|
Kabul 1 yr later { November 20 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12470-2002Nov19.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12470-2002Nov19.html
A Year After Taliban, Daily Life in Kabul Is Struggle for Most
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 20, 2002; Page A01
KABUL, Afghanistan -- On a nameless street in a maze of mud-colored residential ruins are three adjacent houses that illustrate, as well as any corner of Kabul, the raggedly uneven progress that has come to the Afghan capital a year after it was freed from the asphyxiation of Taliban rule.
The first house, a bullet-pocked wreck without windows, doors, water or electricity, is occupied by three poor families who recently returned from a decade in Pakistani refugee camps. Winter is fast approaching, and there is no money for wood or coal. Only one family member has found work, as a casual construction laborer.
"We wait all day for my son-in-law to come home," said Kandi Gul, 65, peeking out from behind a torn plastic tent that serves as a front door. "If he brings home some money, we can buy rice or potatoes for dinner. If he doesn't, we don't eat."
The next house is a half-rebuilt hive of activity, with workmen laying bricks and pouring cement for an expensive new roof with fashionably scalloped eaves. The owner is an Afghan diplomat, related to a cabinet minister, who visits periodically to inspect the work.
The third house, a weedy jumble of broken bricks, belongs to Zia Modaressi, a librarian who has just returned from 15 years in Pakistan and works for a U.N. project here. He is sleeping in his Kabul office, however, because he cannot afford to renovate his family's former home.
"My father built this house 40 years ago, and I want to come back," said Modaressi, poking sadly through the rubble. "A lot of professionals like me want to come back and share in rebuilding the country. But government salaries are very low, and rents are very high. There is no place to start."
It has been just over a year since a U.S.-led military assault drove the Taliban from Kabul, bringing back a semblance of normal urban life for the first time in a decade, opening the way for refugees to return and promising a variety of opportunities for those with skill or money to invest in their country's rebirth.
Today, Kabul is a bustling capital of 2.7 million, more than twice the population of one year ago. Women barred from public life under the Taliban now fill offices and classrooms; music, once banned as un-Islamic, blares from taxis and cassette stands. Shops burst with imported goods, houses are being stylishly renovated and new restaurants offer Thai and Italian cuisine.
But often it seems as if the benefits of Kabul's liberation have been bestowed only on the lucky or well-connected few, while the burdens of its rapid growth, dilapidated infrastructure and continued economic stagnation have fallen on everyone else.
Take the problem of traffic. A year ago, there were more bicycles on city streets than motor vehicles, and there was no rush hour because most businesses and government agencies were closed. Today the capital is trapped in semi-permanent gridlock; a testament to both the welcome surge of urban activity and the woeful incapacity to cope with it.
For government and foreign aid officials with powerful SUVs and chauffeurs, commuting is merely an inconvenient obstacle course. For hundreds of thousands of Kabulis who depend on public transportation, it is a nightmare. With less than 150 public buses in operation, getting home after work may mean waiting an hour in the dark, fighting for a spot in (or atop) a hopelessly crammed coach, and crawling across town for another hour or two.
"There were 3,000 taxis in Kabul a year ago; now there are 30,000. Everyone wants to buy a car, but no one has a driver's license, and the traffic signals don't work," groaned Lal Mohammed, a policeman frantically waving and whistling at a choked intersection last week. "I love to see people back in the streets, but this peace and stability also bring more problems every day."
The acute shortage of electricity throughout the capital is a more worrisome byproduct of the city's population boom, and a more acute example of the imbalance between its haves and have-nots -- especially with the approach of another harsh winter in the mountain-ringed capital.
The combination of protracted drought, neglect and war damage to the region's hydroelectric dams, along with the enormous surge in public demand, has led to a near collapse of the power system in the past month.
Less than half of urban homes are electrified, and under a recent emergency regimen, most of those receive power only for eight hours, at night.
While poorer Kabulis shiver around wood stoves and gas cylinders, wealthy residents can simply turn on their generators when the electricity sputters and dies each evening. In addition, certain public buildings, such as hospitals, schools and police stations, are theoretically exempted from the rationing system.
Last week, however, repeated power failures at Kabul University had tragic consequences. Hundreds of students, angry at the electrical cuts and food shortages, surged into the streets in a spontaneous nighttime protest.
Police opened fire on the crowd, killing three students and leaving numerous others hospitalized with gunshot wounds.
"The university is in the [exempt] category, but the system kept breaking down," said Mohammed Younus Nawandish, the deputy minister for water and power. The underlying problem, he said, is an excess of inhabitants. "We estimated there would be one or two families per house, but in some areas there is one family per room, so the power is always overused."
Now, by repairing and reactivating two old gas turbines, the government hopes to have city power restored full time before the worst cold sets in.
But for tens of thousands of squatters in Kabul's heatless, lightless ruins, the coming winter will mean scavenging for firewood, waiting in line for donated sacks of coal, or freezing.
Despite the hardships of life in this half-destroyed capital, however, Afghans keep streaming back, hoping to secure niches in the burgeoning if chaotic urban economy. Half-bombed buildings are honeycombed with storefront workshops, framed in fresh wood. Sidewalk carpenters turn out desks and chairs around the clock; masons are bricking up tumbled walls on every block.
Mohammed Nasir, a metalsmith who returned from Pakistan in May, has spent nearly $5,000 renovating the workshop in West Kabul he abandoned seven years ago. Now, he is doing a brisk business welding and painting metal doors for returning homeowners -- a partnership of slowly spreading confidence in Kabul's future.
"People like our doors, because they are both pretty and strong," said Nasir. "They want to come back and fix up their homes, but they are still worried about security. There is still a culture of fighting and looting here after so many years of war. But there is also a feeling of wanting to forget the past and promote the future."
In more posh neighborhoods, custom-made signs express commercial fantasies once forbidden by the stern, anti-Western Taliban authorities, from Cappuccino Cafe to Computer Supermarket. On the same streets, dozens of spacious houses are being hastily renovated in hopes of attracting foreign tenants or professional returnees.
But when it comes to more substantial investments, would-be Afghan entrepreneurs complain that red tape, security concerns and the overloaded infrastructure have deterred them from making any long-term commitments, even though their eagerness to be part of the urban action is evident.
"Kabul is so exciting now. I'd love to build a Home Depot, a supermarket downtown, but it's hard to get government cooperation," said Syed Hashimi, a construction company owner who moved back from California "as soon as the Taliban left." He is overseeing some home renovations, but his bigger projects are on hold. "There are still too many political and economic problems," he said.
To a large extent, Kabul's commercial bustle is being artificially sustained by the nonprofit agencies that have proliferated here since the departure of the Taliban. By last month there were more than 1,000 registered in the capital, gobbling up blocks of real estate and driving rents up fivefold.
While most of the foreign nonprofits are solid organizations providing urgently needed services, some newer, Afghan-run nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, are criticized as opportunistic ventures whose operators are trying to avoid the bureaucracy and the expense of opening a business.
"A lot of them are briefcase NGOs who are clearly after money," said Rafael Robillard, director of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, which works with many aid organizations. "If you want to set up a construction company, it's much easier to set up an NGO and avoid the paperwork and taxes." Many Afghan government officials and their relatives, he said, have already started nonprofits.
Meanwhile, the cost of living for ordinary Kabulis is spiraling out of control. Most houses and apartments in undamaged districts have become too expensive for even middle-class families to afford. Some professionals have reluctantly returned to Pakistan, while others like Modaressi have taken jobs here but left their families abroad.
In September the government introduced a new currency, hoping to stabilize prices and exchange rates, but instead its value has plunged against the Pakistani rupee, causing consumer prices to shoot up. Staples such as rice and oil have doubled, while beef has tripled.
"In some ways, life here is better than it was under the Taliban, and in other ways it's worse," said Safatullah, 33, a schoolteacher and father of three who moonlights selling house paint. "When we see girls going to school and people being free, it is much better. But prices are much higher. A teacher's salary can be spent in one day, and many people can't find a job at all. I don't see much to be optimistic about."
Mohammed Jan Baz, the city's municipal planning director, spends much of his time worrying about how Kabul will survive its multiple crises, and begging for foreign help. Russia, he said, has agreed to provide spare parts for dilapidated garbage trucks; India has promised to donate another 100 passenger buses; and Japan has offered to build 1,500 low-cost, prefabricated houses.
But much of the internationally pledged aid has yet to materialize, Baz complained, while tens of thousands of Kabulis remain in highly vulnerable conditions that will only worsen this winter. At least 100,000 of them, like Kandi Gul, are squatters living in abandoned ruins that provide little more than shelter from the wind.
"My son spends all his time looking for work, and I'm too old to go out," said Gul, whose relatives recently squeezed into one room so an even more desperate family could share their drafty abode.
"We have no future here, but we don't have enough money to go back to Pakistan either," she said. "Only God is keeping us alive."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
|
|
