Kabul Guide
|
1824
|
 |
|
18-06-2006 09:50 AF
|
|
Golf, pedalos and cockfights
Jason Burke
Sunday June 18, 2006
The Observer
The people of Kabul are a fun-loving crowd. Most of their leisure activities, dog and cockfighting aside, may seem tame by Western standards but they give the million or so citizens of the Afghan capital as much pleasure as any more risque activities.
The dogfights take place around 7am - mainly to avoid harassment from animal rights activists - and so by mid-morning it is partisans of a more pastoral pursuit who throng the road west out of the city. It is Friday, the single weekly day off, and the road is thick with traffic, yellow and white taxis, battered minibuses and 100cc motorbikes with five passengers. They're all heading to an artificial lake in the dry hills above Kabul - the favourite picnic spot.
The lake is ringed by rubble-strewn beaches. One corner is sectioned off for use by pedalos and six or so yellow and red craft circle aimlessly in the water. The man with the whistle, who shouts 'come in number x, your time is up' in the Persian-derived dialect of Dari, is Nur Ala, 22, who used to be a ship mechanic in Iran. Business is OK, he says. At a dollar an hour for a pedalo, he is making money but not much. 'There is famine in the city, people are hungry, they don't waste money on this sort of thing. It was better a year ago.'
But there is not much sign of hunger among the crowds along the lakeside with its kebab stands and watermelon stalls. Cooking smells waft from the 'family enclosure' - to which I am denied access because there are women there 'having fun with their families' and thus unveiled.
In the non-family sections, Kabul's young blades swagger. The sweet smell of hashish hangs in the air. Up a nearby lane there is a makeshift casino, a series of dice games set up in the dust. The stakes are considerable. One man has just lost 700 afghanis - £10 - about half the monthly salary for a teacher.
Below the dammed lake is the Kabul Golf Course. Three Korean engineers are plodding around the desiccated holes, each a circle of levelled dust surrounded by less level dust. The caddy ports both the bags and a disc of Astroturf he places on the dirt for tee off. Mohammed Ashraf started at the golf course when the King was still in power in the early 1970s. The Russians played badly, he says.
Back in Kabul, a few hundred yards from the sports stadium where the Taliban used to hold public executions, is a patch of wasteland where half a dozen teams play, pausing when a particularly virulent dust-storm blows up. In one corner there are six long narrow 22-yard strips of concrete a few yards apart. On each a game of cricket is under way. Every other Friday a team of Afghans plays a team of Pakistanis, a sporting version of a deeper regional rivalry. The Friday cricketers don't know it, but the wasteland where they play saw cricket matches before: between 1839-1842 when British troops invaded Afghanistan and camped on this plain. But the delights of the game the British brought was not enough to convince Afghans their presence was good. The army was massacred.
The 'sound of freedom' is the Titanic theme on your mobile
Under the Taliban, the only planes at Kabul airport were occasional Red Cross or UN aid flights. Customs was a couple of bored young fighters who would rifle baggage in a desultory fashion, so unworldly they thought a satellite phone was a counting machine. There was no lighting and no air-traffic control. The opposition forces lobbed the occasional rocket aimlessly over the nearby hills.
Now there are no rockets, lots of planes from all over the world, a computerised passport system and lots of people. But the biggest change, and something that has arrived in the last year or so, is that, when you get off the plane and turn on your mobile roaming phone, it goes to the local network and there you are, in contact with office, grandma, partner, whoever.
This may not seem like much, but for those who knew Kabul under the Taliban - when there were no newspapers, no television, almost no radios, and half a dozen crackly telephone lines that allowed you to phone only Pakistan - the change is astonishing. Kabul was an information black hole where you learnt about something that had happened a mile away days later on the BBC World Service. Now it is squarely aboard an information superhighway. Hundreds of thousands of mobiles have been sold (half a penny a minute for a local call), there are scores of radio stations, dozens of newspapers and internet cafes. Some hotels even have broadband. There are phones of the fixed (large metal device with yellow hood on pavement) and ambulant (boy with fistful of cards and a mobile) varieties. Down in the main bazaar the air is thick with hawkers' calls, beggars' wails and a cacophony of ringtones. If, as an American diplomat tells me, this is 'the sound of freedom', then freedom sounds mostly like the theme from Titanic.
|
