Afghan Scene Magazine November 2011

SCENE

perspective • insight • people • reviews • pics • life

AFGHAN

ISSUE 88 - November 2011

Highland Fling: Karzai in ScotlandBehind The Scenes of Kabul At Work

The 2001 invasion—up close and personal

Reading Shakespeare in Kandahar

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Afghan Scene November 2011

Afghan Scene November 2011www.afghanscene.com


7 Introduction

10 Who Is The Body Builder?A Kabul at Work vignette

16 Kabul At Work Behind The ScenesScene talks to the man behind the multi-media mapping project

22 Highland Fling: Karzai in ScotlandFormer British Ambassador to Kabul Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles recounts how President Hamid Karzai went to Scotland in an extract from his memoir of high diplomacy in Kabul

40 Cover feature: Reading Shakespeare in KandaharAf-Pak correspondent Nick Schifrin asks if the cost of America’s revenge following 9/11 has, as in Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty play Titus Andronicus, been too great

58 Recollections of the 2001 invasionJournalists look back on the high hopes and brutal fighting that accompanied the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan 10 years ago

64 In the First PersonLapis man David James talks Afghanistan

68 Be SceneKabul party pictures

72 Afghan Essentials All you need to know about where to go in Kabul

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Publisher: Afghan Scene Ltd, Wazir Akbar Khan, Kabul, AfghanistanManager & Editor: Afghan Scene Ltd, Kabul, AfghanistanDesign: Kaboora ProductionAdvertising: [email protected]: Emirates Printing Press, DubaiContact: [email protected] / www.afghanscene.comAfghan Scene welcomes the contribution of articles and / or pictures from its readers. Editorial rights reserved. Cover photo: Julius Cavendish

Afghan Scene November 2011IntroductionContents

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AFGHAN

ISSUE 88 - November 2011

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Thank You and Goodbye

Introduction

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The reins at Afghan Scene are changing hands, which seems as good a reason as any to look back on three years in Afghanistan and pay a valediction to

a country that almost anyone who spends any time here comes to love deeply.

There was Kabul itself—city of secret gardens, open sewers and edgy urbanization, of warlord’s temples to greed and garishness, slums rising up sheer mountainsides and the bucolia of the university campus, where it all started so long ago. At night you could listen to tabla and rabab in rose-scented gardens, or you might stumble ceremonial sword fighting on the streets of Qala-e-Fatullah to mark a local boy’s engagement, or you could hit L’Atmo—that ubiquity where waiters in starched tunics served anaemic coffees and industrial-strength cocktails to the hard-bitten and the hard living.

There was waking on remote outcrops at dawn, or rolling over the green breast of the central highlands without another car for miles, or catching a glimpse of a wolf at 13,000 feet. There was slurping sweet green tea at chaikhanas by the way, or eating partridge in the dead of winter in a snowbound village, or sipping bootleg whisky in Kandahar on hot summer nights while gunfire grumbled across the city.

What I’ll remember best are the visceral friendships, which took no account of background, circumstances or nationality, the comradeship, the shared excitement. It was better than I’d have ever imagined. Staelemashe, Afghanistan. We’ll meet again. � �

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Almost all of the photographs and cartoons featured in Afghan Scene are available for sale direct from the artists. Most of them are available for commissions, here and

elsewhere. If you would like to contribute to Afghan Scene, or if you can’t get hold of a contributor, please contact [email protected].

Scene Team

ContributorsAfghan Scene Magazine is proud to showcase work from the best

photographers in Afghanistan

David Gill is a British writer, photographer and videogarpher focusing on a social documentary and overseas development. His current book projectKabul, a City at Work is a selection of over 100 original portraits.

web.mac.com/shot2bits/work

Lynne O’Donnell covered the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan for The Australian, for whom she was China correspondent from 1998-2002. She was Kabul bureau chief for

Agence France-Presse 2009-2010

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles was the British Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2007 until 2009. He served as the UK’s Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from

2009 – 2010. He is now BAE Systems’ international business development director, focusing on the Middle East and south-east Asia.

Nick Schifrin is the ABC News correspondent covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Julius Strauss first travelled to the Balkans as a freelance photographer during the Serbo-Croat and Bosnian wars. Later he worked in Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia,

Greece, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq and Russia. He now runs Grizzly Bear Ranch in a remote British Colombia valley with his wife Kristin.

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Afghan Scene November 2011Kabul at work Kabul at work

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Who is the body builder?

www.afghanscene.com Afghan Scene November 2011 Afghan Scene November 2011www.afghanscene.com

Afghan Scene November 2011Afghan Scene November 2011

Name: Ahmad Shuja MomuzaiAge: 30Length of service: 10 yearsIncome: nonePrice: $100 for gym membershipEmployees: Personal trainerGyms in Kabul: 500Location: Iron Man Gym

“We want to show the world that this is

Afghanistan. A strong Afghanistan,

a peaceful Afghanistan”Mr. Afghanistan colours up Photo: David Gill




Afghan Scene November 2011Kabul at work Kabul at work

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eligible to compete in Mr Afghanistan.

Again there is no prize but people take it very seriously. Last year, Mr Afghanistan spent more than $10,000 on his body with protein supplements and training over a year. It is an expensive sport and dangerous too. He died and his brother said he was poisoned.

He was training for Mr South Asia and people were jealous. Sabotage is common amongst body builders. I remember when I was a kid during the communist times there were 52 body builders who were being flown all over the world. Someone killed the pilot on the plane and everyone was killed. It could have been Iranians or Indians who were responsible. Who knows?

I am not scared though as this is a peaceful sport. That’s what keeps me going. We want to show the world that this is Afghanistan. A strong Afghanistan, a peaceful Afghanistan. And people are inspired by us. Last year at the Mr Kabul competition a policeman asked me where I work out. The next day he joined the gym and stopped smoking cigarettes and hashish.

When I was younger I used to run and do kick boxing. In one fight I broke my friend’s nose and stopped after that. If you hit your friend… well it is not good to fight.

We moved to Pakistan when I was 17 after I was arrested and detained in Pul e Charki prison for being Panshiri. It was tough and I worked in a garment factory to help pay for

I never thought, when I was younger, that I would be competing for the title in Afghanistan.

I started body building in 2006. It is a peaceful sport, you know, no fighting. My father was also a body builder but had to stop because of the wars. Anyway, he told me about it and I began training. For the last two years I come second in “Mr Kabul”.

I work out 3 times a day. 30 minutes in the morning and evening and 15-20 minutes at midday. If I weren’t dieting I would be pushing 140kg on my arms and 500kg on my thighs. I train in the Iron Man Gym but there are over 500 gyms in Kabul.

I used to be so skinny, weighing just 60 kg. Now I am 80. I am dieting at the moment as you have to strip down all the fat before building up muscle again otherwise your muscles don’t look good when you pose.

The trouble is that there are no professional gyms, they are good but there is no investment from the Olympic Committee or the government to make them quality gyms. You pay for the privilege. Last year 16 people won medals in the South Asian games but I think they had to pay for their own tickets to compete. And there are no physiotherapists to help you if you injure yourself.

Anyone can try to compete in a competition, so long as you have a good body. There is no prize – just a trophy, a medal and a certificate. If you win Mr Kabul you are

The Body Photo: David Gill

“When we saw the attacks in the

twin buildings and realised we

could go back to Afghanistan we

were happy.”







worsened though. That’s politics for you.

Life is good now however. It is more like it used to be when I was a child. I love my family, my wife, my son, my sister and brothers. I love my job as a house manager and I love training.

But what makes me sad is when I hear about suicide attacks. Yesterday there was a suicide attack in Kunduz and 30 people were killed. That is 30 families who will be grieving now. And you know how big Afghan families are. It makes me so so sad to think about their loss. A lot of people my age, all they have ever known is conflict and their minds have been affected. They get angry quickly, they argue… you can see it in the roads when they drive, people shout at each other all the time and it makes me sad. That is why I like bodybuilding; you can have huge strength and maintain peace. �

my younger brothers’ education. It paid off though as two of my brothers are working as interpreters for the military as their English is so good.

We used to watch beatings and murders on TV from Pakistan. When we saw the attacks in the twin buildings and realised we could go back to Afghanistan we were happy but when we arrived it was hard. The city had regressed. During the communist regime, Kabul was really clean and there were trees and beautiful buildings, none of these horrible poppy palaces. When I was a kid in those times I loved playing with my friends in the gardens at school. The city was a good place. It was peaceful during the Taliban but there was no work and no freedom for women.

When we returned there was no gas, no electricity. It was almost like a ghost town. Day by day it got better. Security has

Kabul: A City At Work is a multi-media project, led by a joint international and Afghan crew collecting interviews, photographic portraits and video shorts of the people of Kabul in their working environments. You can find out more at www.kabulatwork.tv

Kabul at work

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Kabul at work

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Ahmad Shuja Momuzai at work Photo: David Gill





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Kabul at work Kabul at work

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Kabul At Work:

Behind The ScenesScene talks to British photographer and Kabul At Work supremo David

Gill about his mammoth multi-media project to document present-day Kabul through the prism of the working lives of hundreds of Kabulis

try to find publishers. Everyone thought it was a great idea. But no one would really fund it. I just started doing it. I thought, ‘Build it and they will come’. So I started working on it for free in my spare time, collecting characters, boring everybody silly with the concept, but never giving up. And then I got a tiny bit of funding and that meant I couldn’t give up. I was legally obliged to finish the thing. And then we made this documentary for al-Jazeera with [Director] Oliver [Englehart] and that went down really well, and that gave me lots of encouragement. So we took it to the US State Department, had a screening of it at the Duck and Cover, and they thought it was awesome and said, ‘We’d love to fund it.’

Scene: How did you persuade Kabulis to let you document their lives?

David Gill: On one level it’s really straightforward, the access in Afghanistan is – you can just rock up. People don’t have huge amounts of gatekeepers like they do in [the U.K]. If you’re talking about influential people, you just ring them up and they

Scene: Where did this whole project start? What was the inspiration? When did you think this is what I’d like to do, and how had you got to that point?

David Gill: It kind of started when there was that attack at the Indian Embassy. I’d been trying to convince everybody that I lived in this amazing city and then that Indian Embassy bomb went off and Kabul was all over the headlines and on TV, and it made me realise that Kabul only gets attention when something dramatic happens. So I pitched this story to Esquire Magazine, and they ran the feature, Kabul At Work, little vignettes of eight different people. When they were [first] trying to put together a list, I came up with 50 suggestions. So then the editor said, ‘You should do a book.’ So that was the genesis of it, the idea.

Scene: What happened next? It’s one thing to have an idea, another to turn it into something.

David Gill: Well then I started working on—I don’t know how interesting it is—you

David Gill on patrol in Helmand Photo: David Gill





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Kabul at work Kabul at work

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prostitute, tell me about it,’—and they would. In Afghanistan, you’ll ask someone and you’ll start hearing how their tribe moved from Ghazni to Kabul in the 14th century, and if you don’t speak the language and aren’t part of the culture it’s really difficult to construct a personal narrative for each of them on video. So the logistics, the language, and then, obviously, convincing people to tell you stories—sometimes you interview them and they tell you one story and you go back and they tell you something completely different, and you think, ‘What did you tell me yesterday, that’s complete bullsh*t.’ Interviewing women is still one of the most difficult challenges. We have a good selection of women—a general, a mechanic, a driving instructor, an actress. It’s just difficult, convincing women that this is a good idea. But most of the women we have found are really ballsy, so maybe that’s not even a difficulty. If you think of them, they’re all bonkers. They don’t really fear. No one does a study but I think the large majority of the population must have some kind of mental trauma.

Scene: And what and when were the moments that filled you with hope and excitement and satisfaction and kept you going?

David Gill: I feel like I’m still at the start of it. As time marches on and I’m in the middle of the project and the website’s launched I feel as though I’m at the start. I’ve overreached myself. Trying to encapsulate a city of five million people, I want to over-deliver on this project because I believe in it so much.

say, ‘Come round’. There are different levels of social strata—you’ve got your business magnates and your ordinary people. There’s an American film project, they’d throw a dart at a map, fly there, open a yellow pages, put their finger on a page, call them up and say, ‘Can we come over and do a story on you?’ To prove the point that everyone’s got a story. And by virtue of the 30 years of conflict, the Taliban era, everyone’s got a story [here]. They’ve been refugees, caught up in a civil war. Everyone’s got some kind of incredible back-story. From Abdullah Abdullah to the guy selling phone cards in Medina Bazaar, I suppose that’s the background. [The project]’s not really about that. It’s about their lives and how they got on with it, whether they left and came back, or whether they had to stay because they were poor. It’s about how they manage to function and get on with their everyday lives.

Scene: What were the difficulties you faced once you began pulling together all the different strands and vignettes of Kabul life?

David Gill: One of the biggest obstacles is running a business. Registering with AISA. The idea of, ‘Let’s set up a business, off we go’—it’s a huge logistical nightmare just trying to register with all the right government ministries. The main problems are: interviewing people who don’t talk about themselves in the same way Westerners do. The entire project was inspired by a Studds Terkel book titled ‘Working’ and he wandered round America saying, ‘Oh you’re an air hostess, you’re a steel worker, you’re a

Scene: Have you noticed any change in yourself since embarking on the Kabul at Work project?

David Gill: Weirdly enough, I think I’ve got more patient. I used to get really stressed, I’d think this is ridiculous, come on. And then you get used to it. Getting one thing done a week is a success. Getting money out of the cash machine is a good day. It’s kind of like, when something goes well, it’s a lot more valuable. Back home people complain about their iPhones being too slow, or something. White people with white people’s problems. When I go home and think, ‘Jesus!’ You complain about different things, don’t you? I think I’ve got a lot more perspective and patience, I don’t know if patience is the right word. It’s more a Zen acceptance—it’s something about soft temper. The Afghans have an expression about soft temper. And my soft temper is a lot better than it used to be.

Scene: What happens next?

David Gill: I don’t know if we’ll ever finish this. It’s going to be late. There will be no big launch party, I’d like it to just continue. Training people up to continue the work. The idea is that this will be a constantly evolving mapping project. I want it to be the go-to place for Kabul that links to other interesting projects in Kabul. A virtual Kabul. There’s so much potential. You know, new journalists are always coming to Kabul and they don’t have any ideas of their own. It could be a journalist resource centre. If you need a good idea, come and steal it from Kabul at Work! �

People are constantly suggesting who you should [profile] and the list gets bigger and bigger. I’d like the project to be where it just continues and can be part of some socio-anthropological resource at universities, and people can study who were the people around this period. Giving Afghans a voice is something I definitely want to do. And one of the things we’re trying to do is work out what everyone’s saying, and seeing if there’s a common thread or an overarching theme. Joke: if there’s one common theme, it’s that life under the Taliban was better. Life under the Taliban: discuss. The sweet-maker said he preferred life under the Taliban because there were no imported snickers bars.

Scene: It’s human nature to complain.

David Gill: I think that has to be taken with the fact that there is no security and that’s what people appreciate. Would you want them back tomorrow is the question, and of course they don’t. But even the skateboard teacher used to love it when there was a big push. He said he used to go on the roof at night, and watch the rockets. It was like a party he said. �

Scene: Any choice anecdotes you can share?

David Gill: We just finished the gambler. He’s great, he just gambles on birds, he’s got like 40 grandchildren, and borrows money off his kids, and he’s just the world’s worst gambler. And when he does win, he can’t bring the money back into the house because it’s un-Islamic. He wants to go on Hajj but can’t because he spends all his money on gambling.





With competitions, game shows, chat and music from around the world, ARMAN FM keeps it fresh and exciting.It’s no wonder why 53% of Afghans cite ARMAN FM as the station they listen to most.* Find out how you can reach an audience that’s listening.

[email protected] | [email protected] | +93 799 32 10 10

* Kabul province, Altai Consulting, October 2010

Adding colour to life




Afghan Scene November 2011Book scene

Highland Fling: Karzai in Scotland

In an extract from his memoir of high diplomacy in Kabul, former British ambassador and Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles tells

the inside story of Hamid Karzai’s highland fling

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describes as ‘Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom’ making all arrangements (and paying all reasonable bills), once the Guest and party have reached the shores of the UK. President Karzai, and his officials, gratefully accepted the invitation on the terms we explained to them.

But the course of true love between Britain and Afghanistan never ran entirely smooth. Only a couple of weeks before the President was due to land in London we in Kabul realised that we had a major problem. In the absence of any indication to the contrary from Karzai’s protocol team, we had assumed that the President and his party would make their way to Britain in an aircraft of their own. But, in going over arrangements with the Afghans, it dawned on the British Embassy official charged with organising the visit from the Kabul end that our Afghan guests were assuming that the British Government would somehow get them to the UK. After all, that was what happened when President Karzai visited Washington or New York: the United States Air Force would take him all the way there and all the way back. But it turned out that there was no Afghan Presidential aircraft, and that the ancient Boeing 727 the Presidential Palace usually chartered or borrowed from the Afghan airline Ariana was not allowed to land in Western Europe, for safety reasons. Frantic further exchanges with the Palace revealed not only that there was no aircraft available, still less booked, but also that there was no Afghan money available to charter one, or even to pay for tickets on a regular airline.

One of President Karzai’s more attractive traits was his love of walking. Every evening, he would take a lengthy

constitutional round and round the grounds of the Palace in Kabul where he was effectively a prisoner. On learning of both these facts, the Prince of Wales generously invited Karzai to go walking with him in Scotland, staying at the Prince’s house on the Balmoral estate, Birkhall, which had belonged to Prince Charles’s beloved grandmother.

Somehow, over the summer of 2007, we settled on a date for President Karzai’s visit to Scotland in late November. The Prince and President had already met several times, in London and elsewhere, but this would be the first time Karzai had stayed in a British royal residence or spent such an extended period with a member of the royal family, or indeed any senior Briton. Prince Charles kindly asked Rory Stewart (of whose Turquoise Mountain Foundation the Prince and President were joint patrons) and me to stay at Birkhall too.

The Government in London saw this as a chance to develop the better relationship between Britain and President Karzai which I had been tasked to build. In the latter part of 2006 and early 2007, there had been plenty of indications of worryingly anti-British views on his part. We wanted to put this behind us, and to introduce him to the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who had taken over from Tony Blair at the end of June. We therefore turned the trip into what is known as a Guest of Government visit: just short of a state visit, with what the printed programme pompously

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Karzai at Magdalen College Oxford Photo: Sherard Cowper-Coles






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followed by scheduled first-class flight on to London. Options were explored, alternatives costed: using the RAF and scheduled flights would be much, much cheaper. We tested the water with the Afghans: it was clear that President Karzai would be reluctant to travel by scheduled flight. And then the argument that always trumps everything was adduced: security. How could the President be protected in the cabin of a commercial airliner, when his bodyguards needed to carry guns?

I chipped in, arguing that the goodwill generated by the visit would be undone if HMG adopted a cheese-paring approach

Nor was there any budget in London for substantial unforeseen expenses of this kind. Nimble footwork by the Foreign Office’s Afghan team found a Gulfstream jet available for charter, and established the (enormous) cost, including what looked like a quite exorbitant insurance premium for taking such an aircraft into and out of Kabul. But that was only the beginning of the battle. Just halfway through the financial year, nobody in London had available the tens of thousands of pounds needed to pay for a charter of this kind. Quite properly, the FCO Director responsible for Afghanistan insisted that we look at all other possibilities: RAF to Bahrain, or Muscat,

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in Germany but chartered by the British Government. It had been decided that I would travel with the party, to use the nine hours of the journey to build my relationship with President Karzai and his Ministers. Apart from personal aides, the other members of the party were the Foreign Minister, Dr Spanta, and the National Security Adviser, Dr Rassoul. We spent most of the flight looking out of the window, or gossiping about Afghan politics, with the President leading the discussion. The one point at which President Karzai became especially animated was when he spotted that I was reading Sir Olaf Caroe’s classic work The Pathans. Caroe had been the last British Governor of the North West Frontier Province before Partition, and had been asked by the new Government of Pakistan to stay on in that role. His mighty work on the tribes west of the Indus said, in suitably magisterial tones, all there was to be said about the Pashtuns. President Karzai sang the book’s praises. He saw himself as a kind of Pashtun paramount chief. He believed that Britons in general, and Caroe in particular, understood his people better than any other foreigners.

Our reception at Heathrow’s Royal Terminal made me proud: it was a reminder of just how good the Foreign Office’s Inward Visits machine still is. At the foot of the steps, the President was greeted by representatives of the Queen and the Government. He was whisked into the main building, offered tea and biscuits by a black-coated butler, while his party were distributed among the vehicles in the motorcade by efficient FO ladies with clipboards. The President would ride in an

to what the Afghans would see as a minor logistical question. That also ruled out our appealing to the Americans for help: doing so would only complete HMG’s humiliation in Afghan (and American) eyes. Somehow, at short notice, the British Government had to find the money for a charter flight, or dream up some good reason for postponing the visit. Perhaps the MOD could contribute to the cost: after all, they had more invested in Afghanistan, in both absolute and proportionate terms, than any other British Government player. DFID had far more money allocated to Afghanistan than it could sensibly spend. Could we not ask the Treasury for money from the Reserve, given the importance of a successful visit for wider British interests? If Ministers were enlisted, surely the Treasury would cave in.

The battle went on for the best part of a fortnight. There was the usual Whitehall shroud-waving: no one wanted to be the first to concede. No one doubted that the money would be found, but it was not clear from where, or whether it would be subject to conditions. Eventually, the teams in London and Kabul found some unspent Foreign Office funds that could – ‘exceptionally and without creating a precedent’, of course – be used to pay for the charter.

With Karzai blissfully unaware, I hoped, of what a close-run thing the whole exercise had been, the President and his party duly took off from Kabul early on Sunday 21 November 2007 in a large and luxurious Gulfstream executive jet, registered, embarrassingly,

Karzai in Scotland Photo: Sherard Cowper-Coles






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The next morning, President Karzai flew on ahead to Aberdeen, on an RAF aircraft, in order to have time alone walking with the Prince of Wales. I followed on British Airways. From Dyce airport, a dark-green Land Rover from the Balmoral estate whisked me up the Dee valley. The views were breathtakingly beautiful, with the leaves turning every shade of dusky gold, against the darker blues and greens and greys of the moors behind and beyond. Birkhall could not have felt more comfortable or natural: a proper country house, without ostentation or extravagance, and full of family things, albeit from a rather special family. The staff were quietly courteous, showing me to my room, suggesting when I might like to join His Royal Highness and the President for tea. Hotfoot from Kabul, Rory Stewart arrived soon after me, equipped for his Highland stay with kilt and trews and tartan and tweeds. We chatted with Karzai’s Private Secretary, who was still in disbelief about where he was and what his boss was doing.

After a while, the Prince and the President appeared, back from their walk. Hamid Karzai was beaming from ear to ear. Despite the difficulties of negotiating the weather in a shalwar kameez and black town shoes, he had had the time of his life. After tea, Rory gave him a gift from the Turquoise Mountain Foundation: a sura from the Koran inscribed in the most elaborate Arabic calligraphy. Then it was a bath, a quiet pre-supper chat with the Prince of Wales (who was longing to be allowed to visit Afghanistan) and the most delicious and healthy dinner à quatre,

enormous armoured BMW provided and driven by the Metropolitan Police. Drs Spanta and Rassoul had a limousine of their own. The rest of us were placed in couple of capacious people carriers, to reduce the length of the motorcade. Then it was off into London, accompanied by the motorcycle outriders of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Escort Group.The SEG is one of the unsung glories of official Britain. They move the Queen, VIP visitors and senior Ministers (if they so choose and have a real operational need) through traffic as a knife cuts through soft butter: quiet, efficient, undemonstrative, they use whistles, transponders to turn traffic lights the right colour and an extraordinary knowledge of London’s byways to make British VIP motorcades a model to behold. In my two and a half years as principal private secretary to Robin Cook when he was foreign secretary, I experienced many motorcades around the world: the California Highway Patrol closing, quite outrageously, an entire freeway for the British Foreign Secretary, French motorcycle police banging hysterically on the roofs of cars to get them out of the way, Italian Carabinieri, sirens blaring, skidding out of control, and, most memorably, a sweetly inexperienced New Zealand motorcycle escort getting us lost in the suburbs of Auckland. Nothing beats the understated efficiency of the Met’s SEG, as they race past in relays, holding traffic at side-roads and junctions, threading a way for the motorcade around traffic islands and obstacles of every kind, negotiating backstreets, bus lanes and routes through the Royal Parks. No noise, no fuss. Pure ballet.

Karzai about to board the Royal Flight for Scotland Photo: Sherard Cowper-Coles

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the Bodleian Library. The Hertford porter soon put me in my place: clearly thinking that I was a practical joker, and that the strangely dressed gentleman beside me was an impostor, he said firmly that the Principal was in a meeting and could not be disturbed, even for President Karzai.In the Union’s great debating hall, President Karzai delivered a tour de force, in front of a full house of students of every size, shape and background. It was in settings like this that one saw his skill as a speaker who could inspire and communicate fluently in three languages. He addressed questions, from smooth Indians, an angry American and worried Brits, with charm and conviction. We were on something of a high as we left the home of lost causes and forgotten dreams, for the President’s audience of HM the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

The main event, on the last day of the visit, was talks with the Prime Minister over breakfast at Number 10, followed by a press conference. As I had hoped and expected, the President and the PM connected immediately. Hamid Karzai responded to Gordon Brown’s seriousness, his mastery of detail and his willingness to listen. On a personal level, they had young sons in common, and exchanged gifts. Sarah Brown appeared with young John Brown, then aged four: Karzai was immediately charmed. Sensibly, the Prime Minister spent most of the time tête-à-tête with his guest. The press conference was a cakewalk.

As I made my own way back to Kabul, via Dubai, I reflected that the visit had been

surrounded by nine grandfather clocks collected by the Queen Mother. On the Tuesday morning the Royal Air Force flew President Karzai and me back to London. The Special Escort Group whisked us in from Northolt and on to Lancaster House for a full-dress luncheon in the President’s honour, given by Her Majesty’s Government.

Wednesday was another day out, this time in Oxford: the first stop was Magdalen College, whose beautiful tower stands guard over the approaches to Oxford and the bridge over the Cherwell of the same name as the college. President Karzai was greeted there by the President of Magdalen and by the President of the Oxford Union (an undergraduate): a summit of three Presidents. As we toured the President of Magdalen’s magnificent lodgings, an impressed Afghan President commented ruefully that perhaps the President of Magdalen was better housed, and the President of the Union more powerful, than the President of Afghanistan.

Afterwards, we abandoned the motorcade and walked from Magdalen to President Karzai’s next engagement, a speech at the Oxford Union. This, I knew, was what Hamid Karzai loved: striding out cheerfully, being greeted by startled American tourists and puzzled shoppers just off the bus from Blackbird Leys, a real politician connecting with real people. On the spur of the moment, I thought I would try to introduce the President to the Principal of my old college, Hertford, just opposite

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a success. The Afghan–British relationship was set on a new course. It felt good to be ambassador to Afghanistan at such time, making a difference. With the Prime Minister due to pay his first visit to Kabul in December, what could possibly go wrong? �

Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign by Sir Sherard Cowper Coles and published by HarperPress, An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, is available now. This extract is reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher.





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Three people much taller than scene’s snapper | Matt, Melissa and Rima at Nick’s farewell

70s soiree - Ariel and Jules at Altai

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Diplomatic hardcorps | Sascha, Merja, Rudolpho, Gunnar and Rima at the British Embassy Ball

Diplomatic hardcorps | Sascha, Merja, Rudolpho, Gunnar and Rima at the British Embassy Ball

Northen Exposure | Kabul’s Leslie on a visit to the Alaskan wilderness

Road runner | Superfixer Noor on the road to Jam

The Hardcore British Press Pack | P*ssing off ISAF since 2008Down and Dirty | Aschkan, Rima and Tara get the lowdown on Kabul nightlife

Snow-it-all | Lally at a Kabul soireeAll Hail The Giant Acorn | Clem, Em and Leslie get dressed up





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Reading Shakespeare in Kandahar

The United States has won some measure of revenge in the 10 years since 9/11. But as in Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty play Titus Andronicus,

has the cost been too great? By Nick Schifrin

Tigers must pray Photo: Julius Cavendish





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SEALs shot the man who ordered the 9/11 attacks in the head and chest. After loading his body onto a helicopter, they flew it to Afghanistan and then to a ship at sea, where they dumped the prepared body in the ocean. I was the first American reporter to arrive at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. My team and I aired the first video from inside the compound and filed 11 stories in five frantic days.

It was only after I had returned to my home in Islamabad, about a 90-minute drive away, that Titus Andronicus and Kastan’s warning came to mind. I was sitting with a group of American and British friends -- journalists, NGO workers, and diplomats -- having that familiar melancholic conversation about 9/11: “Where were you?” And, because we now lived where 9/11’s plotters had fled: “Did you imagine you’d be here, 10 years later?”

No, I said. I hadn’t imagined, sitting in my Shakespeare class a decade ago, that I would end up in Pakistan reporting the death of Osama bin Laden. But perhaps Shakespeare might have imagined the United States would be “here,” 10 years later.

Titus Andronicus is a play about revenge. It is about how a general fighting for an empire -- Rome -- finally defeats the “barbarous” Goths and returns to his capital with prisoners, the vanquished queen and her sons. Despite the queen’s pleas, Titus kills her oldest son to avenge his own sons’ deaths, beginning cycles of brutal violence that end in the death of nearly every major character.

Thank you for coming,” Prof. David Kastan told the half-full auditorium. “You did not have to be here this morning. I did. It

means the world to me that you came.” I looked around at my fellow classmates; we were all tired and dazed. The night before, the acrid, unforgettable smell of melted steel, atomized concrete, and human remains had drifted seven miles north, from southern Manhattan up to Columbia University’s campus.

It was Sept. 13, 2001, and I was 21 years old. Two days earlier, I had walked into Kastan’s Shakespeare class before the attacks began and walked out after the second tower had already fallen. Columbia canceled classes for two days. I spent my time at the daily student newspaper, the Spectator, where I was managing editor. On Thursday morning, the first class back was Shakespeare.

“I will not make a political statement today,” Kastan continued. “But I will say this: This play we will discuss today is about revenge -- and what demanding revenge can do to a person. I only hope that the people who will be making decisions on how to respond to Tuesday’s attacks read Titus Andronicus.”

When he finished, the class gave him a standing ovation.

Nine-and-a-half years later, I found myself standing outside a large house in Pakistan. It was 1:00 p.m. on May 2, 2011, and I was a correspondent for ABC News. Twelve hours earlier, the United States had finally taken its revenge. In the middle of the night, Navy

I tell my sorrows to the stones Photo: Julius Cavendish





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this part of town -- far from the old British-built cantonment of green lawns and red mansions -- the streets were thin and gray. Autorickshaws competed with horse-drawn carts.

Meena Bazaar was rare in that it catered to families -- one of the few places in Peshawar where you saw women in large numbers. But on this day, there were no girls choosing colorful bangles, no women buying dresses. Most of the small, fragile shops were now piles of debris, destroyed two weeks before by a massive car bomb that had gutted this crowded corner of the city. The explosion was one of the most violent acts of terrorism in Pakistan’s history. The official death count was more than 110, but residents said at least 60 additional bodies were never found, obliterated in the blast.

The explosion coincided with a visit to Islamabad by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Her timing could not have been worse. The bomb in the Meena Bazaar exploded just before she began to speak. The aggressive, ubiquitous Pakistani TV channels showed her news conference in split screen: Clinton on one side, the aftermath of the explosion on the other.

The Pakistani Taliban were in the middle of one of the most violent campaigns of retribution the country had ever seen. They were blowing up police and soldiers, but also bombing mosques and markets full of civilians. And yet the depravity of a Peshawar bomb clearly designed to kill as many innocents as possible somehow did not stoke the city’s anger at militants. (For their part, the Taliban denied involvement in the attack.)

At its core, Titus Andronicus is a play about how good people can become unhinged and indeed overwhelmed by the need to avenge. It is about how powerful people surrender themselves to cycles of violence, how tribal and religious customs unequivocally demand retaliation, and how two tribes’ or two religions’ speaking past rather than with each other can lead to chaos.

“Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,blood and revenge are hammering in my head,” one of Titus’s enemies says before the bloodletting begins.

Kastan was right to worry. The United States has made many of the same mistakes that Titus Andronicus and his fellow tragedians made: prioritizing revenge and killing the enemy over helping the local populations; choosing allies who help produce short-term gratification (security gains) but long-term trouble; refusing to truly engage with a population that seemed so different from themselves.

Had the Americans learned from Shakespeare’s epic of vengeance, might Afghanistan and Pakistan, where I have lived for the last three years, been less violent and more welcoming of the United States today?

In early November 2009, I walked through what had been the colorful and crowded aisles of Meena Bazaar in Peshawar, Pakistan. Every time I visited, the city always felt ancient, mostly unchanged from how it has been described for decades: filled with dust, smelling of diesel fumes and baked brick. In

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Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge Photo: Julius Cavendish





For years, U.S. officials have found statements like that unfair. They have been frustrated by the anger that Pakistanis and the Pakistani media often exhibit toward the United States -- despite billions of U.S. dollars flowing into the country. In 2010, one U.S. diplomat told me, with some derision, that Pakistani perceptions of the United States were “a collection of conspiracy theories.”

But the people of Peshawar were reacting to a basic fact: Their lives have gotten worse since the United States invaded Afghanistan. A decade ago, there were no suicide attacks on markets in Peshawar. (There was only one suicide attack in Pakistan before 9/11. Since then, there have been some 300.) A decade ago, the phrase “Pakistani Taliban” did not exist. The people of Peshawar were responding to the world around them and what they saw the United States doing. They saw CIA drone attacks in the nearby tribal areas. They saw U.S. soldiers fighting and killing in Afghanistan. They saw the United States pouring money into developing Pakistan, but much of it going to high-priced Western consultants who did not engage with the population and demanded big, expensive programs that helped the elite, not the masses. And the people of Peshawar saw the United States unconditionally pour even more money into a Pakistani military that supported Afghan militants labeled “good Taliban,” even though blowback into Pakistan was evident.

A U.S. official once admitted to me that, for years, “U.S. policy in Pakistan came from Langley rather than Foggy Bottom,” implying

Most people in Peshawar blamed the United States -- not the Taliban. Clinton’s speech about developing a “partnership between the people” of the United States and Pakistan fell on deaf ears. Residents either directly accused the United States of planting the bomb or accused it of inspiring the violence by pushing Pakistan to fight “America’s war” along the Afghan border.

Shams ul-Ameen, a property dealer, told me he was walking into the bazaar as the bomb went off. He was blown off his feet but survived, and he saw a scene like “doomsday.” A few days after the explosion, he had found the body of a 4-year-old girl on a nearby roof. Like everyone I spoke with that day, Ameen blamed a “foreign hand” for the violence -- including the United States, India, Afghanistan. Anyone but the Taliban.

“These are foreign forces,” Ameen said. “Hindus and white men together want to destroy Pakistan. This is an American trick. On the surface, they pretend to be friends, but they strike Muslims in the back.”

Siraj ul-Munir, whose shop was destroyed in the Meena Bazaar explosion, told me he was worried Pakistan had no future.

“We are wondering what will become of our future generations who today ask us, ‘Father, why do these bomb blasts take place? Who are these bombers? ’ We can’t answer them,” he said. “We are innocent people. Tell us what we did to deserve this. It’s since the arrival of the Americans that there’s been a spike in all this violence.”

businessman, and he was even more positive: “The people who oppose America, they should see how they’ve helped me. And they will change their minds.”

But these vignettes are sadly rare. In most areas of Pakistan -- where people perceive their lives as less secure and less developed since 9/11 -- there is still a strong anti-American narrative, from the streets of slums to elite drawing rooms.

That feeling extends even to Islamabad, the capital. In September 2008, I arrived at the swank Marriott hotel on a Ramadan evening. Rubble was piled 10 feet high, electric wires sparked against pools of water and gas, and mangled iron gates poked out of the mud. I saw at least eight bodies. As one police officer walked outside, he threw up into his own hand, sick with the stench of death. Inside the lobby, the reception desk had been crushed, a piano was thrown against a wall, and a fish flopped against the marble, its glass aquarium lying shattered nearby. Twenty minutes earlier, militants had exploded 2,200 pounds of military-grade explosive at the outside gate.

Even then, some of my fellow Islamabad residents -- who opposed the Taliban and their suicide attacks -- blamed America. “It’s not a good thing what they are doing, but they’re doing it out of compulsion,” said one Islamabad resident of the Taliban, asking me not to print his name. “If my home was bombed,” he continued, “and my parents and brothers were killed, wouldn’t I become a suicide bomber?”

that the CIA (and the Pentagon) ran the show and that drones and counterterrorism tactics were more important than the diplomats and development experts.

In Titus Andronicus, Titus gets halfway through the play before he realizes that not only do his historic enemies -- the Goths -- seek revenge; his fellow Romans may as well. “Rome is but a wilderness of tigers,” Titus says. “Tigers must prey.”

Elsewhere in Pakistan, where the United States sought not to avenge but to assist, the population doesn’t blame its ills on Americans. A few months before the Peshawar attack, I visited the Government Centennial Model High School in Dadar, a school destroyed by the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. One student was killed and more than a dozen injured when the buildings crumbled on top of them. By 2009, the school was filled with shiny new classrooms, one of which displays a large plaque from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The principal, Mohammad Irfan, said he was proud to have received U.S. help.

“We were destroyed. We were ruined at that time,” he told me. “Now, we feel very, very happy with America. We now feel, ‘Long live America, long live USA, long live Pakistan!’”

Down the road, Badr ul-Islam, an old man with a long white beard, had received $5,000 from the United States to buy refrigerators for his struggling dairy business. He was not a government official or bureaucrat, like so many recipients of U.S. aid. He was just a private

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the sound and smell of diesel generators. Men with beards and turbans filled the markets; women, when they appeared in public, were covered by burqas.

Thurman’s orders were to get through the city quickly, but on the way out of town, his convoy of 30,000-pound, mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles skidded to a stop. On the other side of two lanes of traffic, an empty fuel truck and a passenger van had overturned after a crash. A group of people surrounded two drivers who were badly injured.

Thurman wanted to help, so we hopped out of the vehicle and walked over to the crash site.

For 30 minutes, Thurman’s medic examined the large, bleeding gash on the truck driver’s head and the dozens of cuts on the body of the van’s driver. Thurman handed out water, teased children who nipped at his heels, and engaged with local elders who had congregated to watch. At one point he took off his sunglasses and helmet -- something U.S. soldiers weren’t supposed to do -- so he could better relate to the crowd. Most just stared at him in silence. They did the same with me.

After the wounds were dressed and the kids had scattered, Thurman and his medic packed their gear and began to walk off. As they did, not one person shook Thurman’s hand. Not one person said thank you. In Afghanistan, guests are royalty; not shaking hands was the equivalent of a slap in the face.

“They still don’t like us,” Thurman responded

Revenge is ingrained in this culture. In Pashto -- the language spoken by 40 million people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is a saying: “Even if I wait 100 years to take revenge, I’ve made haste.”

For Pakistanis, the war launched to avenge the 9/11 attacks had created a vicious cycle of revenge.

On a sunny morning in October 2009, Capt. Michael Thurman, an eloquent military police commander out of Fort Stewart, Georgia, drove me through the streets of Kandahar.

Thurman was an example of a gifted, post-9/11 breed of officer I’ve come across in Afghanistan: men and women in their late 20s or early 30s who have come of age inside a military as it fought two wars. Smart and brave, it seemed like Thurman had read every book about insurgency and Afghanistan. He was respected by his men.

I’d come to southern Afghanistan ahead of an expected surge of U.S. troops. Forty percent of the population of southern Afghanistan lives in and around Kandahar city, and I’d spent about a week with Canadian troops, the only soldiers who were living inside the city at the time.

If Peshawar was mostly the same after the last few decades, it felt like it had been centuries since Kandahar had changed. Some of the dirt-packed roads had been replaced by asphalt, but most shops were still made of mud, as were the large boundary walls that protect every house. The city rose early and filled with

the insurgency with his opium connections. Kandaharis from other tribes associate him with the pre-Taliban warlords who ruled different parts of the province in the early 1990s by controlling segments of road with the help of murder and rape. Raziq’s uncle worked for a particularly cruel commander back then; he was later hanged by the Taliban from the turret of a tank.

Despite that history, the United States allied with Raziq because he provided immediate security gains. He controlled the vital border crossing, and he had done this job effectively: As the rest of Kandahar became increasingly violent, the border town of Spin Boldak was an island of relative calm in late 2009.

Which is why, after we left his office, the U.S. military officials I was with told me that Raziq was an example of what was going right in Afghanistan: a strong commander bringing peace to his little area. America needed Raziq because he could produce quick results. But by prioritizing short-term security gains, the United States is risking Kandahar’s long-term stability. The Taliban originally gained their popular appeal by opposing the ruthlessness of leaders like Raziq’s uncle. By in helping install Raziq, the United States became associated with such discredited sources of power.

Like the characters of Titus Andronicus, the United States was seduced by those who could provide immediate satisfaction: “ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind, by working wreakful vengeance on thy foes.”

when I asked him why he thought he had been snubbed. “When I took my helmet off, a kid jumped away from me... We haven’t spent enough time engaging with the people.”

For years, soldiers were suspicious of everyone who lived in this Taliban stronghold, and they often failed to take the time to connect with the people. And crucially, many of those whom U.S. soldiers did spend their time with and helped install into government positions were the very people whom Kandaharis trusted least: ruthless warlords who had been thrown out by the Taliban. (One Kandahari once joked to me that the United States had brought “demoorcracy” into his city, purposely mispronouncing the English word by inserting a Pashto word in the middle that means, roughly, “mother-f***ing.”)

One of those warlords is Abdul Raziq, a local police commander who at that time controlled Spin Boldak, the crossing between Kandahar and Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. I met him on Christmas Eve 2009.

“You are welcome anytime!” he greeted us with a slightly squeaky and much younger voice than I had expected. Despite his position of seniority, he was only 30 years old. “The embassy has given us a lot of money! Come, sit!”

Raziq’s boyishness hid a ruthless history. Western officials -- speaking only on background -- have, for years, accused him of helping run drug rings, private militias, smuggling rackets, and his own prisons in Kandahar. They accuse him of helping to fuel





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In early 2002, President George W. Bush promised to rebuild Afghanistan in the tradition of the Marshall Plan.

Slowly, some things improved: The number of Afghan children in school is, today, seven times what it was on 9/11; almost eight times more Afghans have access to health care, compared with 2001; and women’s gains have been especially inspiring. As Habiba Sarabi, the only female governor in Afghanistan, once told me while we overlooked gaping holes in the rock where the Taliban had blown up Buddha statues in Bamiyan: “Women were deprived for a long time -- deprived of education, deprived of facilities, deprived of rights. I can be a role model for other women, and other women in society can see that if a woman can be in a higher position like a governor, they will feel more comfortable and gain self-confidence.”

But over time, the United States failed to deliver on that Marshall Plan promise. Just as people in Peshawar saw their lives worsen after 9/11, many Afghans feel let down by the lack of improvement in their lives in the last decade.

The guest in Kunduz, after we ate our dessert and drank our tea, recalled a story that helped summarize the United States’ failures. He remembered that on a sunny morning, the troops he worked with stood proudly at a news conference, helping the local governor open a multimillion-dollar school that the troops had paid for and helped construct. But every Afghan there -- everyone but the foreign troops, the guest insisted -- knew the school wouldn’t last. The foreign troops’

Recently, the U.S. military stopped handing over detainees to Raziq until it can be confident he is not secretly torturing them, as his critics allege. But his power has only grown since I met him at the tail end of 2009: U.S. forces have increasingly teamed up with his men throughout Kandahar province, and U.S. commanders have praised him as a go-to leader. Today, he has moved up from his position on the border. He is the now the police chief of Kandahar city.

In December 2010, I sat in a small guesthouse in Kunduz, Afghanistan, near the border with Tajikistan. The owner was an affable German-Afghan who had made a lot of money working with the cash-rich coalition and ran small hostels on the side. On this night, we sat around a wooden table below a single light, powered by a generator, that illuminated a meal of fried fish, the local specialty. I sat with my ABC News colleagues and the owner’s guest, a thin, 30-something contractor who worked at the local NATO base staffed with German troops. The guesthouse was unmarked, and men with automatic weapons guarded the front gate. Security in the city was not good.

The guest was a serious, well-read Afghan from Kunduz who lamented the state of the once-peaceful north. He believed the United States had squandered the support Afghans initially provided. Eight years before, when the war began, most in the country had welcomed the young Americans who threw out the Taliban. Afghans heard U.S. promises and dreamed into the future, expecting American-sponsored beneficence and development.

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Ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind by wreaking vengeance on thy foes Photo: Julius Cavendish




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A new hospital. A new governor’s house. A fire station. A justice center. A visitors’ center.

But there was a problem: Nobody ever asked whether the Afghans wanted those buildings, according to the 2009 PRT commander, Lt. Col. Andrew Torelli. And they never taught the contractors how to maintain them or how to use the Western construction equipment.

And so, as we walked from building to building, each sat empty and crumbling. The power director’s building had no water, so nobody worked there. The hospital was collapsing and reeked of urine. Most medical supplies were unused, as the staff had never been trained. The fire station was never going to be filled; Qalat had never had a single firefighter.

I told that story to the dinner guest in Kunduz. He said it represented everything the United States was doing wrong.

“They never listen,” he said of the West. “They only did what they wanted to do.”

As Titus says when he feels his former allies have abandoned him: “I tell my sorrows to the stones.”

For centuries, Titus Andronicus was neither popular nor particularly respected by critics, who believed the play’s barbarity was overindulgent and implausible: After Titus kills the captured queen’s son, her other sons rape Titus’s daughter and cut off her tongue and hands; Titus kills her after she is raped; and the list of brutal, violent acts goes on. T.S.

funds weren’t allowed to be used to pay for maintenance or teachers’ salaries. And the Afghan government certainly couldn’t afford either. And so, eventually, the building deteriorated and the teachers stopped coming. The area where he worked became more violent, leading the troops to become more aggressive, leading to less education, development, and governance work.

“Don’t build me a school,” he implored. “Give me a teacher. That’s how to pacify an area.”

It was a lesson I had seen for myself the year before in the poor province of Zabul, Kandahar’s neglected neighbor.

Qalat, Zabul’s capital, is filled with the same Pashtun ethnic population as Kandahar and Peshawar, but it has a fraction of the wealth -- or the charm of either city. Downtown, a simple market is filled with some cars and carts, but there are no tucked-away, middle-class areas. The city of 40,000 quickly becomes rural: Just a stone’s throw from the market, entire neighborhoods are composed of mud houses. But, like Kandahar, it has always been a key location on the road toward the Indian subcontinent. On the city’s highest point sits the ruins of a 2,000-year-old castle built by Alexander the Great. Down the steep hill from the castle, the senior U.S. officer on Qalat’s Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) walked me through “New Qalat City.” It had been built in 2006 as a sign that the United States cared about Zabul province. It was meant to be a sort of Emerald City, with relatively modern buildings that would revitalize the town.

and economic growth and other kinds of development activities.”

But three years later, it seems the United States is no closer to this ambitious goal. And on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan and Afghanistan are suffering from continuing cycles of violence. I am making the final edits to this piece late at night in a hotel with failing Internet on a trip to Peshawar. It has been a long few days. On Wednesday, Sept. 7, in Quetta, militants stormed a military officer’s house and killed his wife and 22 others, including two children. A few days before, in Kabul, police picked up the body of an American civilian working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He had been strangled to death.

Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of Titus Andronicus ends when Titus’s grandson walks out of the Coliseum where much of the action takes place -- suggesting that the next generation of Romans could exit out of the cycle of revenge.

But nobody expects a Hollywood ending for Afghanistan or Pakistan. �

Eliot called it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.”

But in 2011, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, this revenge-driven cycle of violence does not seem so far-fetched. In this “post-9/11 world,” where we have seen so much barbarity, Titus is less shocking than ever. In many ways, Titus Andronicus is a play “written for today,” as the director Julie Taymor put it -- and that was back in 2000.In one of my first interviews in Pakistan, in 2008, Gerald Feierstein, then former U.S. deputy ambassador to Pakistan, made it clear to me that revenge was not a solution for Pakistan and Afghanistan -- that “kinetic activity,” as the military calls offensive actions, was not going to be enough.

“What we need to do is give people an alternative narrative for hope for the future. And that’s really much more important in terms of how we’re ultimately going to achieve success in that part of the world than anything we’re going to do in terms of kinetic activity,” he said. “What we need to do is prevent them from being drawn into extremism in the first place, and you do that through education

Nick Schifrin is the ABC News correspondent covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.This article first appeared at www.foreignpolicy.com





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country on Russia’s underbelly, that is the gateway to northern Afghanistan. About a dozen other reporters, many of whom I knew, were on the same flight from Munich.

We landed at about 4am. There was the usual third world scrambling and bribery and each of us huddled around those colleagues who spoke Russian. They seemed to have a better chance of greasing the right palms.

The land border to the south was closed and, in an odd hangover from the Cold War, still controlled by Russian troops.

The only way to get into Afghanistan from the north was to shoe-horn my way onto an ancient paratrooper plane owned and run by the Northern Alliance.

It was no mean bureaucratic feat. First I needed Tajik accreditation. That cost $20. I ponied up $40 and persuaded the oily official to give me an express variety - two hours instead of two days. Then I had to get a

When the first airplane struck the World Trade Centre a decade ago, I was on a break from assignments. I had recently

been covering the small war in Macedonia and the end of the Milosevic regime in Serbia.

At first, like many, I’m sure, I couldn’t quite believe what had happened. I phoned the foreign news desk at the Daily Telegraph where I worked.

“I can get to America,” I said. “The airports are closed,” they answered. “I’ll go through Canada,” I ventured. “They’re closed too.”

After that we didn’t talk for several days. They were busy in London and I was at something of a loss. I’d spent the best part of a decade covering wars in the Balkans but I knew now that period was over. What, I wondered, would be the fate of a wandering reporter in the post-9/11 world.

A week or so later I was on a plane to Tajikistan, the forgotten, desperately poor

Julius, run,” he shouted.

I ran, straight through the scorching exhaust blast of the engine towards the side door. With the plane gathering speed my friend pulled me in and we were on our way.

In late 2001, Afghanistan was still a Holy Grail among aspiring war reporters. We had been brought up listening to Old Timers tell of the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s and the months they spent trekking through the Hindu Kush with the Mujahideen in the days before satellite phones and laptop computers.

Then there was the romance and savagery of the 19th Century uprising against the British when the Afghans massacred the entire garrison in a long bloody retreat to Jalalabad.

Some of the journalists I most admired were Afghan veterans at a time when being a war correspondent was a brutal and usually thankless calling.

After a few drinks they sometimes reminisced and talked quietly among themselves about ambushes in the passes, Soviet reprisals and close calls in the mountains.

Then, in the mid 1990s, the Taliban arrived in their long, flowing, black turbans and lunched war by pick-up truck, a modern and Islamic equivalent of the blitzkrieg.

The reality, when I arrived, was as good as the myth. Within a week I was off on a

Northern Alliance visa, another $100.

With two or three dozen journalists in Dushanbe all trying to achieve the same, competition for the few seats into Afghanistan was fierce. But after 48 hours a few of us stood like a herd of sheep on a deserted piece of Soviet tarmac waiting for our passage to the unknown.

An hour or two later an old propeller airplane drew up. It was one of the saddest looking machines I have ever seen, it’s fuselage punctured by bullet holes. It rolled to a halt and the main rear door slowly lowered. The Russian officer in charge began to read out names. One by one we were summoned to load our bags and climb aboard. I waited.

Three of us left. Two. Then just me. The Russian officer closed his book and began to walk away. “Wait,” I shouted. “There must be a mistake. I’ve got to get on that plane.” “Nyet,” he barked. “I must,” I said. “Nyet.” His hand went to the pistol at his waist.

The Afghan pilots began to close the hydraulic cargo door and the propellers began to rotate. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt my heart sink. In one final desperate effort, I slung my pack over the closing cargo door, then darted around the Russian and headlong for the side-door just as the plane began to roll.

An old friend, a photographer who was already on the plane, tried to hold the door open for me as one of the Afghan flight crew attempted to lever him out of the way. “Run,

The 2001 invasion - up close and personal

Reaching the front line by any means possible, Julius Strauss looks back on the early days of the 2001 invasion — when, for a veteran

war reporter, the reality in Afghanistan was as exciting as anything that had gone before





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fortress, where they had fled after escaping custody. Others were burned to death when Northern Alliance soldiers sprayed fuel from tankers on a school building where they were hiding, and then sprayed it with gunfire to set it alight. Many more were locked in containers to suffocate in the stifling heat or to be dropped from helicopters to another form of certain death. The foreign fighters reportedly killed those Afghans among them who wanted to surrender as the eight-day siege dragged on.

There was no mercy shown during that week I spent crouched outside the Qala-I-Jangi, feeling as if I was living a George MacDonald

The siege of Qala-I-Jangi on the outskirts of Mazar-I-Sharif in late November 2001 resulted in one of the most horrific war

atrocities of the modern age.

The massacre raised questions about the commitment of Afghanistan’s new rulers and their international sponsors to the rule of law, and cemented General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s reputation as a brutal and ruthless warlord.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of Taliban fighters, mostly from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and the Arab states, were killed when the US fired missiles and dropped bombs on Dostum’s 19th century mud

In the shadow of Qala-I-JangiOne of the first foreign reporters into Afghanistan after an anachronistic alliance of CIA operatives, American air power and Northern Alliance militiamen launched their onslaught against the Taliban, Lynne O’Donnell recalls the heady hopes and vicious fighting of the early days of the invasion

Julius Strauss reporting in Northern Afghanistan Photo: Julius Strauss

“Can I stay here?” I piped up. The commander hesitated barely a second. “Of course,” he answered graciously. “You can stay with my soldiers.”

The next day I asked for a horse and he brought me one. My very own little warhorse, a smallish mare but feisty and fast.

Each day for weeks I would ride up to the front line to talk to the soldiers, drop in on local commanders to get the latest news and write my dispatches for the newspaper about the preparations for war, the arrival of the CIA paramilitaries, the refugees and the hopes and fears of a thousand down-trodden civilians. �

long tortuous drive across the north with a colleague, two photographers and a translator I had found in the market. He could barely speak any English, we could speak no Dari.

On the third day we drove into a small dusty compound. I knew immediately that this was where I wanted to stay. The compound belonged to a local warlord, a bearded Mujahid who had fought the Soviets. He was an avuncular and kindly man.

“How were our families keeping?” he enquired politely. “All well,” we answered. “Would we drink tea with him?” We would. “Would we like walnuts?” Surely. “Did we have any wishes?”





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Recollection scene

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brought breakfast of bread, apricot jam and an enormous pot of tea to my room at 6 o’clock each morning.

Hope was alive in the heart of the mother of five I interviewed a couple of days after sitting at Dostum’s knee as he extolled the virtues of the new, free Afghan state. She had been a university lecturer before the Taliban’s misogynistic time, and then while forced inside her home by the cane-wielding vice police, had taught her four intelligent daughters to tile kitchens and bathrooms, and weave carpets, so they would not starve should the nightmare never end.

In those heady days of early December 2001, as the defeated Taliban made their way across the border to their Pakistani refuges, she had already abandoned the burkha and was looking forward to going back to work and getting her girls back to school. Life was, once more, theirs for the taking. Or so they believed.

Now, after 10 years of mistakes and misrule, the Taliban’s footfall is again heard across the north, and fear encroaches on the hopes of ordinary people to live ordinary lives. The women of Mazar-I-Sharif are once more taking refuge behind the veil, dressing for the return of the illogical hatred they have already known and had thought they were well rid of.

Ten years after eyebrows and ire were raised worldwide at the tactics used to get rid of the murderous brutality of thugs hiding behind religion, smart Afghan people talk of

Fraser novel and half expecting to see Harry Flashman slithering through the dirt to save his own hide.

British Special Forces roared around in utility trucks, threatening to shoot journalists who filmed them; US Special Forces holed up in the sprawling compounds of minor warlords in downtown Mazar, living on their own ready-made rations; B2 bombers circled overhead; and armed CIA agents strode the walls of the fort barking orders in Uzbek at the Northern Alliance soldiers under their tutelage.

Dostum flew north to Uzbekistan while the fighting raged, but rushed back when the coast was clear. He invited the international media into the Qala-I-Jangi, and sat on a high-backed chair as he surveyed the destruction of his HQ, strewn with Taliban body parts, and claimed victory.

It had been obvious when the invasion began on October 7 that the Taliban’s autarkic regime would soon crumble into the dust. Hope had been evident in the wave of an elderly Afghan man who stood on the bank of the Amu Daria watching the barge that brought me, and a crowd of other foreign reporters, down the river into Afghanistan from the horrible Uzbek border town of Termez.

It was like stepping through a tear in the fabric of time, back to the 13th century – a sensation not dispelled by the dignified gent in a tall, grey Astrakhan hat who stood at the door of my guesthouse and tried to force me into a burkha each time I left. He also

financial collapse, endemic corruption, and never-ending violence, few want to believe that we are witnessing the last desperate gasps of a failed and dying insurgency. What even fewer want to acknowledge is that Afghanistan’s blood- and tear-stained soil is the battleground for a hot war between the United States and Pakistan.

As the light of hope dims, Afghanistan is again one of the saddest places on earth. �

the Taliban’s return as inevitable, and clever commentators seem to delight in the apparent failure of efforts to graft modern democracy onto the ancient Afghan body politic.

Many of those with money and connections are leaving their country, hoping to secure a future abroad for their children as Afghanistan appears on the verge of collapse and the prospect of civil war looms as an encroaching reality. Amid political gridlock,

Lynne O’Donnell covered the Qala-i-Jangi siege for The Australian, for whom she was China correspondent from 1998-2002. She was Kabul bureau chief for Agence France-Presse 2009-2010.

Recollection scene





because it provided the best and safest return on investment.

In 2008, I set up a social enterprise to provide marketing and communications support to economic development initiatives in the Wakhan Corridor. I lived in an Afghan village on the edge of the Wakhan in a house with no mains electricity, running water, armed guards or blast walls. I drank tea on my veranda with my Afghan neighbors and we talked about the future. Our focus was on getting more international expeditions to visit this remote, beautiful, peaceful and desperately poor corner of Afghanistan.

We got hundreds of international visitors to see for themselves this ‘other’ Afghanistan—one which bore no resemblance to anything they saw in the international media.

I had my first experience of Afghanistan in 2002 as a soldier in the British Army. Although fearing the worst I had an

incredibly positive experience. The sense of optimism was endemic and I became incurably infected. Despite the many setbacks and missteps over the intervening 10 years I’m still a chronic optimist about the opportunity for Afghanistan to finds its feet as a nation and fulfill its potential.

On that first tour I fell in love with this extraordinary country that is like nowhere else on earth and developed a deep respect for the Afghan people.

On my second tour in 2004/5 I became convinced that 80 percent of Afghanistan’s

problems were economic. People grew and invested in opium and took part in other illicit activities

In the first person David James had his first taste of Afghanistan with the British Army in 2002.

Six years and a second tour later, he returned as a social entrepeneur based in Ishkashim, at the foot of the Wakhan corridor, before finally

succumbing to the bright lights of the big city. Here he describes that journey—and why he’s optimistic about Afghanistan’s future

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Wakhi farmers threshing with donkeys Photo: David James





projects that are taking place and shows the audience how life has been changing and improving with the help of the international community.

Over two seasons Mujeeb has visited 32 out of 34 provinces, which has created an extraordinary body of work that showcases Afghanistan as it’s seen by Afghan eyes. I believe that it is actually a better reflection of the daily realities for most Afghans than anything we see in the international media.The reason I bring this up is that Mujeeb would always come back saying, “We need to do more programs on business and economic opportunities.” There is, he explained, a real hunger among the Afghan people to find new business opportunities and ways to improve their situation.

As we move towards transition, this hunger aligned with a strong media industry presents us with a fantastic opportunity. We are in a great position to open a dialogue between Afghanistan’s entrepreneurs, the international organizations involved in economic development and the global business community.

I’ve had the privilege to meet up with some of the stakeholders at The Afghan Investment Support Agency, the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock and many others who have provided great insight into Afghanistan’s economic opportunities. Although, as previously stated, I’ve always been optimistic about Afghanistan’s potential I’ve been genuinely shocked about how much

One of the most memorable and talked about parts of each visitor’s trip was experiencing Afghanistan’s legendary hospitality. The visits shattered any preconceptions of who the Afghan people were.

The hardest part was trying to get anyone from the international community to support this success and having spent around $30,000 of my own money I decided that sustainability had to start at home. Last year I moved to Kabul recognizing that this was the strategic centre from where the money for positive change would come.

I found a job with Lapis, a communications agency that is part Afghanistan’s largest media group. With 97 percent local staff producing 15 hours of original content every day the Moby Group is a true Afghan success story that has captured the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.

We produce a whole range of shows and campaigns that are changing the way Afghans think about themselves and their place in the world.

One of my favourites is “On the Road” a show that turned one of our presenters, Mujeeb Arez, into one of the most loved personalities in Afghanistan. The show has a simple yet incredibly successful format. Mujeeb travels around Afghanistan visiting the local people and shows the rest of the nation the history, culture and lifestyles of their countrymen. In each place he visits some of the myriad of development

we should reinforce it, replicate it and communicate it.

We can all come up with negative scenarios for how the transition will play out, and if we focus our attention and resources on those scenarios they will come true. If we really want Afghanistan to be a success then we need to help the Afghans develop, articulate and communicate their positive vision of what Afghanistan will be in 2017. Once that vision has been articulated we can get behind a new generation of Afghan leaders who, with our help, can make it happen. �

good stuff is going on that we never hear about.

Marketing communications and the media have the potential to bring to the fore some of these great Afghan success stories and to help them build brands and market awareness.

There has been this overwhelming urge by many to focus on Afghanistan’s problems but maybe now it is time to focus on the solutions. Wherever we find a success

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The author with (left to right) Amruddin, Gorg Ali and Malang, three of the Afghan mountaineers who successfully climbed Noshaq in 2009 Photo: David James

David James served on two tours of Afghanistan with the British Army. In 2008 he returned as a social entrepreneur living in the Wakhan Corridor and working on economic development initiatives. He is now a Senior Strategy Manager at Lapis





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Afghan EssentialsWhere to stay, where to eat, where to Shop. And how to pay for it.Afghan Scene Making Life Easier

Essential scene



Herat RestaurantShar-e Naw, main road,Diagonally opposite Cinema Park

Mixed/WesternLe Dizan (formerly L’Atmosphere)Street 4, Taimani Tel: 0798 840 071, 0700 209 397

Flower Street CaféStreet 2, Qala-e Fatullah. Tel: 0700 293 124, 0799 356 319

Kabul Coffeehouse & CaféStreet 6, on the left, Qale-e Fatullah Tel: 0779 020 202, 0786 226 223, 0785 192 421

Le BistroOne street up from Chicken Street, Behind the MOI, Shar-e Naw Tel: 0799-598852

Red Hot Sizzlin’ SteakhouseDistrict 16, Macroyan 1, Nader Hill Area Tel: 0799 733 468

Le Pelican Cafe du KabulDarulaman Road, almostopposite the Russian Embassy.Bright orange guard box.

IndianNamasteStreet 15, left Lane 4, (last house on right side) Wazir Akbar KhanTel: 0772 011 120

Delhi DarbarShare – Naw, Butcher St, Lane # 3.Tel: 0799 324 899

Anar RestaurantLane 3, Street 14,Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0799 567 291

LebaneseTaverne du LibanStreet 15, Lane 3, Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0799 828 376

Hotels and Guesthouses

Kabul Serena HotelFroshgah Streetwww.serenahotels.comTel: 0799 654 000

Safi Landmark Hotel & SuitesCharahi Ansariwww.safilandmarkhotelsuites.comTel: 0202 203 131

The Inter Continental HotelBaghe Bala Roadwww.intercontinentalkabul.comTel: 0202 201 321

Gandamack Lodge HotelSherpur [email protected]: 0700 276 937, 0798 511 111

Sanpo Guesthouse(formally Unica Guesthouse)Royal Mattress Haji Yaqoob Square

Golden Star HotelCharrhay Haji Yaqoob,Shar-e Naw. www.kabulgoldenstarhotel.comTel: 0799 557 281 , 0777 000 068

Roshan HotelCharaye Turabaz Khan,Shar-e Naw.Tel: 0799 335 424

RestaurantsAfghanRumiQala-e Fatullah Main Rd, between Streets 5 & 6Tel: 0799 557 021

SufiStreet 1, Qala-e Fatullahwww.sufi.com.af Tel: 0774 212 256, 0700 210 651

The GrillStreet 15, Wazir Akbar Khan.Tel: 0799 818 283, 0799 792 879

TurkishIstanbulMain road, on the left, between Mas-soud Circle Jalalabad Road Rounda-bout. Tel: 0799-407818

IranianShandizPakistan Embassy Street, off Street 14 Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0799-342928

Italian/PizzaEverest PizzaMain Road, near Street 12,Wazir Akbar Khan, www.everestpizza.comTel: 0700 263 636, 0799 317 979

Bella ItaliaStreet 14, Wazir Akbar KhanTel: 0799 600 666

ChineseGolden Key Seafood RestaurantLane 4, Street 13, Wazir Akbar Khan. Tel: 0799 002 800, 0799 343 319

ThaiMai ThaiHouse 38, Lane 2, Street 15, Wazir Akbar Khan Tel:0796 423 040

KoreanNew WorldKarte 3, in front of Abdul Ali Mostaghni High School. Tel: 0799 199 509

DeliveryEasyfoodDelivers from any restaurant to your home www.easyfood.af Tel: 0796 555 000, 0796 555 001

Room serviceFood. grocery, errand service [email protected] Tel: 0794952001

Want to get on the Afghan Essentials list of places to eat and sleep? Contact [email protected]

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Supermarkets, Grocers & Butchers

A-OneBottom of Shar-e Naw Park

ChelseaShar-e Naw main road. opp Kabul Bank

SpinneysWazir Akbar Khan, opposite British Embassy

FinestWazir Akbar Khan Roundabout

Fat Man ForestWazir Akbar Khan, main road.

Enyat Modern ButcherQala-e Fatullah main road,Near street four

ATMs

Afghan Spinneys Supermarket, Wazir Akbar Khan(AIB)

AIB Head Office, Shahr-e-Naw, Haji Yaqoob Square, Shahabudin Watt (AIB)

AIB Microrayan Branch, 2nd Micro-rayon

AIB Shahr-e-Naw Branch, Ansary Square, opposit of Kabul City Center, Shahr-e-Naw(AIB)

American Embassy, Massoud Square

Bearing Point Compound, Shahr-e-Naw, Ansary Square (AIB)

Camp Eggers Second ATM, Wazir Akbar Khan

Camp Eggers, Green Bean (AIB)

Camp Gibson -Mil Base, Qasaba Roadd (AIB)Camp Phoenix, Jalalabad Road (AIB)

Faisal Business Center, Lycee Maryam Khair Khana (AIB)

Finest Food Superstore, Shahr-e-Naw Between Hajee Yahqoob Square, Hanzala Mosque (AIB)

Finest Superstore, Pul-e-Surkh, Kart-e-Se (AIB)

Finest Superstore, Street #.15, Wazir Akbar Khan(AIB)

Green Village, Stratex Hospitality Green Village, KAIA Gate-3, Off of Jalalabad Road (AIB)

ISAF HQ -Military Base, Shashdarak (AIB)

KAIA-Military Base, Beside Kabul International Airport (AIB)

New Kabul Compound, Massoud Square (AIB)

Pinnacle Hotel Services, 5 Industrial Parks, Bagram New Road (AIB)

Supreme Truck Park, New Bagram Road (AIB)

World Bank Guard Hut, Street 15 Wazir Akbar Khan (Standard Chartered)

Standard Chartered Branch, Street 10, Wazir Akbar Khan (Standard Chartered)





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Afghan Scene Magazine November 2011

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Transcript of Afghan Scene Magazine November 2011