil servants who have not been paid in months because the government has no money to pay salaries; and the beautiful wide-eyed children who play in bombed-out skeletons of buildings, oblivious to the landmines that, until recently, were buried all over Kabul. These are people whose eyes display modern and ancient secrets, old and new scars.

“The lie of the land, psychologically speaking, was measured against two inescapable reference points: that the city might at any moment be overrun, and that no one was exempt from truant rockets”, wrote Jason Eliot on Kabul in his travelogue, ‘An Unexpected Light’. “The tight weft of traditional Afghan society meant that there was always someone we knew who, in turn, had known one or more of the victims, and each loss touched us with an almost personal intensity.”

Five days later, I left Kabul by road as all flights out of the city had been cancelled due to bad weather. The 12-hour drive to Islamabad, through Jalalabad and Peshawar near the Pakistani border, is scenic but rough. Only certain sections of this major highway are tarmacked. The UN car in which I travelled carried four non-burqa-clad women, including myself, and a male driver. Rural Afghans are not used to seeing women travelling on their own, so we generated quite a bit of curiosity along the way.

Afghanistan’s countryside is a picture of beauty and serenity. Crystal clear streams traverse magnificent mountainous landscapes. Women in brightly-coloured salwar-kameez prepare an afternoon meal outside their homes, while boys can be seen herding sheeps on the many hills that surround villages. But the tranquillity is deceptive. According to UN security sources, much of the countryside is harbouring thousands of landmines. That innocent-looking field of flowers could actually be a death trap.

This is clearly a country in need of both physical and emotional healing. The international community, led by the European Union, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United States, has already pledged $4.5 billion to rebuild the country. But while one can fix the roads, construct sewerage and sanitation systems, install electricity and rebuild houses, how does one go about healing the emotional scars and wounded spirits of an entire nation? This is a question the international community will have to grapple with if Afghanistan’s recovery is to be complete.

Photo/Rasna Warah Women Involved in Reconstruction In 1995, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), as part of the Poverty Eradication and Community Empowerment (PEACE) initiative of the United Nations Development Programme, started the Community Fora programme in Afghanistan. The core of the Fora programme’s strategy has been to establish sustainable, multi-functional neighbourhood centres that provide economic, educational and social benefits to men, boys, women and girls in the various communities. “Our biggest challenge when we started the community development project in Afghanistan was to get women involved in community meetings”, says Samantha Reynolds, UN-HABITAT Chief Technical Adviser to Afghanistan. “In consultation after consultation, I became increasingly frustrated by the fact that there were no women present.” Ms. Reynolds was invariably the only woman in these meetings. The team’s breakthrough came rather unexpectedly one Friday morning in 1995 in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, when at the close of an all-male meeting, the mullah agreed to invite women to the next meeting. Ms. Reynolds remembers the moment vividly: “When we arrived, the muezzin crackled into life over the frozen mudscape of domes. It turned out he was not calling people to prayer; rather, he was using the mosque’s loudspeaker to invite all the women in the neighbourhood to the meeting. Before we knew it, the room was filled with blue-shrouded figures, some curious, others accusing and skeptical. Many wanted to know why the United Nations had not consulted with them before and why the world was not helping Afghanistan.” After the Taliban took control over most of the country in 1996, these fora had to be run from women’s homes. Although less visible, they nonetheless managed, even in the most repressive of times, to open home-based businesses and schools for both boys and girls. The authorities left them alone for the most part because the women’s fora were viewed essentially as home-based cottage industries that did not pose any direct threat to the Taliban’s extremist view of gender relations. But it wasn’t an easy task. The Taliban authorities showed little interest in the welfare and development functions of the State. This made it difficult for UN organizations to secure approval on projects, particularly those that involved women and girls. The authorities curtailed the employment and education of women and girls. As a result, women’s opportunities to earn a living outside the home were non-existent, and illiteracy among girls escalated. Women heading households because their husbands either had been killed, had disappeared or were imprisoned for political reasons, felt the impact of this repressive policy most acutely. Subsequently, their economic dependency on family and neighbours increased during this period. “Much of our work with girls had to be done underground”, explains Parveen Ahmed Zai, a Community Fora member in Kabul. “We had to teach girls secretly, because there were Taliban informers in our midst who would spy on us and inform the authorities. In many cases, women members were beaten, but there were also men within our communities who supported us in our work.” Now that the Taliban are no longer in power, she hopes that the Community Fora will operate as non-segregated bodies that address community issues through a common platform. “The UN-HABITAT experience in integrating women in community development under very difficult circumstances has shown us that women have a crucial role to play in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan”, says Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-HABITAT. “It is our hope that women will be integrated in national and local development strategies in the immediate future.” However, women like Mahbouba Wizi, a UN-HABITAT Community Liaison Officer, are more cautious and less optimistic. She still dons a burqa in public, even though she complains that it has ruined her eyesight. “Many women don’t trust the peace”, she explains. “Who knows, there could be Taliban among us. They could be watching and waiting to seek their revenge when they come back to power.” Under the Taliban, Ms. Wizi was forced to work from home, even as a UN national officer. She stepped into the UN-HABITAT office in Kabul for the first time in January this year. - Rasna Warah

Links:
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT)
Habitat Debate

Rasna Warah is Editor of Habitat Debate, a UN-HABITAT periodical, based in Nairobi, Kenya. She visited Afghanistan in February and also took the accompanying photographs.