The new Great Game

Jyoti Malhotra chances upon love and the circle of life in the time of war and elections in Kabul.

At the Bagh-e-Babur in Kabul, the circle of life is like a panorama before you, playing out in the trickling water flowing into the canal in the centre of the garden.

Atop the garden, in the shadow of the mud wall that surrounds the newly re-created acreage courtesy the Aga Khan Trust, Babur’s enclosed marble tomb —pockmarked by bullet holes that are a gruesome reminder of the civil war that raged in Kabul until only a decade-and-a-half ago — is witness to Kabulis self-consciously indulge in their newest pastime: the concept of public leisure.

The canal divides the park into two, one side for families, the other for young men only. Some of them pass the time just beyond Babur’s tomb, lounging in their shalwar suits.

On the other side, families loaded with cotton carpets and large picnic hampers settle on to the grass, the women covered in black hijaabs but with their faces defiantly revealed. And then I spy the most exciting change of all, a young couple walking the intermediate spaces, not holding hands but walking side by side, separated by a few inches of heat.

Kabul must, perhaps, be among the most dangerous places in the world, but it’s the sense of new beginnings — despite the daily doses of bomb blasts, kidnappings and a renewed face-off between the Taliban and international security forces — that sends a frisson of excitement through any new arrival.

The new airport terminal has been built by the Japanese, the coffee bar at the Hotel Safi Landmark right in Shahr-e-Nau (the New City, what else!), in the heart of the city, is packed with young men and women (admittedly, mostly men) and there’s more than one bar in the city that serves you drinks (only to foreigners) with a free slice of the star-spangled sky.

Kamil, a Lebanese who owns Taverna, one of five such expatriates-only bars, smiles away both apologies — as we gatecrash into the night — as well as the profusion of compliments that accompany the tangy babaganoush. He has been in Kabul for five years (and is looking to open a place in New Delhi) and shrugs away all questions about how safe or dangerous it is. “I came here from Baghdad,” says Kamil, adding new flavour to the phrase, terror-tourism.

As a foreigner and an Indian, I am acutely aware and more than a little embarrassed by these pools of normality, considering how easily we have sweet-talked the AK-47-carrying Afghan men at the restaurant entrance into allowing us entry with our Bollywood stories, without even showing them our passports.

This one is called L’Atmosphere (a joint venture between a Frenchman and an Afghan) and a friend says it’s on top of the Taliban hit-list precisely because it’s so popular. The private guards look like they’re guarding a mud hovel, just like those packed across the north Indian countryside. I am totally unprepared for the fabulous informality of the “chai khana” that lies beyond, the bar interspersed between groves of orange and mulberry trees.

Afghanistan is like a Bollywood film with a storyline gone so awry, it’s difficult to decide any more who are the good guys and who the bad. Today’s Taliban, mostly Pashtun, are of the same stock as the protagonist in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, Kabuliwallah. And while the country is being constantly shaken by explosions and people being killed and kidnapped (at least 2-3 a day in Kabul), there’s surprisingly a great deal of understanding among Afghans about why Taliban numbers are growing.

“Most Afghans join the Taliban because their families and friends have been killed in air strikes by the international forces and they want to take revenge,” said an Afghan official, pointing out that in southern provinces like Kandahar, Oruzgan and Paktika, where the poppy crop has largely overtaken the cultivation of maize or wheat, the Taliban pay much higher wages than the government (if government jobs pay $2 a day, the Taliban pays $6 and drug-runners $12).

There’s little to choose, anyway, added the cynical Afghan official, between today’s elected members of parliament-who-were-once Taliban, President Karzai’s senior officials and ministers who are hand-in-glove with the warlords, and the warlords themselves.

In the wake of the recently-concluded presidential elections, the stakes are really high for all sides. Since the Taliban were ousted by the US in November 2001, the international community has poured money into Afghanistan (according to some estimates, over $500 billion), in the hope of building a new country. (Of course, the contrary argument exists that the Americans hardly gave any aid to Afghanistan, instead spending most of their monies on Iraq.)

With the aid came the international consultants like bees zig-zagging around a particularly luscious hive, with the result that very little of that large sum of money, less than $5 billion, has been used up by the Afghans themselves.

The figures may be contestable, but the question is, do the several hundred consultants also follow their flag? According to the December 2001 Bonn agreement, the world took responsibility for Afghanistan’s most serious issues — the US would train the army, Germany would train the police, Japan would be in charge of collecting illegal weapons, while Italy would take charge of training the judiciary.

But the truth is that all the world’s powers congregated in Kabul are keeping a watchful eye on each other. Nobody trusts anyone else, there are no permanent friends or enemies, only interests, and every interest has at least five different versions.

As the cool wind blows in from the Hindukush and nuzzles the foliage of the blood-red mulberry, it’s easy to forget the heat and dust of the Indo-Gangetic plain and watch the new Great Game unfold in the ravaged city. The best diplomats are posted here, and so are their advisers — of course, you don’t have to be either to be a spy.

On the other hand, if it’s national interest that sends the blood rushing to the aorta, then distractions like the absence of your family (Kabul is a non-family diplomatic station) are a near-irrelevance.

The principal actors in this drama that has now lasted more than a hundred years, and is still being played out in the mountains and plateaus of inner Asia, range from the Americans to the Pakistanis, from the Europeans and Russians to the Indians.

Most Afghans agree that the US and NATO forces are so unpopular they should have quit yesterday — then step back and stare at the internecine blood feud nightmare that passes off as the future if they leave. The Afghans’ bittersweet relationship with Pakistanis is explained by the enduring belief that Pakistan midwifed the Taliban, but also gave shelter to three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan for several years.

As for India, seen as a friend of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the national hero, who was killed only two days before 9/11 by two Al-Qaeda men posing as Moroccan journalists, both Bollywood and bilateral aid in building roads, electrical transmission lines, a run-of-the river dam, schools and SEWA training is hugely popular.

Hindi movies and Indian TV serials have, in fact, become the latest arrows in the liberal Afghan’s arsenal against fundamentalists — although it’s a moot point if even Tulsi, the overweight upholder of the dharma of the north Indian middle-classes in Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, can take on the Taliban.

Most Afghans speak Hindi and Urdu with equal ease, the first because the markets are packed with Bollywood releases, pirated several times over (Amitabh Bachhan and Aamir Khan have done more for India in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world than the foreign office ever could), and the second because of the intimate relationship with Pakistan. Few people were surprised in Kabul when the outspoken actor Shabana Azmi was recently invited by the UN to launch a report against the abuse of women and publicise its campaign, “Silence is Violence”.

The Karzai government has tried to do its share for gender equality by enforcing a 27 per cent quota for women in the National Assembly (among them, Malalai Joya from Farah province, who publicly denounced the elected warlords in the Assembly), although many would say it’s hardly enough.

The truth is that in the Islamic republic of Afghanistan (the Gender Development Index places it the second-lowest in the world), men are legally allowed to take up to four wives and some of the most progressive women in the country have been forced to accept the male wandering eye, including those of their own husbands.

That sense of teetering on the edge of several worlds is probably what won Shinkai Stanekzai, 19, the $2000 Afghan Contemporary Prize this year. Her prize-winning entry, Forty Women, seeks to connect the stories of 40 subjugated women in Afghan mythology, both in Pashto and Dari, with the modern era.

“I wanted to show that women in Afghanistan are being killed even today by their parents, their brothers or their husbands, or are killing themselves,” Shinkai said, her eyes framed by a black scarf that she had teamed up with a black tunic and narrow trousers. “Things haven’t changed that much.”

Rahraw Omarzad, who opened a private arts academy in 2004, believes that for the time being it’s enough that young Afghans have begun to paint. “After so many decades, they are getting back in touch with the rest of the world,” he said.

This incipient feeling of normalcy is what completes the circle of life in Kabul: Death may only be a rocket attack away, but until then, life is both uncertain and beautiful.