Around Kabul

Coming in from the airport, my car is stopped by police who inquirer from my driver about what country I'm arriving from. When the driver says "Pakistan, they want to search the car. They say that Pakistan is "the suicide-bomber country." My driver quickly tells them I work for the United Nations and they let me pass. But I am reminded by this incident of how much Afghanis distrust their Pakistani neighbor - and vice-versa. Each blames the scourge of the Taliban on the policies of the other.

The last (and only) time I was previously in Kabul was ten years ago when the Taliban ruled. I was looking at secret girls schools. At the time, white Toyota pick-up trucks careened around the streets filled with Taliban in black turbans carrying Klashnikovs. I find myself looking for those trucks which mercifully, are no longer around.

The other big change is the presence of women on the streets, some still in blue burkas, but others in headscarfs, and baggy pants and tunics, long skirts, or occasionally, in pants and hip length jackets and scarfs.

Kabul's buildings, with scruffy storefront shops, somewhat spruced up with a few garish four and five story buildings. still reflect the incredible damage done to an already poor country by decades of war. The streets are full of incredible potholes, and traffic jams reflect the inability of these narrow roads to handle the influx of new cars. Mountains ring the city and illegally built houses line the inner hills around the city core; the hilldwellers have no running water or paved roads, and one can see donkwys and women and children carrying water cans up narrow paths or stairways carved in the rock.