Our writer discovers how foreigners rarely see the country they are trying to rebuild
WAR-ZONES ARE often more ordinary than you expect. So it was recently when I made my first trip to Afghanistan. As we pulled out of Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul and onto the highway my taxi driver turned to me and said that “the worst thing” about life in Afghanistan is the traffic. What about the war, I asked? Oh, yes, sure, sometimes bombs go off, he replied. And the security everywhere is a pain . But bombs rarely inconvenience, whereas traffic, that happens every day.
Sadly, most of the foreigners who work in Afghanistan don’t get to see much of that side of the country, because they are not often allowed out of their diplomatic compounds except under heavy protection. The part of Afghanistan known to most visitors as the “green zone” is nothing like the rest of the city. Concrete blast walls four metres high, topped with barbed wire and surrounded with HESCO blocks—giant wire-framed sandbags—surround everything.
Foreigners hiding away hurts the economy, too. Not far from the diplomatic quarter in Kabul is Chicken Street, a delightful, pedestrianised corner of the city lined with shops selling carpets, antiques and leather goods. For a while its vendors made a good living from the crowds of foreigners based in Kabul. In one emporium, the owner had a complete selection of Victorian flintlock cavalry pistols for sale, the steel embossed with Queen Victoria’s crest.
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