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Outside Magazine December 2003

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The Kabul Express
In the sixties and seventies it was the hippie trail that brought foreigners to Afghanistan. Two decades of war and terror later, Kabul is a nonstop rave of C-130s, NGOs, soldiers, and spooky nation-builders. The freaks are back on Chicken Street—where everything old is new again.

By Patrick Symmes


	WORLD PARTY: on the ground at Kabul International Airport (photograph by Seamus Murphy)

When the world community of do-gooders arrives to rescue a nation from itself, the first sign is the blinding white traffic jam. White Land Rovers stack up thick at the airport; white Nissan Pathfinders block the streets at lunch; miraculous white-on-white Toyota Land Cruisers choke the traffic circles of the lucky target country.

This caravan of chariots was triple-parked outside the Mustafa Hotel in downtown Kabul on a Saturday night. Late-model 4x4s filled the avenue and circled the block, churning up dust as the chauffeurs maneuvered for parking. I threaded my way through a cluster of acronyms: UN, UNESCO, UNDP, UNHCR, FAO, UNICEF, UNICA, UNAMA, UNOPS, UNEP, MSF, ACF, MAP, MACA, IRC, WFP, IOM, IMC. Even the hotel was painted white. I could hear Shakira playing faintly from above.

The ground floor of the Mustafa holds a dank cybercafé that doubles as a bar, the only public place in Kabul to get draft beer. A Turkish de-mining technician sat typing homebound messages at a terminal while a Brit, a white South African, and a black Kenyan sat on stools, nursing beers and ignoring one another.

"You want the roof," the Kenyan told me.

Map It Out

CLICK HERE for a detailed map of Afghanistan and the surrounding region.

Many NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—had banned their staff from frequenting the Mustafa after the owner's son went on a window-smashing rampage during a particularly violent business feud. Now that the hotel was off-limits, everyone was here. Spread out on the roof was the full cast from the theater of charity: UN staff, humanitarians from the 1,800 aid groups registered in Kabul, suit-wearing security ninjas, and ubiquitous consultants. By some estimates, there are 10,000 or more foreign civilians in Kabul—about the same number as there are U.S. military personnel in all of Afghanistan, and twice the 4,800-person NATO-commanded International Security Assistance Force that keeps the peace in the city. This moths-to-the-flame aid tribe moves from global trouble spot to Third World crisis, Africa to Asia, Bogotá to Beirut. The roof looked like a cross between a kegger and a siege.

It was, in fact, a book party. The Survival Guide to Kabul, a kind of underground tip sheet for expats, had been circulating in a 16-page photocopy edition for a year, but tonight it was coming out as Kabul, a 178-page paperback crash course on first-aid kits, bad hotels, and who really makes those rugs. The two British authors, Dominic Medley and Jude Barrand, both NGO aid workers, were selling it through a network of street children, who took it on a $5 commission and hoped to sell it for $15, keeping the spread.

"Who are these people?" I asked Dominic, gesturing across the roof.

He leaned up from signing books and grinned. "I have no idea!"

A few spooks, certainly. Two American men put their gray heads together and whispered about Cuban-run hotels in Prague, while a chatty Brit fumbled the introduction of an American to his friends: "Are you clandestine, or do you just tell people you're from—" he asked, before being abruptly shushed. A claque of NGO folks groused about the way house rents in Wazir Akbar Khan, the city's best neighborhood, had shot up to $5,000 a month. Righteously nonprofit, they held themselves aloof from their cousins, the BONGOs, or business-oriented NGOs, who mingled charity with actual profits. German soldiers knocked back $3 Bitburger pilsners, and militaryspeak flashed through the night: "Green on green" fighting (Muslims versus Muslims) had "gone kinetic," and the world's most-wanted man was referred to only as "OBL."

There were journalists, of course—the television flesh puppets had fled for Iraq months before, but a few lean stringers complained about the Mustafa's moldy rooms. And diplomats. A cultivated European in his fifties rhapsodized about his recent first encounter with opium, sounding as tripped out as any hippie on the Kathmandu trail, at least until he admitted he'd spent the entire drug trip—rave on!—cleaning his house.

There were Afghans on the terrace, too—they were the ones drinking the free water. A few had stayed in-country under the Taliban; others were exiles back from Virginia or Munich, full of schemes for exporting mulberries and converting monastic caves into B&Bs.

The night was soft and utterly black. The shape of TV Mountain—named for the transmitter on top—was sketched out by the tiny lights of shanties on its slopes. Shakira was replaced by a trio of traditional musicians in the courtyard, their wailing melodies drifting up to the roof. An Afghan man began to dance, Sufi style, spinning with his eyes closed and arms outstretched. The foreigners tossed the musicians small bills of afghanis, a currency worth pennies fluttering down into the dark.

The party lasted until after three. The first call to prayer echoed out at 3:42 a.m., just a few winks away.

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Contributing editor Patrick Symmes wrote about the Amazon mahogany trade in October 2002.

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