A jewel ground to rubble

October 8, 2001

BY MAUREEN O'DONNELL STAFF REPORTER

When the smoke clears, the capital of Afghanistan may not look much different from before U.S. air strikes Sunday.

That's because years of factional fighting have literally flattened a jewel at the crossroads of Asia.

Kabul, once a center of the spice and silk trade, was laced with gracious gardens and palaces.

No more.

"I suspect that Kabul is going to look [Monday] morning like it has in recent years--with a few more piles of rubble and some dead people,'' said Larry Goodson, a professor of International Studies at Massachusetts' Bentley College and author of Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics and the Rise of the Taliban.

"For the most part, it can only get better,'' said Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan studies at the University of Nebraska. "It [already] looks like Berlin after the Second World War. It looks like the New York financial district. It's just horrible. I lived there 10 years and in those 10 years it was a very picturesque, wonderfully culturally exciting city to live as a foreigner.''

Gouttierre continued, "It was beautiful, rimmed by gardens, and everybody had a garden in their compound. There was a river flowing through the city, great spices, pungent smells. . . . certainly the evidence of life, and vibrant life.''

A couple of years ago, Gouttierre visited the Kabul neighborhood where he had lived in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a Peace Corps volunteer, a Fulbright Fellow and coach of the Afghan National Basketball Team.

"It's flattened to rubble,'' Gouttierre said. "No one has rebuilt because the people have no confidence . . . houses that stand are left unpainted and unrepaired because they assume if they do anything it will be destroyed again.''

"Museums have been looted, the zoo has been looted of animals, the trees have been cut up for firewood,'' Goodson said.

Afghan native Ashraf Ghani, 52, misses his old high school, a modern architectural marvel that he said rivaled the best secondary schools of the United States. Like much of Kabul, it is little more than a pile of rocks now, he said.

Kabul "was beautiful. It was peaceful,'' said Ghani, an adjunct anthropology professor at Johns Hopkins University. "There were gardens all surrounding it. There were poets that praised it. . . . Babur [founder of the Mughal dynasty] sent his body back to be buried because he loved it so much.''

Ghani agreed with Goodson and Gouttierre that the U.S.-British strike will wreak little change in Kabul's appearance.

The human cost remains, Ghani said.

"Life was fearful before'' the air strikes, he said. "Depending on the extent of what the civilian casualties are, [it] will mean mourning and immense fear for what is going to follow next.''

Both Ghani and Goodson believe the strikes may be sufficiently surgical to keep civilian deaths low.

"The airport at Kandahar, where I've been, is on the edge of [that] city,'' Goodson said. "It would be possible to hit sites at that airport without hitting anything in the nearby town.''

Afghanistan's history is pockmarked with invasions. Gouttierre ticked off a list:

"Alexander the Great in about 330 B.C.; Genghis Khan in the 13th century; Tamerlane from Central Asia in the 14th and 15th century; Babur, who established the Mughal dynasty in India, at the end of the 15th and early 16th century. The British tried to go in three times between 1838 and 1920, and the Soviet Union from 1979-1989,'' he said.

"There were lots of conquerers from Iran and the Asian subcontinent, the British, all trying to control the country in some way or another,'' Gouttierre said. "Now we have the U.S. trying to help the Afghans rid themselves of these two foreign presences: Osama bin Laden and the terrorist network al-Qaida and the Pakistani military in their country.''

Kabul's modern-day destruction occurred after 1992, when the communist Najibullah government fell, Goodson said. Different mujaheddin groups began fighting for control of the country, waging pitched battles in Kabul with heavy artillery, mortar strikes and machineguns.

An atmosphere of fear has gripped Kabul under the strictures of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime, Goodson and Gouttierre said.

"The Taliban had a problem with everything,'' Ghani said.

TV, music cassettes and movies are banned, Goodson and Gouttierre said. Kite-flying is forbidden, as is the keeping of pigeons as pets.

Kabul residents are just scraping by against a backdrop of poverty, hunger, joblessness, low female literacy and high infant and maternal mortality, Goodson said.

Women's lives under the Taliban "have been horrible,'' Goodson said.

"Afghans like to have parties, they throw great weddings, they love to dance, they love music, they like to get dressed up and enjoy themselves,'' Gouttierre said. "People can't even fly kites, they can't listen to music, they can't watch movies.

"What it is today is a religious concentration camp imposed by the monastic style of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. They expect everyone to spend their lives praying and not living.''

-- Anonymous, October 08, 2001