getting above it all – Kabul scene from afar

Being away from Kabul is a good thing for a cat to do every so often.

It doesn’t matter, it turns out, how brief the period of awayness is; the effect is instant. It starts almost as soon as you leave Kabul International Airport. 

Kabul is a bit of a bubble, bloated in comparison with the rest of the country, stuffed with internationals, crawling with new politicians. Almost everyone is learning on the job (with the exception of President Karzai who has been in his long enough now to know it very well). People from here haven’t yet worked out how to deal with the tidal waves of attention roaring off in different directions, bearing things no one had really thought that much about before they were suddenly there: whole new sets of revamped security forces. Elections next year and the year after. New strategies for governing, for getting rid of terrorism, insurgency and the Taliban, for developing the country, for replacing its poppy economies with fish farming or fruits and nuts for export. Some clash, but heads of state of important countries turn up every few days to press for more and doggedly to state that support will carry on.

The surreal air lasts while this cat is swept to the airport in an armoured car. The last turnoff for the airport is at a clean roundabout which recently started to be presided over by an enormous, overwhelmingly orange picture of Afghanistan’s first Olympian holding some clashingly red flowers and waving to people in the course of a triumphal return to his country from the Beijing Games. 

The car sweeps on up a tree-lined almost-boulevard, lined with posters of Ahmad Shah Masood, Afghanistan’s treasured freedom (from the Soviets) fighter. Masood was assassinated in 2001 by a suicide bomber posing as a cameraman two days before September 11. He is regal and commanding with his nose-dominated profile, deep eyes and roll-up Afghan hat. Karzai bestowed the title, “Hero of the Nation” on him and there is a national holiday on 9 September to commemorate his death. The posters are presumably limbering up for this.

It is common enough for airports’ approaches to be overseen by some relevant adornment, a scale model of concorde or some such. Past the posters, this airport has a fighter jet for a gate guardian. Set at a steep angle, as if launching itself skywards, this jet drips with weaponry dangling down from it like deadly udders.

We pause for a close protection person to move some cones which people had used to block the road, then the car sweeps into the airport’s “VIP” area, a windy, dusty garden with plastic chairs dotted on the grass around trees. There is a TV room inside the airport building which has furry brown sofas and is occupied by parties of travelling Afghans, men and their black-clad women. A filthy toilet is guarded by a besuited attendant, whose role does not allow him to give it the occasional clean. 

A smart young Afghan gets out of a big car, too-short trousers revealing white socks. He turns trendily pointy shoes (labels flash white as he walks on his still-new soles) sideways so that they don’t trip him as he goes up the couple of steps into a shed where men in grubby uniforms stamp passports. He is followed by a distinguished Afghan in flowing offwhite peraan tunban (long shirt, loose trousers) carrying soup in a large transparent vat containing what looks like goldfish but is disappointingly more likely to be carrots.

A dirty-blue uniformed man eventually emerges from the passport-stamping shed to put the milling people onto a UN flight to Dubai, the aircraft doors are shut, and the atypically tall and fit-looking air stewards bluster through a safety demonstration with which they don’t seem to be all that familiar.

Safely past these hurdles, the surreal air starts to wear off. Kabul’s brown clutter merges into the brown air below as the aircraft climbs into the clear bright blue. It is like getting undressed. Simple to shed the murk and struggle of Kabul’s bubble, to see the place, in all of its confusion, with perspective: somewhere unlike anywhere, rough, wild, unfamiliar, untamed and totally un-comprehended.

Other than flying off, the way to get a clear, soaring view of things is to bring the outside in. An excellent group of extraordinary normal people turned up a couple of weeks ago under the wing of the esteemed Sandy Gall to do a sponsored walk in Bamiyan to help Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal.

A cheering reminder about the gentle, ordinary, humble and friendly connections which help, slowly and with respect, to make life more possible, how rare they are and how admirable.