October 5, 2004

Kaboom Town

It’s election time in Kabul and a motley assortment of carpet-baggers, do-gooders and telephone salesmen are gathering for the big day. Eric Ellis reports.

IT’S FRIDAY MORNING AROUND the breakfast table of the Gandamack Lodge in Kabul, and I’m worrying about the prospects for Afghan democracy.

Tucking into greasy eggs is Ed, an American election official with a combover as unwieldy as Afghanistan’s politics. As Ed loudly tells it, he has just sorted out Iraq and now he’s deeply important to the preparations for Afghanistan’s first presidential election on October 9, a poll which – despite the sudden appearance of 17 opponents – Washington’s man, Hamid Karzai, is expected to walk away with.

Ed is setting his fellow breakfasters straight on local history, in one of Kabul’s grander homes recast as a $US150 ($212) a night B&B with strategically placed copies of Country Life and The Spectator strewn among ancient guns and Afghan memorabilia for that elusive colonial pile feel.

“You know, they signed the Treaty of Gandamack in this very room,” Ed offers breathlessly, and we nod with due solemnity. “This is living history, you know, the Great Game and all that.”

(Evoking the Great Game is an old chestnut trotted out by five-minute-old Afghanistan experts to illustrate 1. the region’s geopolitical significance; 2. their suddenly acquired knowledge of it; and 3. how it relates to 9/11, the reason Kabul suddenly became Asia’s latest boomtown, and why we’re all here.)

But Combover Ed clearly hasn’t read the Scottish writer George MacDonald Fraser and his Boys’ Own tales of Sir Harry Flashman, the Zelig of British history, the made-up version. Fraser placed Flashman in colonial conquests from Abyssinia to the Zulus, and of course the first Afghan war. The Gandamack – set up by BBC cameraman and obvious Fraser aficionado Peter Jouvenal – is an ironic tribute to the fictional Flashman.

The 40-year-old house fizzes with his derring-dos and don’ts, total nonsense of course, but entertaining nevertheless. And lost on Ed, who loves that he’s staying in “one of the great houses of colonial history”.

The Gandamack is the place to be in Kabul, the preferred digs of Bright Young Media Things from London, deputy assistant producers called Caroline and Emma and Simon and Jeremy just down from Oxbridge. Two were at brekkie the other day, Arab keffiyehs (er, very wrong country) fashionably slung around their shoulders as they argued in cut-glass accents about their Thuraya satphones, the foreigner-in-Kabul’s accessory de rigeur. A CBS-TV crew waits and plays cards, waits and plays some more.

They’re some of the many hacks on Osama Watch, just in case George W. Bush gets lucky before the US elections in November and actually bags OBL. Osama bin Laden used to rent this house from Kabuli businessman Saeed Hashimi for $US150 a month, for one of his many wives. Saaed complains that OBL did a runner before his Taliban hosts fell to US bombs in late 2001, owing $US500 in back rent.

Indeed, GWB could have bagged Osama right here three years ago; the World Trade Center would be standing, none of us would be dodging suicide bombers in this miserable dustbowl and Afghans wouldn’t have their polls organised by Combover Ed.

Americans are not distinguishing themselves in Afghanistan, a shame as it’s one place they actually did liberate. Perhaps it’s because redneck bounty hunters hoon around in chunky 4WDs kidnapping innocent locals they suspect to be al Qaeda operatives. And then there’s the tax-freed team of UN officials and assorted NGO do-gooders. Some of them pass opium pipes around at parties, this in the world’s leading producer of heroin poppies, while trousering $US10,000 plus a month in fees as foreign consultants and employing Afghans at $US5 a day to reseed their lodgings’ unsightly lawns ... this as Afghanistan cries out for new schools, hospitals and basic infrastructure.

Add to this the platoon of “Tashakor Ladies”, burqa-clad Europeans so called because the Dari word for thank you is the only one they know. They circulate Kabul “feeling the Afghan woman’s pain” by advising their local sisters to “go back to your village and bake bread” when the average Afghan woman is more likely to want a vote, a job, school for their kids and for their husbands to stop beating them up in the name of Islam.

A COUNTRY AWAY, IN THE MOUNTAINS outside the northern city of Kunduz, warlord Mohamed Daoud Khan’s militiamen are having a picnic. And helping rebuild Afghanistan – without American help. On a cloudless day, the flesh of two fatted lambs is cooking under a purloined UNICEF tent 2000m above Kunduz. It was a bomb-cratered peak away, at Erganak in November 2001, where the Taliban had its last stand against the Northern Alliance and their erstwhile American allies.

Today, hungry Tajiks tear at the greasy flesh with chunks of naan, washing it down with way too many bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label. An hour’s bacchanalia later, the beast is stripped to the bone and the whisky drained. Suddenly the air fills with jaunty Tajik folk tunes, played from a 4WD. Drunken wildmen in flat woollen caps whirl dervishly, their Kalashnikovs flinging about. At the precipice, the less festive loose off a few rounds into the valley below, because they can.

A feast like this is the height of hospitality in Afghanistan and only cooked for special occasions. Today, that’s The Bulletin’s visit to this remote mountain-top to inspect an ambitious $300m attempt to install a 21st-century telecommunications system into the fourth-century landscape. The Afghan Wireless Communication Company is a New Jersey-based consortium of Afghan-American returnees, many of them former anti-Soviet mujahadeen who have returned after 20 years of exile to rebuild their shattered country.Today, workers are building a modern cell tower, one of a string that networks Afghanistan’s Uzbek and Tajik north, through the capital Kabul, to Kandahar in the Pashtun south, and then to the world via satellite.

When I later meet Daoud in his carpeted lair, the first 10 minutes of the interview is spent debating the merits of my Sony-Ericsson handset over his Motorola clam. “You can get email on that?” he asked, as a silent bearer prepares green tea and almonds.

By road, Kunduz is a one- to two-day drive away from Kabul via the Salang Tunnel, 3500m up the Hindu Kush that divides Afghanistan. The tunnel is formidable, the only land artery from Kabul to the north, and was frequently bombed, mined and ambushed by whichever side held – or wanted – the Salang Pass.

For news junkies, driving through the pass is an eerie experience in dèja vu. One remembers the sepia 1980s TV images of muj assaults on supply columns of blue-eyed Russian troops. The footage depicted tanks destroyed in ambushes and helicopters pinged by Washington-supplied Stinger missiles. The detritus of that liberation war – rusting tanks here, a chopper blade there, a propaganda sign in Cyrillic – remain strewn by the road.

Human jaw has been found at places scoped by AWCC technicians for cell sites, like at Lataband, high in the mountains above the eastern city of Jalalabad near the Khyber Pass and the border with Pakistan’s lawless North West Frontier Province. Lataband was one of the first places hit by American cruise missiles in October 2001. The Taliban had also sited a communications station here, a pathetic shambles of wires that channelled the few telephone connections the Taliban had to the outside world. The station’s five Taliban guards, who apparently were settling down to sleep after evening prayers, probably wouldn’t have known what hit them, at best hearing a whoosh before they were vaporised. All that remains is a poignant shrine of twisted metal and half-melted sandals. And pieces of jaw.

Windblown Lataband is Osama territory. Over the ridge are the Tora Bora hills the US bombarded over Christmas 2001 as Osama led al Qaeda remnants to escape in northern Pakistan. Lataband also overlooks Kabul Gorge, scene of the 1842 massacre of General Elphinstone’s retreating Raj forces by the Afghan warlord Dost Mohammed’s men. Just below is the town of Sorubi, where five western journalists were murdered in 2001, including the Australian Harry Burton. AWCC has built here a state-of-the-art cell tower and transmission facility on the ruins of the old Pakistani facility.

In the not-so-old Afghanistan, Afghans saw a strategic mountaintop and thought fortress. Today, they see the same places and are increasingly thinking things like a mobile phone tower – and money. And in a training ground of terrorism that’s exported its mayhem to places like Lower Manhattan and Bali, that’s progress.