‘Kabul will never become what it was,’ Afghan Professor Rafi Samizay says to me.
‘Besides you have to remember there are no good old days. Even in the ‘70s there were problems.’
It’s the first day of the ‘New Vision for Kabul’ five-day conference he has helped to organise. Academics, aid workers, philanthropists and businessmen from 25 countries have gathered together for the first time. I’m representing the Rotary Club of Canberra and am the only Australian, apart from the President of the Australian Afghanistan Association, Wali Hakim.
Professor Samizay and I are standing in the autumn sunshine outside the recently renovated auditorium of the Lycée Estiqlal where the conference is being held. Armed boy soldiers in oversized uniforms lounge against the walls, smoking and posing for photographs. They are also wearing black Calvin Klein T-shirts, a gift from the high fashion clothing company. Getting into the conference means two bag and body searches with meticulous attention to cameras and mobile phones. Four months ago the French-built school around us was almost destroyed by bullet and mortar fire.
Professor Samizay’s statement seems understandably bleak. Hardly a centimetre of the city has not been damaged or flattened by the war of the northern warlords. Eighty per cent of the adobe houses, block after block along the pot-holed, furrowed roads, are now dust and rubble. Half of the city’s 2.2 million people are squatting in the ruins with three thousand more ‘returnees’ each day. And with no reliable clean water, garbage disposal, sewerage, drainage, electricity or telephone systems, optimism seems an impossible sentiment.
Across the road from the Lycée Estiqlal is the fifty-year-old, Soviet-designed Kabul Hotel where conference delegates have been accommodated. The corner of the hotel was demolished when the ammunition stores at the Presidential Palace ignited. At the hotel gates, the beggars have gathered. Women in sky-blue chadors squat in the dust. Little kids, skinny as sticks, cry out softly to passersby. By contrast, the crippled boy is fast and efficient, scooting round the corner with broken sandshoes on his hands and dragging his twisted legs. He parks directly in front of us and puts out his palm. Stephen Rossi, the folksy engineer from West Virginia with a plan to rebuild the city’s sewerage and drainage system, kneels down and takes the child in his arms. He hugs him then discreetly stuffs a wad of American dollars down his shirt.
The UN-sanctioned International Security Assistance Force