The Network - Jason Elliot [120]
‘Shall we see how it goes?’ I ask H.
In Afghanistan cars sound as if they’re about to fall apart when you slam their doors. This one sounds as if we’ve just closed the hatch of a nuclear shelter. The engine starts first time and purrs. It’s done less than a thousand kilometres and is good for about another half-million. Mr Raouf drives ahead of us and heads back to the office, but I take the road to Kart-e Parwan and turn west around Aliabad hill. I have my reasons. As we reach the Deh Mazang crossroads by the zoo I turn onto the broad avenue that leads in a straight line to the presidential palace, nearly a mile away. The surface is scarred by shell and rocket blasts and the G weaves between the craters, handling magnificently.
It’s a surreal drive. We see the world through a greenish haze, silenced and deceptively harmless-looking, as if we’ve descended like aliens and are observing the life around us from a protective bubble. Some men on bicycles and the occasional taxi pass us in the opposite direction, but there’s no other traffic. Men haul at overloaded carts of timber and sacks, and ghost-like women in pale-blue burqas float past us as if carried on air.
I’ve never dared to visit this part of the city before because it was so vulnerable to attack and came under rocket fire almost daily when I was last in Kabul. The buildings on either side of the road are in a state of utter ruin. Floors, columns and lintels all sag and droop, held together only by the metal reinforcement inside them. Lesser structures are shattered and split and crumbling into the earth. There’s isn’t a square foot that hasn’t been riddled with gunfire. Sometimes we see the dark scar of a rocket blast that looks as if someone has thrown a bucket of paint against a wall, only it’s been caused by an explosion of white-hot metal.
We are in the centre of a capital city, but it looks more like one of the battlefields of the First World War. In the early 1990s the area was first devastated by Hekmatyar’s rockets, vast stockpiles of which were generously financed by American taxpayers and supplied by the CIA. Later it became the southern front of prolonged battles as the government’s rivals converged on the city from every direction except the north. They were fought off in a series of desperate counter-attacks organised by Massoud, whose exhausted forces were unable to counter the swift advance of the Taliban a year later.
Ahead, the palace looms. It’s a shell of a building now. The roof has been torn open in several places by rocket blasts, and resembles a botched attempt to open a tin can. The walls are saturated with bullet holes. I park nearby, and for a few minutes H and I wander around the deserted arcades of the lower floor, where kings and heads of state were once received and where our feet now crunch the fragments of its shattered walls.
Then we return to the G, circle the palace on a dusty track and drive north again along the equally devastated Jade-ye Maiwand, named after the battle in which the British 66th Foot were decisively defeated by Afghan forces in 1880. The Afghans were rallied, so the story goes, by a Pashtun woman called Malalai.
As we near the house, we round a final bend and nearly collide with an ageing Land Rover, whose occupants gawp at us with a look of horror. It’s the BBC’s official car, and I recognise the pale and scarved face of the Kabul correspondent. I’ve had a bit of a crush on her ever since she interviewed me years ago in Islamabad, when I was on my way home and Kabul was going to hell. I feel guilty at not stopping to say hello, but it’s better that H and I remain as invisible as possible. I don’t want a journalist to be able to position us in Kabul just before a rather large act of sabotage is committed.
Back at the guest house I park the G in the garage and put a new