Live Update July 2003. Many recent articles are semi-frequent updates from Kabul, where I was working in July, brought to you by a wonder of satellite technology. I'd be delighted to know what you think.
......
Most of the rest of this section was compiled between September 11 and the end of the Bonn conference which set up the Karzai government (I admit that the latter event makes my views, based on limited but non-zero experience of the reality, look unnecessarily pessimistic and realpolitikal).
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Perhaps because their evils were so newsworthy this goes double for the Taliban, who governed Afghanistan from the mid-90s until the year before last. But Professor Graham Farrell, a Loughborough university ...
Show whole article (710 words)
It’s been eighteen months. Taliban are still off in the hills, that nice Mr Karzai is still president. Kabul has cinemas and wedding dress shops. You can dance. Aid money and wealthier emigres are coming in and the building trade’s kicking into gear. Girls are going to school and their ...
Show whole article (800 words)
There is a modest but insidious problem in the Afghan aid world. It may be a problem in aid work elsewhere – I expect so, but I don’t know from my own experience. The problem is BONGOs. This is a term expressing cynicism. There are NGOs (non-governmental organisations, a ...
Show whole article (1970 words)
So on with the farewell tour.
Drive out of Kabul on the Lataband road, the old highway to Jalalabad via Gandomak, before modern engineering made the Kabul river gorge a going concern, along which Elphinstone’s doomed army shuffled and staggered in the New Year snows of 1842; drive out on ...
Show whole article (790 words)
My last day in Kabul, a Friday and so a day off. A colleague and I took a stalling rattler of a Landcruiser and went out to drive at random. First we zoomed up to the Intercontinental Hotel. It sits in a saddle between Kabul proper and the suburbs of Afshar, Silo and beyond. Good views ...
Show whole article (820 words)
Well then. A few nights ago I was getting ready for bed but there was this music. It came and went – reedy and lots of drumming. Amplified. Canned? I thought not, though there was little or no crowd noise. It was music that didn’t quite make sense at first – to begin with the drummer ...
Show whole article (2630 words)
So anyway, that party.
But by the way I shouldn’t like to give the impression (see previous) that Kabul is some one-horse hick town and Afghans are accident prone. Kabul has about seventy thousand private cars and thirty-five thousand taxis, besides several thousand aid agency and ...
Show whole article (310 words)
Yesterday afternoon I went out on the scrounge for information. Kabul has email and mobile telephony now, but not always to the point where it gets you what you want. Sometimes there's no substitute for going to somebody's office and asking a question.
My driver was Shoeib - a very ...
Show whole article (570 words)
Turns out I was wrong. The demo wasn't against the US and Pakistan. Week before last there was a super demo in which the Pakistani embassy was looted from top to bottom - I know this is true because I met a man who wants to go to Islamabad, left his passport with the embassy and now is an ...
Show whole article (1310 words)
I've been here almost a week - two more to go. Too short a visit to such a super country.
"Super country"? you ask - thinking of a generation of war, almost the lowest life expectancy and income in the world, mines, militias and oppressed women. Well, I can see I'm going to have to ...
Show whole article (650 words)
There are many good reasons why we should help Afghanistan rebuild itself. To begin with, they need some help and we can afford it. You’re probably jaded with heart-wringing statistics, but let me encourage you to think what it means to say that the average Afghan’s income is ninety-eight ...
Show whole article (990 words)
Much of this section is arguably too pessimistic. It's based on my own experience of the country and some limited reading of history, which the reader may wish to see summarised.
I worked in Afghanistan from July to December 1997 and part of the Spring of 1998. The impression I got of ...
Show whole article (200 words)
Well, this is what I was afraid of. Of course, arguably, a penal system that sanctions amputations and executions, and a government that prohibits dissent, women's freedom, and most kinds of fun, is too much of a price to pay for law and order. But if you lived in Afghanistan, ...
Show whole article (100 words)
You know those email petitions that go around? One about women in Afghanistan drops into my inbox every now and then. Hang on, let me see if I can find a copy... ah, there it is. It's about how badly the Taliban treat women. Here's a sample:
> > > the government of Afghanistan, is waging a ...
Show whole article (1240 words)
I must say this whole business troubles me. There are few countries I have a greater affection for than Afghanistan and America, so I'm rather torn. It bothers me that the Taliban have got rolled in with the terrorists in popular perception - as far as I can make out their interest in ...
Show whole article (600 words)
To make it quite clear that I'm totally not anti-American in any way, and because it bears repeating that the USA is a beautiful and admirable country, here some observations about the events of 11 September which I originally posted on perlmonks
It would be absurdly self-important of me ...
Show whole article (590 words)
I wrote this... ages ago, early 2000 I think. I refer to what was then a semi-current event, the hijacking by Kashmiri terrorists of an Indian Airlines aeroplane. As you may recall, after some wanderings this plane ended up in Kandahar where everyone thought the Taliban would welcome ...
Show whole article (2450 words)