Ashes, Ashes, All Fell Down

I was driving through some of the residential outskirts of Kabul last night, and two things struck me. First, I finally saw a road with lane markers! And it also had some street signs!!! Now, granted, this was Highway 1, the southern half of the Ring Road that goes around the mountainous center of Afghanistan and connects all the major cities (this part goes from Kabul to Herat, via Kandahar), but I was still quite impressed. Not that Kabuli drivers seemed to have any idea what exactly the little white stripes on the road meant, exactly, but points to the government for trying.

More interestingly, I saw the Kabul that, frankly, I had been expecting to see more of all along: bombed-out buildings, people living in sheds made of scraps of corrugated iron, and a generally post-apocalyptic-looking sort of industrial wasteland. Sure, much of the inner core of Kabul, including where I live, is under construction, but around here, most (although not all) of the construction is actually building towards something (or actively taking something down). But out by Pagman, where I was yesterday, buildings are half-built--perhaps half-destroyed would be more accurate--and staying that way.

I asked the Afghan I was with, who has lived in the country since before the Russian invasion, how long this part of Kabul has looked like this. He said, interestingly, that it wasn't the Russians that did this to Kabul. It was actually during the civil wars of the early 1990s, after the Russians had left but before the Taliban rose to power, that Kabul suffered most. Bombs, rockets, and horrifically intense street fighting ravaged Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan as warlords, bandits, and heroes scratched and clawed for inches of territory soon to be rendered uninhabitable by reprisal violence. This part of the city isn't dead--far from it, thanks to the Afghan people's trademark tenacity in the face of hardship. But at twilight, under smog-choked skies, stuck in the gridlock of yet another Kabul rush hour, it sure doesn't look very alive, either.