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Curiously, no one attacked the compound I stayed in upon arriving or any of the other hotels or guest houses I lived in. It could have been that the small infantries of security guards and their Russian assault rifles (both holdovers from earlier wars) dissuaded potential evildoers, or just that no one within shooting distance wished us ill will. The Taliban later stepped up its stabs in the capital, attacking a hotel frequented by Westerners and using the free media to announce its designs to further target establishments where Westerners congregate, but the threats of follow-up attacks never materialized.
Westerners are occasionally kidnapped in Kabul for ideological reasons, more often economic ones, because Afghanistan is poor and its people don't see enough of the aid money sent their way. Afghans characterize the foreign presence as a 7,000-mile game of fetch: The West throws development money at Afghanistan; Westerners scurry over to bring it back. Between inflated salaries and expensive security, the percentage of money that makes it through to redevelopment is offensively low. Meanwhile, United Nations SUVs with their giant phallic antennas waving about are the Afghan equivalent of the Toyota Prius; they're all over, and they confer on their driver an exaggerated sense of moral authority. And the disproportionate distribution of aid money is only one reason some Afghans believe the U.S. wants instability in Afghanistan—it needs an excuse to stay, I'm told, so its military is well positioned on the geopolitical chessboard.
Afghans don't for the most part blame every Westerner, and they're reluctant to express dissatisfaction to visitors because they're obsessive about their hospitality. But it must take a commendable fortitude to hold back: As most of Kabul still lacks running water and electricity for most of the day, foreigners enjoy a vibrant nightlife. Expats go to bars that throw salsa nights and happy hours that Afghans are prohibited from patronizing because alcohol is served. So the hosts are entirely absent from the social scene unless they're holding guns at the doors or looking ridiculous in tuxedo vests behind the bar.
While surprised, I was not unprepared to receive the following e-mail message a few days after my arrival: "2 of Kabul's fiercest party animals are about to leave us so we're throwing a massive end o' summer leaving bash to give them a sweet and proper send off. Music's guaranteed to be the crispiest tunes heard this side of the Hindu Kush, drinks will flow and it should be a wicked night to celebrate!!" Below, after his name and contact information, the sender's automatic e-mail signature read, "DFID, the Department for International Development: leading the British government's fight against world poverty."
But newcomers soon learn what it means to live amid war, surrounded by people who know nothing else. Though you're thrown at first by the parties peopled by overpaid expats—all the embarrassing contrast with what's going on around them—emotional survival in Kabul requires the gradual decay of peripheral vision. If you see everything, you're paralyzed, so you learn to look ahead and practice forgetting. And within weeks, you're scolding Bashir the bartender because he can't remember how you like your drink.
On nights with wind, the dust kicks up and rolls like ghosts through the streets of Kabul; lamplight escapes from cracks in compound walls so you can see the spirits at your feet. Muslims call their ghosts "jinns," and when the dust swirls through houses hollowed by rockets and over roads carved up in recent wars by fallen artillery, the mind wanders: If ever there was a city for specters, Kabul is it.
One Sunday, I watch the Kabul night from my friend Aimal's roof. Aimal has invited a Canadian journalist to dine with us, too—a neophyte uninitiated to reporting in Afghanistan. He spends the evening pushing food around his plate and squirming uncomfortably, and when he talks, he betrays embarrassment for having chosen to live in a compound that Afghans are forbidden to enter, and for coming to Kabul for only a week or so to exploit the suffering he sees and be on his way. He's not yet come to terms with the fact that this is what we do here, all of us, no matter how long we stay.
Then his bowels get the best of him. "I have to leave," he says, "before I have an emergency." And I think how for expats in Afghanistan, life often revolves around the gastrointestinal. That afternoon, an Afghan friend who'd made a mistake causing me minor frustration wrote an e-mail message to apologize. "I'm sorry," he wrote, "for the incontinence."
Aimal's mother is beautiful in her own way, a weathered woman who's managed to maintain her grace through war. Over the course of several meals here, I've slowly drawn her out of the kitchen. The first time, she only showed her hands while pushing plates through the curtained doorway; the second time she came out to greet us, but only sheepishly, and was gone after a moment. Today she sits with us before we eat, and when I leave, I'm taken aback when she offers her hand to shake.
On the roof, one of Aimal's brothers points to where Jamiat-e-Islami fighters rolled their tanks up against the walls of his house, and from there shelled soldiers on the other side of the city. He gestures across the street to the house that collapsed under the rain of rockets, and next to that a small bakery. "Lots of people died there," he says. I ask why he never left, and he says he did, for a time, but that "our lives were here." So Aimal's family stayed. They watched houses collapse around them and neighbors turned inside out by falling artillery, all so that they could continue with their lives, as long as their lives continued.
He tells me what year it was according to the Persian calendar when the worst of the war was happening in Kabul, and I do some quick math in my head. It would be fifteen years ago, and that would put me in third grade, right around the time I was mourning the Philadelphia Phillies' loss in the '93 World Series.
When it came time to go find Farishta, I hired as a driver a security officer from an NGO, a former mujahideen from the days when everyone was, and brought along my friend Melissa, tall, blond, and feminist, and unapologetically all three in a country where laborers and drivers joke that they know no word for "woman," just "girl and "wife."
The drive from Kabul is long, up through the Hindu Kush mountains—"Indian killer," it means, because those from the subcontinent who tried to traverse them never could. But the range was tamed by Soviet industrial ambition, Russian tunnels built in the '80s with typical aesthetic disregard, looking like freight trains fused to rock face. Attique Sharifi made this drive several times with his family, back and forth from Mazar-e-Sharif to Kabul, while they tried to outrun the metastasizing violence.
The road is at times smooth, at times washed or bombed out, at times treacherous only for being sliced so thinly into the mountains with such a long way to fall. We pass rusting Soviet tanks adopted as inevitable elements of the country's terrain—the leftovers of Soviet imperialism combined with the singular resourcefulness of the Afghan people yields an exploitative kind of survival. Abandoned tanks are stripped of their wheel assemblies, their treads unraveled across the roads to serve as speed bumps, their hulls cut for scrap metal to become roofs and walls.
The car engine overheats on the climb, and we spend an unplanned night locked in a hotel room in Baghlan, where six parliamentarians and dozens of civilians will die in a bombing a month later.
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