After five years in Kabul, Ben Farmer reflects on the frightening reality of daily life in the city
Ben Farmer in Kabul, where he lived for five years Photo: John Wendle
By Ben Farmer7:00AM BST 09 Jun 2013
Kabul, like London, can feel like a city of villages. Travel through the Afghan capital’s ever-widening sprawl lapping against the mountains, and the city of four million reveals itself as a dense constellation of neighbourhoods. The city stretches for miles and houses perhaps one in eight of Afghanistan’s population, yet everyday life is often centred on these discrete pockets.
It was to one of these corners of the city that I said goodbye last month after nearly five years covering Afghanistan for The Telegraph. The adjoining neighbourhoods of Qala-e Fatullah and Taimani were home for nearly all that time, and a haven as violence and uncertainty have swirled around the country. I covered stories from the mountains of the east to the battlefields of the south and the great cities of the north and west, but always returned to these quiet backstreets.
A mile from what counts as the capital’s green zone, and with much cheaper rent, this wedge of Kabul has found itself home to an unlikely mix of deep-rooted Afghan families and transient expats. Aid workers, journalists and the drifters who wash up in foreign conflicts live next door to Afghan families who have resided in the same houses for decades.
Such a mixture may sound like a powder keg of antagonism but, by and large, the two coexist peacefully, if with a certain reserve. Crowds of children tear around kicking footballs or playing hide and seek as watchful fathers stand at the gate. Tradesmen and labourers walk the potholed dirt streets and alleys shouting their wares and looking for work. At the weekend – Friday in Afghanistan – the men wash their cars and pack in their families to go visiting. The call to prayer, ice cream salesmen and American Black Hawk helicopters flying low enough to rattle the windows provide the soundtrack. Through this, expats come and go, and frequent the handful of cafés and restaurants catering to them.
When I first arrived in Kabul, I spent several months living in one of the now-defunct small hotels catering to foreigners that used to dot the city. My meeting at a party with an Afghan restaurateur who had rented a bachelor pad in Qala-e Fatullah and was looking for a flatmate was fortunate in more than one way. Soon after I moved in with him, the Park Residence hotel where I had been staying was hit by a massive Taliban bomb blast and stormed by gunmen in an attack that killed 17, including Indian, Italian and French guests.
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Such spectacular attacks punctuated my time in Kabul. Both the Taliban and the coalition allies are well aware of their propaganda effect and how bad they look back in Western capitals. An intense intelligence and policing war has been fought to try and stop them occurring, but every few months an attack gets through.
Each follows a similar pattern. A quiet morning is shattered by a blast and often gunfire, leaving everyone craning to see where smoke is rising. Phone networks often jam as people seek assurances their relatives are safe and then people check local radio, TV and even Twitter to see where the attack struck.
One aspect of Kabul life that I came to admire was how quickly the city got back to work after attacks. Daily life refused to be halted and often resumed minutes after the shooting had stopped and the blood was hosed away. I once stumbled across a wedding party just a few blocks from a fierce armed siege.
Qala-e Fatullah has no obvious military, government or diplomatic targets and has largely escaped these attacks. This means it has also escaped the growth of concrete blast walls and road closures that have choked much of the city centre.
For all the risk of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in such attacks, it was perhaps the fear of kidnap that fed a low level of anxiety which was often forgotten but never really disappeared. In all my time in Qala-e Fatullah, a couple of expats were seized. After each incident rumours swirled. Was the foreigner targeted or was it opportunistic? Was it the Taliban or some shady personal dealings gone wrong? Few of these questions ever found satisfactory answers, even after the victims were eventually released. Everyone swore they would be more careful and carried on about their business.
My housemate and I went on to live in three different houses in the area. As he diversified from restaurants into the Afghan music scene, the houses often filled with musicians, artists and filmmakers. We learnt to co-ordinate our diaries so that skinny jean wearing musicians did not bump into the conservative tribal elders I had invited to interview. The watchman at our house made a point of advising many of the young musicians they would be better off “stopping all this noise and becoming doctors”.
Daily life in Kabul involved hailing taxis around town to interview the ministers, generals, diplomats, businessmen and warlords who were trying to steer, or even just make sense of, what was happening in the country. Evenings were spent in restaurants, houses and gardens with friends, contacts and colleagues.
The violence wracking the country is too widespread for it not to occasionally intrude, though. I woke one morning last summer to the awful sound of women wailing and a street full of mourners. A suicide-lorry bomb attack on an American base in Logar had killed one the neighbours’ sons as he worked in the family shop next door. He was only a few weeks from his wedding. A few months later, Asadullah Khalid, the Afghan spy chief, was grievously wounded two streets away when a suicide bomber blew himself up while posing as an insurgent envoy.
But the past few years have been very good for some in the neighbourhood. More and more of the plain old one- and two-storey houses have been knocked down to provide space for gaudy mansions of dubious funding.
One particularly flamboyant new landmark boasts a complete zoo of concrete animals housed on a rooftop pleasure garden. This mirrors a similar boom across Kabul and other cities where military or construction contracts and drug money have brought riches to the lucky few. Old residents tut that planning laws forbid houses over two storeys so gardens and yards aren’t overlooked, but in this, as in much in Afghanistan, the rich can do as they please.
The neighbourhood was not always this prosperous. Twenty years ago it was nearly deserted as rival Mujahideen warlords picked clean the capital’s bones after the collapse of the Soviet-backed government. Qala-e Fatullah witnessed fighting between militias of the Jamiat and the Hezb-e Wahdat factions. Old residents can still point out where rockets fell and recall the death toll of each strike. The fighting often seemed just an excuse for looting. One former landlord liked to regale me with tales of defending his property against Panjshiri marauders intent on burglary, and seeing them off by throwing grenades. The commanders who oversaw these atrocities are now back in power, propped up by Western money – something ordinary Kabul residents find it difficult to forgive us for.
It is also a return to this kind of civil war that they fear most, even more than a return of the Taliban. The Taliban are despised as ignorant and backward men who used to wield sticks to herd people into prayers in the green mosque at the crossroads in the centre of Qala-e Fatullah, but they were better than the chaos. A string of brutal burglaries that have recently struck both expat and Afghan homes in the area have served as an unsettling reminder of how fragile the current situation might be.
All eyes are now on the end of the Nato combat mission next year. The end of 2014 has taken on an almost apocalyptic symbolism in many people’s minds. The prospect of what might happen when the foreigners leave is chewed over everywhere. For many, the prognosis is bleak.
They foresee a deep economic recession which is already starting to bite, and a contested presidential election next year which destabilises the fragile state. Many doubt British and American promises to continue providing money to the Afghan government and fear a repeat abandonment of the 1990s. At times fear of 2014 can be contagious, with all the creeping panic of a nightmare. The uncertainty exhausts everyone. In my final weeks in Kabul, I lost count of how many people half-jokingly asked if I could take them with me when I left.
And yet there are plenty of others who are more hopeful and see predictions of doom as an affront to national pride. They say the more Afghans can do for themselves, albeit with foreign funding, the better chance they have of avoiding a return to chaos. Life is better than it was and, after all, they can scarcely do a worse job than the foreigners. Entrepreneurs who are either heroic or insane, according to who you speak with, are still pouring fortunes into shopping malls and business ventures, gambling on stability lasting long enough for them to turn a profit.
Qala-e Fatullah was at its loveliest as I left. The cold and mud of winter were long gone, though the peaks were still snow-capped, and everyone’s gardens were full of ripening fruit trees and roses. I cannot help but worry about what will happen to it as I leave at such a time of uncertainty. I confessed as much to one neighbour who had stayed throughout the civil war and Taliban rule. He shrugged and said he would again stay whatever. “We will have to deal with it like we always have. Unlike you, we can’t leave.”
