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A TALE OF TWO CITIES

AMONG THE MANY things that came as a surprise when I first visited Kabul in the autumn of 2008 was the Dari version of Marilyn Manson’s “Personal Jesus” playing on the radio. There was also the astonishing courtesy, solicitousness and exuberant friendliness of the people. The view from the mausoleum of King Zahir Shah at the top of landmine-pocked Maranjan Hill, where the kids come to fly their kites on weekends, revealed a city of perhaps four million people, ten times the population of thirty years before. Kabul’s motor registry department was adding eight thousand new vehicles to its rolls every month, and the roads were choked with traffic. Down in the gritty backstreets, uproars of laughter erupted from men sitting around TV sets watching Afghan talk shows. The bazaars were bursting with life and commerce. Even in the dingiest parts of the bomb-blasted metropolis, down among the rickety vendors’ stalls that sell cow heads and sheep guts, there was always a newly opened computer school or a long line of unveiled women waiting for their literacy or accountancy classes to open for the day. Every morning, the streets were filled with schoolchildren.

It was as though there were two completely different cities in the world called Kabul.

The city that routinely showed up in English-language television reports and daily newspapers was a Central Asian version of Stalingrad during the siege, or Phnom Penh just before the Khmer Rouge rolled in. Shortly after I arrived, Britain’s Sunday Telegraph judged Kabul to be “as dangerous as Baghdad at its worst”—the Taliban were at the gates. But the Taliban were not at the gates, and the city I came to know—making my appointments, buying naan and bananas at the bazaars, popping into bookstores, drinking tea in mud houses and half-collapsed buildings, sitting at tables in pleasant offices and coffee shops—was not the city the world was being told about. The Kabul that trundled along before my eyes was a thriving, heartbreakingly poor but hopeful and splendid place.

Over the years, I’d made Afghanistan a bit of a personal study, and I could count Kabuli émigrés among my friends. Still, nothing had quite prepared me for certain things. The prompt pizza delivery service, for one. For another, the fact that you could take a handgun to the bank with you, leave it with the guard and pick it up on the way out. Perhaps most surprising was the spectacular contrast between the cosseted little universe inhabited by Kabul’s “international community” overclass and the raucous reality of everyday life among Kabul’s rambunctious masses.

Kabul, the capital of Absurdistan, is the city you see at sunrise over the shoulder of the television reporter, the city that crackles at twilight from the verandas of jittery foreign diplomats, aid-agency bureaucrats and journalists. It’s the city with helicopters always flying overhead and rapid-fire text messages on everyone’s cell phones relaying intelligence bulletins about the latest assassination attempts and kidnappings.

The real Kabul can be a perilous place, true enough. As in almost every big city between Amman and Calcutta, something horrible happens almost every day. The day before I arrived, Gayle Williams, a British aid worker, had been shot dead by two Taliban thugs on a motorcycle outside the gates to Kabul University. Humayun Shah Asefi, a prince from the old royal family, had just been kidnapped along with his son. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Melissa Fung hadn’t been heard from for weeks—she’d been kidnapped by bandits. A French aid worker was snatched just a few blocks from the guest house where I’d settled in. Notably, an Afghan who lived on the street where the incident occurred died in his attempt to prevent the Frenchman’s abduction. He grabbed a kidnapper’s machine gun by the barrel and was shot in the chest.

A few days after I got to Kabul, while I was interviewing Fatani Gilani, head of the Afghan Women’s Council, one of her staff ran in with a cell phone. Gilani took the call and gasped. The young man she’d just sent to pick up some office supplies had been caught in the blast from a suicide bombing at the Ministry of Information building over on Feroshgah Street. Five people were killed. The council’s young employee was okay, though. Just a bit shaken up.

But the real Kabul was not a dreary, white-knuckle-dangerous place where the crazy locals are just itching to slit foreigners’ throats. It was a city that got knocked around, picked itself up, dusted itself off and carried on with its business. This was the city I came to know, a city of polio victims, almond sellers, seamstresses, football players and anti-poverty activists. A city of cab drivers, teachers, money changers and beggars. It wasn’t especially difficult to get to know the place. The trick, I learned, was to run with savvy Kabulis. Don’t keep routines. Don’t make ransom bait of yourself. I found I could pass as an Afghan easily enough, shambling down the street or wandering the markets on some errand. But up close, even with my Afghan shawl and Panjshiri hat, I wasn’t fooling anyone. All the better, too. Get noticed as someone from away, and people are likely to watch your back or invite you in for tea.

In this other Kabul there is a sprawling sub-metropolis, where life unfolds in dramas and excitements all its own, in the hordes of kite-flying children on the city’s flat roofs. At least seventy thousand of these Kabulis are more or less orphans. They descend into the streets every day to hawk maps, magazines and packages of chewing gum, sometimes resorting to begging and ragpicking or the refined art of pickpocketing. In this vast rooftop district, the talk was not about kidnappings or a looming Taliban takeover. It was about President Karzai’s decree outlawing begging. Karzai had instructed the Interior Ministry to clear the streets of panhandling ragamuffins by trundling them off to orphanages and to the network of Dickensian “care homes” run by the Afghan Red Crescent Society. Nothing came of it, though, which was not a great surprise. It was just another thing to laugh about. Kabulis like a good laugh. And they like to tell jokes.

Two country bumpkins visit Kabul and decide to take in a movie. A cow appears on the screen, and one of the hillbillies gasps, “Watch out, everyone; there’s a cow in the theatre!” The other guy says, “Don’t be silly; it’s just a movie.” Then the first guy says, “Sure, but the cow doesn’t know that.” A mullah is making a spectacle of himself by crying and moaning at the funeral of a rich man. Nobody recognizes the mullah, so somebody asks him, “Were you a close relative?” The mullah says, “No, I’m crying because he was so rich, and I didn’t know him when he was alive.”