The Network - Jason Elliot [117]
‘Bloody hell,’ says H gloomily as he looks over the destruction. ‘They really went to work here.’
Even on the outskirts of Kabul there are hollowed-out carcasses of Soviet-made tanks, whose turrets have been blown from their housings by anti-tank mines and lie upside down a few yards away. I wonder how many wars some of them saw before they ended up here. Some date from the era of the Soviet occupation that ended twelve years earlier, others from the long civil war that saw the city torn apart by rival factions. Some may have even seen action in the Gulf War, after which the CIA had the bright idea of gathering them up from Iraqi battlefields and bases and sending them on to Afghanistan.
Kabul seems half-deserted since I was last here, probably because the Tajik population championed by Massoud, the Taliban’s arch-rival, has largely fled. Nor is there any sign of the pakoul, the flat woollen hat worn all over the north of the country. On the advice of our taxi driver, we’ve already hidden ours. There are few cars other than taxis and the occasional pickup truck with tinted windows, the preferred means of travel for Taliban commanders and their bodyguards. It’s as if the place is on holiday and every normal activity has shut down. There are no kites in the sky. The Taliban have seized a ghost town.
Our guest house is in the least-destroyed residential part of the city called Wazir Akbar Khan, where a grid of homes for Kabul’s most prosperous families was built in the 1970s. The trust provides a housekeeper and a chowkidar, who welcome us warmly and fuss over our every request. The windows on the ground floor are heavily sandbagged, and upstairs the panes have anti-shatter tape across them in case of nearby explosions. We install ourselves gratefully in big rooms with marble-floored bathrooms where the taps don’t work because there’s no electricity to pump the water. But we’ve made it to Kabul and we’re happy to be here.
From the upstairs room we can just see a snow-covered ridge, miles away in the high mountains to the north. The final moments of sunlight are just settling along it with a bright pink glow, and it looks almost as if a luminous flamingo feather has gently fallen to rest there from the beyond.
13
The mine clearers are brave men whom I respect. Their work is dangerous and by normal standards they are paid a pittance for it. Though they save countless lives, they don’t get the recognition they deserve and are frequently treated with suspicion or ridicule, especially in rural areas, by people who are too stupid to understand the importance of what they do.
They have never been introduced to the notion of life insurance. When one of their team is wounded or dies, the others contribute to a sum which is then delivered to the man’s wife, who may be able to live from it for a few months. But this is Afghanistan, and they are among the most privileged of the city’s employees.
We walk to their headquarters in Wazir the following morning, and are greeted with spine-crushing hugs from the manager, a burly and jovial Pashtun in his fifties who I’ve known for years. I call him Mr Raouf because he used to call me Mr Anthony, and the habit of using our first names stuck. Even as a junior member of the de-mining team his natural confidence and authority told me he’d do well, and I did everything to see he was promoted as swiftly as was fair. Now he’s the local director and has thirty men working under him.
‘Thanks be to God,’ he smiles, ‘life is good. You see how religious we have all become?’ he asks with an ironic chuckle, and tugs at his thick beard. It’s a decree of the Taliban that men let their beards grow. Being clean-shaven is associated with the irreligious devilry of the communists, who brought ruin to Afghanistan, though not everybody agrees. Like many Afghans, Raouf doesn’t see why not having a beard should