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PHOTOGRAPHS BY REZA TO BE DISPLAYED
AT NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MUSEUM
Museum’s First Outdoor Exhibition

WASHINGTON (June 13, 2006)—A selection of powerful images from 30 years of work by internationally known photojournalist Reza will be on display — both indoors and out — in a new exhibition, “One World, One Tribe – Reza,” at the National Geographic Museum at Explorers Hall from June 20 through Oct. 9. From Asia to Africa, these photographs witness the agony of war and revolution and express the power of beauty and hope behind human tragedy.
 “One World, One Tribe – Reza” is the National Geographic Museum’s first outdoor exhibition. In addition to an indoor gallery, photographs will surround the 17th Street building on its portico. Each image includes a caption with Reza’s personal reflections on the photograph.
As Reza notes in the introduction to the exhibition, “From the Bosporus to the Great Wall of China, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, from Rwanda to Sarajevo, I try to show not only torments and upheavals but also the arts, culture and tradition that give life meaning.”
Reza was born in Tabriz, Iran, and taught himself the principles of photography at age 14. From 1971 to 1978 he photographed rural society and architecture in his homeland. Reza left Iran in March 1981 and since then has photographed for National Geographic and other leading news organizations and worked for humanitarian groups in many of the world’s troubled spots.
“During the last 25 years, I have always used my camera as a weapon to fight against war and injustice,” Reza says, “…I have not forgotten what is it like to separated from a place dearly loved, from family and friends. Each image I capture becomes a part of our collective humanity, connecting us through shared emotions.”
Before photographing the city of Cairo, Egypt, for his first story published in National Geographic magazine (April 1993), Reza covered the Iranian revolution for Agence France-Presse, and served as an Iran and Middle East correspondent for Newsweek and Time magazines. Since then Reza has shot numerous stories for National Geographic, from East Asia to North Africa, with a particular focus on Afghanistan, which he first visited in 1983 to document resistance to the Soviet occupation.
(MORE)

ONE WORLD, ONE TRIBE EXHIBIT (PAGE 2)
In 2001, Reza founded Aïna (meaning “mirror”), an organization dedicated to promoting press and cultural freedom in Afghanistan. In recognition of his photographic and humanitarian achievements, the French Senate honored Reza with the French Order of Merit in 2005.
In conjunction with the “One World, One Tribe” exhibition, Reza will present a National Geographic Live! lecture on Friday, June 23, at 7 p.m. in Grosvenor Auditorium.
The National Geographic Museum at Explorers Hall, 1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., is open Mondays through Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is closed Dec. 25. Admission is free. For information on the “One World, One Tribe – Reza” exhibit, the public should call (202) 857-7588 or visit nationalgeographic.com/museum.

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The Sunday Times June 18, 2006


Under the Afghan sun, a dark new reality is taking shape
Simon Jenkins
 
 
 
 
 
This weekend an army of 11,000 troops, including Britons, is roaming the mountains of southern Afghanistan trying to kill or capture the Taliban. Their professed aim is “to establish conditions” in which government institutions and NGOs can “begin the real work that needs to be done”. Operation Mountain Thrust is the last American venture in the country before Nato takes over next month under British leadership.

The operation, coming after four such failed endeavours, is a show not of force but of face. When the troops return to the security of Kabul they will leave behind a few hundred corpses, some destroyed villages, a thousand new Taliban recruits and tens of thousands of angered and disillusioned Afghans. There is nothing new under the Afghan sun.

The British deployment to Helmand, in southern Afghanistan, makes no sense and visiting Kabul has only made me sure of it. This is quite different from Iraq, where the British Army is embarked on a delicate exercise of extraction.

Helmand is an exercise of insertion and has already cost a British life. About £1 billion is being spent on a base in the desert. Nobody in London or Kabul can offer a clear mission statement for the 3,300 soldiers garrisoning it, only implausible remarks about “establishing the preconditions for nation building”.

David Richards, the ebullient British general in Kabul, puts the best possible face on things. To emphasise the newness of his strategy he derides the Pentagon’s four-year-old Operation Enduring Freedom as counter-productive and stresses the anarchy into which it has allowed Afghanistan to fall: 80% of the country is no longer under the control of Kabul.

At least American policy had clarity. As Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor make plain in Cobra II, their recent study of the war on terror, to Washington Afghanistan was never like Iraq. It was not about neocon nation building but was a hunt to find Osama Bin Laden, “albeit with the wrong search party”. Once a puppet ruler had been found in Hamid Karzai, America was happy to dump the job of propping him up on Britain and others. It even abandoned poppy eradication as a reward to the drug lords for their (temporary) support. The policy was cynical but it was a policy: punch hard and get out.

Richards is a victim of Britain’s post-imperial romanticism. He must go back in. His plan is for “Malayan inkspots” across the country, holding isolated villages long enough for local leaders to win support against insurgents. There will be no more American-style bombing of villages and wedding parties. Taliban units will be pursued and destroyed, but anti-Taliban areas will be rewarded with dollops of money.

British troops will not eradicate poppies, which is impossible, but eliminate the occasional shipment or middle-man (thereby making the crop even more valuable). Richards hopes this will bring the “lost” southern provinces over to Kabul’s side. He shrugs at how this can possibly work with just 3,300 British troops and some reluctant Canadians and Dutch. He is the boy on the burning deck.

The western idea that Kabul can, with a handful of foreign mercenaries, assert a control over Afghanistan that it has not enjoyed in history is bizarre. Such ideas gain currency only when foreign policy departs the national interest and good sense vanishes in clouds of international do-goodery.

Kabul is now a statelet crammed with the cosmopolitan staff of massed United Nations development agencies and 800 NGOs, many withdrawn from an unsafe hinterland. They are guarded by a garrison of 36 nations under a Nato umbrella, said to be operating with 71 different rules of engagement. They form an astonishing babble of adventurers, mercenaries, idealists and philanthropists. Their joking ambition is to create “not an Afghanistan run by Swedes but a Sweden run by Afghans”.

It is the sort of armchair interventionism ridiculed by Rory Stewart in his new book Occupational Hazards (reviewed in today’s Culture). As he picks his way across some mortar-strewn, bloodstained province in Iraq, he receives e-mails from Baghdad’s green zone requesting news of his gender awareness seminar and his democracy enhancement project.

Such is the raw material of Richards’s Afghan crusade, regarded by most observers as the West’s last attempt at constructive engagement in the region. He is answerable not to London but to Karzai and is desperate to downplay the significance of the Helmand operation in the south. All southern and eastern provinces straddling the border are awash in insurgency and instability. The most that any outside army can hope to achieve is to hold a few exemplary villages for a few exemplary days. Richards’s best bet is in the more friendly north.

Karzai is clearly distancing himself from the foreigners crowding his outer office. His coalition is stuffed with so many warlords, or “commanders”, that a 2005 UN report had to be suppressed for fear of revealing their record of torture, murder and worse. Last month he further infuriated the foreign community by appointing 13 provincial police chiefs who were openly known as criminals, drug runners and thugs. All were tribal nominees.

Last Sunday Karzai went one worse and said he was recognising and paying (with western money) various provincial warlords “to fight the Taliban”. This sabotaged the West’s disarmament programme and put some 120,000 militiamen under government arms. To appease western diplomats Karzai called them community policemen. One beneficiary was Sher Muhammad Akhunzada, sacked last year as governor of British-occupied Helmand for opium running. It was like sacking a Kuwaiti sheikh for selling oil. His private army is some 500 strong. British taxpayers are now financing drug runners, warlords, murderers and torturers. That’s overseas aid for you.

I see no alternative to what Karzai is doing. He was a provincial ruler and knows which way the wind is blowing. If Nato will not put 150,000 troops into Kandahar and Helmand, then he must rely on realpolitik and live with the Taliban in the south. Unlike Al-Qaeda they are Afghans, not Arabs, and their hotheads may have cooled. Karzai must cut deals with territorial power, as Afghan rulers have done since time immemorial. He can never make his country Sweden, but he might at least make it Pakistan.

Nato troops remaining in and round Kabul may be able to protect Karzai long enough for him to piece together some such confederation, sharing power with provincial leaders prospering from the booming narco-economy (now 80% of total Afghan exports). This may be beyond the tolerance of donor countries but it is the best hope of stabilising a country that will otherwise revert to civil war.

The view taken by the coalition in Kabul so far — as by the Americans in Baghdad — is that the only thing “these people understand is force”. Yet massive force has been deployed to bring Afghanistan to heel — costing $18 billion a year — and all that has been achieved is thousands of deaths. Afghanistan is now less safe than at any time since the Taliban ruled and as open as ever to the practice of terror.

The benign reincarnation of Britain’s Victorian “kings of the Punjab” as marine colonels and earnest NGOs has not worked. The British empire was for life, not for re-election. As Lawrence of Arabia wrote of these parts, “Only when we learn to rule without soldiers will we be safe.” We have not so learnt.

The one obligation that the West owes the Muslim world is rationality. Intelligence from this region all indicates that its leaders expect western soldiers to go home soon. Democracies have no stomach for a long haul. Shrewd local rulers can see that the fundamentalists are reasserting their power and they must shift allegiance accordingly. Drug and oil “protection” money is flowing towards Islamic nationalist groups, including from Gulf and Saudi “charities”. Tribes must guard their interests against whatever the future holds.

Last week in Shanghai the leaders of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan met under the umbrella of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. This little-reported group was intended to cement an alliance against further western intervention in Asia. So far, so understandable. But if western diplomacy allows that cement to harden into something more sinister, the “war on terror” will have been the stupidest mistake in history.

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Afghanistan scores another victory in 3rd one-dayer


KABUL, June 16 (Pajhwok Afghan News): The National Cricket Team has scored a third consecutive victory against a local team during its tour of England.

The Afghan team played its third match against the Wales City and defeated the opponents by three wickets.

Bating first, the hosts scored 205 runs for all-out. In reply, the Afghan team achieved the target in 37 overs for the loss of eight wickets.

Mohammad Nabi from the Afghan side was the top scorer with 61 runs. He also got three wickets and was announced man-of-the-match at the close of the day.

Among others players, Nauroz scored 42 and Nasir 30 runs. Skipper of the team Raees Ahmadzai got three wickets.

Chief of the Afghanistan Cricket Federation Shahzada Masoud, team coach Taj Malik and captain Raees Ahmadzai appreciated performance of their players.

They said the third consecutive win had boosted the morale of the players and they were in position to win the remaining matches during their stay in England.

Javed Hamim

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To: NGO “Concern” located on Street #2 Left, Qala Fatoulla

Subject: Party on Friday the 16th of June 2006

               

   This letter is to express “concern” over the actions of some of your party attendees on the evening of Friday the 16th of June.

 At aprocomatly 8 pm on Friday as a party was being conducted at your Qala Fatoulla office two individuals knocked on our office door located down from your office. They where looking for a place to “Relax” when they where asked what they wanted. We informed them that this was an office and they where looking for the house across the street which is a Chinese brothel. They proceeded to mingle with your guests who some where gathered in the street. At aprocomatly 11 PM there was another knock on the door. Since it was late I ignored the knock, about two minutes later I herd another knock this time I could tell it was across the street at the brothel, I looked out the window to see two individuals at the door across the street.

 They where not let in at the brothel and they walked across the street to our office and not knocked but pounded loudly on the door. I opened the second story balcony doors and told them to leave. I said this is an office and we do not have anything to do with the brothel across the street. One individual became mad that I would not let him in and asked “Why?” again I said to leave and closed the balcony doors. About 30 seconds later one of the individuals through a chunk of concrete and hit the balcony doorframe and window breaking the window. At first the sound did not sound like a window breaking as it hit the door frame first and sounded like a pistol shot. I drew my side arm and went to return fire when I saw that they where not armed and watched as they proceeded to walk to your office and entered your facility.

 Instead of going to the 10th district police and bringing them to your office and disturbing your party I first thought it wise to inform who ever was in charge of the party what was going on. I felt this was the prudent thing to do since our offices are neighbours. I went and asked who was the boss and in charge, at this point an Afghan male came and said he was in charge. I took him over to our house and explained to him what happened.

 The damage was one broken window which will be replaced on Monday the 19th. Your organization will be charged the cost of the window and the replacement of the blast film covering the window.

 I am very disappointed at the actions of your guests and also of your organization as the music was extremely loud all the way to 12 midnight, it appears that your organization does not care about the people who live on the same street. I hope that the individuals are not the type of people that you employ to work for your organization. We feel we should not have to take this from one of our neighbours especially from a foreign based NGO that should be promoting harmony and understanding of different cultures.

The Sunday Times June 18, 2006


Focus: Taking the fight to the Taliban
British troops in Afghanistan have come under fierce attack from the Taliban. Has Whitehall, which talked of peacekeeping, made a terrible misjudgment? Christina Lamb reports from Kabul
 
 
 
 
It was late afternoon on Sunday, the time of day when the rising dust merges with the desert to mask visibility and the good people of Helmand are already behind closed doors. What little authority their government holds in Afghanistan’s most lawless province disappears entirely from sundown. The British operation mentoring and liaison team (OMLT — or Omelettes as they are jokingly known) was returning from training an Afghan army unit in Sangeen, a small town with a fearsome reputation that has switched back and forth under Taliban control.

After a day in heat so blistering that locals claim it can fry a fish upheld on a palm, the dust-coated soldiers from 7 Parachute Regiment were looking forward to getting back to base at Camp Bastion and their air-conditioned tents, perhaps even catching some World Cup action. But as the armoured Land Rovers bumped along the sandy track sending up thick grey clouds, they were heading straight into an ambush.

By the time they glimpsed the shadowy figures swathed in cloth and turbans rising from a gully clutching Kalashnikovs, they had already been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and were under fire. The British fired back and radioed for help. Soon a quick reaction force was on its way from the camp and two Apache helicopter gunships equipped with Hellfire air-to-surface missiles and a 30mm cannon roared overhead.

But by then the OMLT vehicle had got bogged down in the sand and a six-hour gun battle ensued into the night, which left one man dead, Captain Jim Philippson, 29, from 7 Parachute Regiment. Two more British soldiers were seriously injured, one of whom lost an arm, before they could finally get away. Ten insurgents are believed to have died.

It was the third significant clash with insurgents since British troops took over the province last month, one of which involved 700 militants and went on for three days. There was another near-miss when a man rushed out of a house as a British convoy was passing and fired an RPG which went straight across a commander’s lap and out the other side.

The first death of a British soldier in Helmand has focused attention on what exactly the British troops are doing in this fierce bandit country where the only industry is growing opium poppies. It is a mission clouded in not just dust but confusion.

On announcing the deployment of 3,300 troops, John Reid, then defence secretary, said he hoped they would get out “without a shot being fired”, adding that they would be involved only in pre-emptive “deep strategic manoeuvres”. The MoD continues to insist that clashes with insurgents are a rarity.

Instead The Sunday Times has learnt that the British troops are averaging one enemy contact every three days, though many of these are minor. Helmand has already become known by the squaddies as the South Armagh of Afghanistan after the part of Northern Ireland most opposed to British presence. “A lot of us have been surprised at the level of attacks,” said one officer. “We expected a few rounds to be fired, not the full-on ambushes we have seen. They seen well-organised, well-armed and committed to the cause.”

The enemy are not just Taliban. There are also tribal leaders with a proud history of repelling outsiders and drug lords who fear the collapse of their income — Helmand provides a quarter of the world’s opium. The terrain could not be more hostile. “Think of the worst place you can think of and times that by 50,” said Sgt Ryan McIntosh, a US soldier based there. Camp Bastion is so remote that it was described by Brigadier Nick Pope as “just when you think you’ve gone beyond the edge of nowhere, it’s 20 minutes further, and that’s flying”.

“This mission is turning out to be far more dangerous than the public and backbenchers had been led to believe just a few weeks ago,” complained Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary.

Have we been misled into a fourth war in Afghanistan, a country that in the 19th century was the graveyard of thousands of British troops?




WITH all the focus on Helmand, few seem to have realised that the whole military operation in Afghanistan will soon come under British hands.

Lieutenant-General David Richards, 54, jokingly refers to himself as “the biggest warlord in Afghanistan”. Last month, he became commander of the Kabul-based Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), a Nato command structure which by autumn will control the entire foreign military presence in Afghanistan.

He does not like to be reminded that his headquarters in Kabul is on the site of the British cantonment from which its entire strength fled in January 1842 after a tribal revolt against the British- imposed ruler.

Of the 16,000 soldiers, wives and children and camp followers, only one got away, the rest all slaughtered or taken prisoner. Only Dr William Brydon was deliberately left alive to tell the tale and warn people back home of the consequences of getting involved in Afghanistan.

Richards is in command of 9,720 Nato forces from 36 nations but by the end of next month he will also assume control of 7,000 troops in the south including the British in Helmand. By September, the 14,000-plus US troops of Operation Enduring Freedom to hunt out Al-Qaeda will have also come under his command. It will be the first time that American forces have served under the theatre-wide leadership of a foreign general since the second world war.

It is also the most important test to date for Nato, which has struggled to find a post cold war role and hopes Richards’s operation in Afghanistan will provide a blueprint for other conflicts worldwide. “Our global credibility is on trial here,” said General James Jones, supreme allied commander, Europe, while visiting Afghanistan last week.

But Richards is clearly relishing the enormous task. A highly charismatic man, he is no stranger to challenge, having commanded the British peacekeepers in East Timor and the task force in Sierra Leone. A great fan of the first Flashman book in which its hero gets caught up in the first Anglo-Afghan war, he says of Afghanistan: “I love it: it’s in the genes.”

Whatever the politicians might say in London, as the commander on the ground Richards has no doubt how he sees the mission in Helmand. “The primary purpose is to facilitate much more rapid delivery of reconstruction on the ground,” he said. “But to do that we must be prepared to fight hard and no one should have any doubt that this is the case as has already been proved by last Sunday.”

He is not surprised by the strength of Taliban opposition. “Previously the Americans had just 130 people in Helmand and now we’re putting in more than 3,000. If you were the Taliban you would think this spells curtains and fight like mad to protect your territory. That’s what we’re seeing now.”

On top of this, stepped-up pressure from London and Washington on neighbouring Pakistan to stop providing a haven has led to an influx of militants across the border into Helmand and the rest of southern Afghanistan. For the first time Pakistan has sent troops to those borders to prevent them crossing back.

With the escape routes thus cut off, on Thursday the US launched Operation Mountain Thrust to try to crush the Taliban in the south. British forces from 3 Parachute Regiment in Helmand are among the 11,000 taking part, as well as special forces from the SBS. It is the biggest operation since the fall of the Taliban almost five years ago but got off to a bad start when it was inadvertently announced before it had started, thus giving the Taliban 24 hours’ notice.

The biggest concern, expressed publicly by Liam Fox and privately by a number of former defence chiefs using expressions such as “mission impossible”, is that Britain is not sending enough troops for the size of the task, pointing out that Helmand is three times the size of Wales.

“It’s quite obvious that there aren’t enough boots on the ground to maintain security,” said Charles Heyman, a former infantry officer who now edits the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom handbook. “It makes you gasp when you realise what they are being asked to do.”

“If you look at the map the troops-to-task ratio looks horrendous,” agrees Richards. “But two-thirds of Helmand is desert. There’s Helmand river valley and outside that there’s no life. It’s like the Sahara. So while not necessarily disagreeing, this is not northern Europe where there are villages every two yards.”

He concedes that of the 3,300 troops that will be in Helmand by the end of the month, only 900 are infantry. “But the tooth-to-tail ration will rebalance in favour of the tooth once the camps are all set up. It looks as if in terms of combat like we’re just talking about 3 Para and a company of Gurkhas but remember we’re not just talking about the British Army but also Danish reconnaissance, Afghan Army (ANA) and Afghan police and Apache helicopters being used in a combat role.

“Every general would like more troops because then I could do things quicker. But I will just have to construct a campaign that reflects what we’ve got. If we were trying to win a war we’d have a problem but this is a question as much of mind as of traditional military campaign.”

The unrest in the south has meant virtually no development has taken place in Helmand since the international community moved into Afghanistan in 2001. This neglect has enabled the Taliban to secure a foothold in the province, setting up shadow administrations, closing half the schools in the province and exhorting people to grow poppies.

Recently they have begun targeting police, beheading their relatives to deter them from co-operating with the British.

“We estimate that 80% of people in Helmand are neither one way nor the other — they don’t like the Taliban but are disillusioned by the Afghan government,” said Richards. “We need to persuade that 80% to support us. This means delivering on the ground.”

He plans to do this using the so-called inkspot doctrine modelled on that used by one of his heroes, Gerald Templer, to fight communists in the Malaya insurgency in the 1950s.

“The aim is to create secure ‘feelgood zones’ within which the international community, Afghan government and non-governmental organisations can go about development such as roads, micropower projects and schools. It is only this that will persuade the Afghan people that all this effort is worth it and to reject the calls of the Taliban.”

To this end he has held many meetings with President Hamid Karzai (whom he has already won over and who describes him as “thinking like an Afghan”), the former king Zahir Shah, tribal elders, warlords and MPs. He even sent one of his generals to the Afghan Women’s Day meeting last week. He has already persuaded a wealthy businessman to fund a packaging plant in one of his Helmand inkspots.

The plan is to start small and gradually increase both the size and number of the inkspots to extend the writ of government. “We know we’ll have to fight to secure those zones,” he said. “The Taliban won’t want us to succeed there because then everyone will be wanting to be part of these zones.”

For the strategy to succeed, he admits that it’s vital that the British troops are seen to be there long-term. “It’s important for local people and Taliban to see we’re not going anywhere. If the Taliban see we’re there for the long haul, are they really going to want to stay on the run for ever away from their families?” Although the deployment was announced as lasting for three years, Richards insists: “That’s a minimum commitment. They’re not saying we won’t stay longer than that if required.”

Talk of an extended stay will add to fears that Britain is getting sucked further into Afghanistan than originally intended. On Thursday the defence ministry announced it was sending an extra 130 troops from RAF 34 Squadron to bolster the security of Kandahar airfield, base for more than 50 British aircraft.

“There’s mission creep here,” said Tobias Ellwood, a Tory MP and former army officer who visited Helmand last week as part of a Nato delegation. “We’re doing more and more. It’s a hornets’ nest.”




WHILE Richards might be clear of what he wants to do in both Helmand and Afghanistan, back in Whitehall there has been confusion from the beginning. Just as with Iraq and the missing weapons of mass destruction, the original reason given for British involvement in Helmand was deeply flawed.

Not once does Richards mention anti-narcotics as part of his remit. He insists that is a matter for later when alternative economies have been provided within his feelgood zones. “You won’t see Nato troops lopping off poppies,” he said. “On the contrary if farmers who put down their hoes and pick up rifles don’t have any alternative and that directly threatens the lives of our soldiers, then we need to think very carefully about the timing of all this.”

Narcotics aside, there is no doubt that Afghanistan is at a critical moment if it is not to go the way of Iraq. The widespread feeling that the international community has let Afghanistan down was brought starkly to the fore almost two weeks ago with riots in Kabul that raged for seven hours. It is hard to see where the £5 billion spent in Afghanistan in the past four years has gone. On a foot patrol in Kabul with some of Richards’s soldiers it is clear they are shocked that the streets still run with green sewage and locals have no running water.

“The international community must start working better together to deliver,” said Richards. “The West has been guilty of applying western precepts on an almost post- medieval economy. We need to address a basic economy with basic solutions. The lack of amenities is staggering. A quarter of children die by the age of five. Worrying about civil service reform and gender rights are really tomorrow’s problems.”

“Think of the psychological victory for Osama Bin Laden and his ilk if we failed here and the Taliban came back,” he added. “Within months we’d suffer terror attacks in the UK. I think of my own daughters in London and the risk they would be in. What we are doing in Helmand is risky but it’s better that we put in the effort now than much bigger effort later.”

Additional reporting: Michael Smith

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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.